Let’s examine The Prophecy franchise as a TTRPG using In Nomine as the game system. In Nomine is a role-playing game designed by Derek Pearcy and published in 1997 by @Steve Jackson Games. You can learn more about The Prophecy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophecy_(film_series) and you can buy In Nomine products here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/12199/Steve-Jackson-Games/subcategory/28908_30775/In-Nomine?affiliate_id=50797
About In Nomine
Written by Derek Pearcy + Illustrated by Dan Smith
Edited by Jeff Koke, Steve Jackson, and Susan Pinsonneault
Cover art by John Zeleznik (first printing) and Christopher Shy (second printing)
In Nomine is a modern roleplaying game in which the players take the part of celestial beings – angels and demons – as they struggle for control of humanity and themselves. The celestials, powerful though they may be, are merely pawns in a much larger game being played by their Superiors, the Archangels and Demon Princes. Based on the best-selling French RPG by the wonderfully diabolical Croc!
In Nomine won the Origins Award for Best Graphic Presentation of a Roleplaying Game, Adventure, or Supplement of 1997.
Transcript
Cold Open
I love you, I love you more than Jesus!
Intro
Welcome to In Nomine, a celebration of my favorite tabletop role-playing games. This In Nomine YouTube channel is a sister channel to Eviliv3. Subscribe if you’re new to the channel, because today we are continuing our In Nomine series with this episode, Styles of Play: The Prophecy.
Discussion
The Prophecy franchise is a guilty pleasure of mine. The films aren’t very good, but the stories behind the films, in my opinion, are great! Throughout the five films in the series, you have Angels and Demons fighting a second war in Heaven over humans. God wants to have human souls return to Heaven, and the Angels are split, with some wanting to be the favored creations of God, and others wanting to follow God’s will. The problem arises, when due to the second war in Heaven, no human souls can ascend to Heaven, hence they are stuck in their rotting corpses. Enter the Demons. If the dissenting Angels win the war, and humans are not allowed into Heaven, then Heaven will be just another Hell, and the Demons don’t want another Hell.
The later films turn to the Nephilim myth, claiming that there is a prophecy where a Nephilim will end the war in Heaven, uniting the angels and humans against the dissenting angels. Then when that is resolved, there is another myth about the coming Antichrist where some demons want to stop it and some angels want to have it happen. As you can see, the franchise falls back on familiar myths to create a macguffin the angels and or demons are after, and the humans must protect or work against them.
The Prophecy is one of those franchises which, if you like the Abrahamic myth of Heaven and Hell, and Angels and fallen angels, you would probably love the tabletop role-playing game, or TTRPG In Nomine. On its face, one might think that In Nomine, is the same as the film series The Prophecy. Both are focused on Angels and Demons fighting over humans at their core. The biggest difference is that In Nomine has its own creation canon which is separate from the Abrahamic Old Testament myth, and The Prophecy sticks to the Abrahamic myth up until the end of The Fall, or the first war in Heaven. The Prophecy focuses more on the human experience in the second war in Heaven, while In Nomine focuses on the Angels and Demons. Thus if you play In Nomine as written, you are a powerful celestial battling against others and protecting mankind. But if you instead played in the style of The Prophecy, you would be humans, stuck between the war trying to survive and stop whomever you perceive as the celestial bad guys with little to no help from the celestial good guys.
The difference between them means in a The Prophecy game, the player characters or PC’s are much more vulnerable than the celestials warring with each other, and they are at the center of the conflict. This requires the Game Master or GM to design their adventure with some form of macguffin the heroes must acquire and protect from the celestials who are hunting it. It is much more of a survival styled game, where tension mounts until the very end, and the PC’s are given the advantages in the end by one side or the other. I say it like that because in the first and fourth The Prophecy films, the humans were aided by Lucifer to overcome the Archangel Gabriel and the Demon Prince Balial respectively, who were hunting them.
So, what elements of a The Prophecy game would need to be addressed in an In Nomine campaign? Aside from the aforementioned survival aspect, you must consider the MacGuffin. In the first The Prophecy, it’s a human soul, which would be a simple connection, as ghosts are an existing aspect of In Nomine. It may be connected to an item or an artifact the PC’s must discover then acquire. In the second film, the MacGuffin is the creation of the nephilim, and the mother carrying it. Again, this would be discovering a pregnant human woman and protecting them. The third film is the nephilim. The nephilim are an existing element in In Nomine, so you would need to help them survive and or fight the big bad guy or BBG. The fourth film focuses on an artifact which is writing a prophecy. Once you discover the artifact, you simply keep it away from the demons searching for it. And the final film is about the same artifact, but it brings in the antichrist myth. So do you protect the artifact or use it to discover the antichrist and then what, protect them from the demons?
All of this is to say the moral ambiguity forced on the players by the dissenting angels, demons and angels following God’s will are all in contention and the humans are forced to take a side. This could be chosen with a bit of railroading on the GM’s part, or you could let the PC’s discover alternative viewpoints and choose where the campaign goes from there. There will inevitably be time sensitive missions, facing off against much more powerful opponents and MacGuffin’s to search for and protect or fight. But when things seem darkest, the GM can pull in the third side, based on the PC’s choices, to aid in the final conflict. This will create high drama, tension and morality based decisions that will stay with the players long after the campaign ends.
Now, In Nomine does have a lot of elements that you don’t necessarily need to bring up or focus on in a The Prophecy styled campaign like the Ethereal Realm, or The Marches. But you could bring it in as a location for one of the MacGuffin’s. Or if you want to give the players a bit more of an edge against the celestial counterparts, you could have them be Sorcerers, Soldiers of Heaven or Hell, or even a Soldier of a Spirit or God in the Ethereal Realm. Perhaps one of the PC’s is the Nephilim, or another form of a MacGuffin like a Gorgon, or half human-half ethereal.
In the end, a The Prophecy styled game could only truly be pulled off in a TTRPG like In Nomine, and it’s a style of campaign that I would love to run for players who also appreciate this style of play. I would highly recommend you check out the films and consider running a campaign of your own.
Outro
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And as always, remember that evil spelled backwards is live, so get out there and Be Evil!