The most recent Bundle of Holding offering is Tribe8, which hands down has to be one of my favorite far too deep for it’s own good roleplaying game settings — which I read passionately but never played. Strange post-apocalyptic fantasy with humans living under the harsh protective rule of earth goddesses called Fatimas and surrounded by alien demon Z’bri horrors who wish to enslave them all once again.
From a simple inspiration perspective, the society of Tribe8 could very likely serve as great inspiration for those of the Dagger Isles. The Z’bri are definitely more viscerally horrific entities than the more elementally aligned demons of BitD but still potentially useful to read — especially if you want your demons to be darker than what it says in BitD. The Serfs of the Z’bri are good inspiration for the demon influenced people from the far off land of Tycheros.
Taking it one step further, it’s easy to imagine that humans may have survived through more than one apocalypse. The first apocalypse resulted in the world of Tribe8 with demons enslaving humans as serfs and strange goddesses protecting the humans. The Immortal Emperor could have been one of the fallen 8th Tribe who mastered a mixing of Synthesis magic and Sundering allowing them the ability to bind the demons and imprison them. This was the start of war between the 8the Tribe, the Z’bri and the Fatimas. At the height of the conflict, the mysterious Melanis of the Z’bri attempted to do what they always dreamed break open a door back to their land. This severing of walls of reality broke the Gates of Death and caused the Cataclysm, leading to the world of Blades in the Dark.
Ooooooooo….. I always loved Tribe 8 too! Thanks for pointing this out!
Nathan Black the PDFs are honestly a bit shitty scans with OCR but they are serviceable. Especially as I never had all the supplements. I still have the main book.
Nathan Black it makes me want to run Tribe8 — if I wasn’t already GM booked solid at Big Bad Con it would. Though part of me wants to adapt it as a Blades in the Dark or AW hack.
I think it would be an interesting setting for Blades.
Or AW for that matter
Nathan Black yeah it could go either way. AW would make it a hero’s (or anti-hero’s) tale with struggles and strife; and BitD would be more focused on the interwoven societal political conflict of the 8th Tribe and the various Fatima lead groups. Both are totally feasible ways to play in the Tribe8 setting.
Mostly I just want to run Blades in the Dark but using the Z’bri Demons rather than the elemental demons described in the BitD quick start. So much more alien and terrifying.
I wish that I ever got to play Tribe 8, regardless of system. Reading the books and planning games was so much fun.
The other reason I love T8 so much is that it is set in/around Montreal where I was born and spent a bit of my youth, so I have these really vague and dreamy memories of that area anyway, and to have them invoked in this way is really magical for me.
Jerry Sköld yeah same here :/ I picked up Tribe8 right about when my gaming hobby started to die due to lack of time/players. Now that I’m back in the hobby I’d love to give it a whirl. The system ain’t bad actually if I remember. I’m definitely more into indie AW, BitD, etc play to see what happens style these days but it might not really need to be hacked. The main problem with getting Tribe8 to the table is the level of backstory and knowledge of the Fatima society needed before getting going. But that mentality is definitely a 90s gaming holdover. If you treat all the game world text as flavor and suggestions that are open to changes via “play to see what happens” style play rather than canon, then you could get rolling pretty fast.
If you wanted a light hack, the BitD factions mechanic could easily be adapted if you wanted to have Tribe8 societal politics play a big part in the story. Likely would be good to use that mechanic anyway as there is a lot of different groups and subgroups to juggle. Also clocks — I’ve found clocks are a great mechanic to introduce in nearly any game!
After downloading the pdfs, I got lost reading (again after not looking at the book for a while) about world of Tribe8. So good. Impressive the amount of thought and writing that when into it.
The more I read in Tribe8 the more it feels like an appropriate story of pre-cataclysm Blades in the Dark. In Tribe8, both humans and the inhuman demon Z’bri are trapped in a world closed off from the land of the spirit — no longer can souls transverse to the land of the dead, but also nothing can traverse to the physical realm. Humans huddle in tribes under the protection of severn Goddess avatars from Z’bri demons who wish to enslave them once again. Their souls of those who die drift away into the Sea of the Lost. Mythology says that an Eight Tribe will rise up to destroy the Z’bri demons. A war is slowly brewing between the Z’bri, the seven Tribes, and the Fallen of the Eight Tribe. That war will very likely lead to an opening of the Fold which closes of the land of the spirit from the land of the physical — this is the goal of the Melanis Z’bri after all.
The spectrologists and historians of Duskvol who specialize in the cataclysm say that “Before the events that caused the cataclysm, it’s said that the Immortal Emperor bound most of the demons and imprisoned them in the dark, hidden places of the world. Only a few escaped this subjugation, and scholars believe that it was these few that broke the Gates of Death in their rebellion and freed the greatest of their kind— the Leviathans—to shatter the world.”
Using Tribe8 as pre-cataclysm history it stands to reason that the Immortal Emperor is likely the living avatar of the Eight Tribe who rose up to defeat the Z’bri. A few of the more cunning Melanis escaped and to open the Fold; however, in their haste they completely broke the barriers between the land of the physical and the land of the spirit. The spirit and the physical became one and both lands were shattered with pieces set adrift in the Sea of the Lost. This is now where the remnants of humanity reside in the Shattered Isles surrounded by the “ink-dark waters of the Void Sea” within which swim with great demon Leviathans. There no longer is a separate land of the spirit where souls can pass on to as the physical and the spirit is now one. The ghost field is part of the physical world, ghosts are themselves a electroplasmic force, and the few remaining free demons roam the land as powerful yet fully physical as anyone else.