Nibiru, a Science Fiction RPG of Lost Memories

Nibiru Update #13 - About the MEMOs System
over 5 years ago – Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 06:16:39 AM

Hello Vagabonds!  

Aaaand we are past the £12.000 mark! The end of this week will most certainly see us unlocking the next stretch goal, and then we'll be on our way to unlocking those awesome dice.  

Today I wanted to talk a bit about the MEMOs system, and the things we learned during playtests and games ran these last two years.  

It's this system above all other things that make Nibiru a character-driven game. This is mainly due to the fact that each mechanical bit that makes your characters unique has a small story written in. A small piece of background that relates to each modifier, and that makes those numbers much more significant. But then, that's also something you already know.

One of the things we slowly learnt was that that ever-growing story gives a lot of gravitas to the characters themselves. Say you play a game for about a year. In most other games, you'll only get to know so much about those characters when looking at their sheets. In Nibiru, however, you'll see their worldview, moments, memories, all  written in—the character's life unfolding before you.

When players invest their creativity in such a way, they develop a strong connection to their characters. This means that situations of risk and danger feel all the more tense, nerve wracking and significant. The stakes are so high! This relates to the fact that Nibiru has a pretty deadly system, which is by all means intentional. 

It encourages groups to try to tackle issues in a variety of ways—only resorting to violence when it's the last possible measure, and (hopefully) if they feel confident doing so. After all, we've observed that character death in Nibiru has a stronger impact than in other games (given the reasons above).

Another interesting thing we've observed is how, as players get more and more into the game, they put more thought into their backgrounds. This is specially rewarding when there's a shared habitat (for example, people from BrightTown came all from the same place, or maybe you have two Vagabonds of the Wild who belonged to the same species and the same pack). These tend to result in joint efforts to build a cool background, then explored via the characters' memories.

We'll have more to say later, specially when we discuss Revelations and how they enrich the base MEMOs system!

Nibiru Update #12 - Antumbran Economics!
over 5 years ago – Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 06:41:01 AM

Hello Vagabonds!  

After a slow day yesterday we have picked up the pace, and are on our way to the last third bit of the trip towards the second stretch goal!  

There's something cool to know about this one in particular. The difference between the first stretch goal and the second is does not just account for "the map". Sure, that's what you get in the book if we get there, but it mostly comprises the costs of printing more than 1000 books (which is our minimum order quantity).  

This means that we'll have a healthy stock of books to send to retailers, to sell to those who learned about Nibiru after the campaign, and to take to conventions with us—which in turn helps us reach a larger audience, and opens up the possibility for supplements to be produced.  

All of this, of course, after the KS backers get their copies. In essence, it's a stretch goal that will help the game stay healthy in the long run :)  

But enough about the boring real-world number stuff! It's time to talk about the economies of Antumbra.  

All Antumbran city-states started as small settlements, some of these sharing a single vault, but eventually merging under one ruling council. This idea of a "council of the peoples" became the pillar upon which societies developed, in which a group of wise folk would decide what was the best way to distribute the plentiful bounties of the vault.  

Even if the city-states grew more advanced and wise, they remained mostly isolated in their vaults. Given their privileged position, they did not require (like our ancestors on Earth) to move from one place to the other in search for natural resources. Most of them didn't develop a currency until the first contact with other settlements happened.

Curiously enough, this "currency thing" didn't happen in all city-states. Some councils viewed the ideas and creations of other city-states as something to covet after. It was in those societies that the State Credit became a thing, used to encourage people into acquiring these foreign creations.  

Other societies performed exchanges by just trading some of their own creations. It was with the invention of State Credit, however, that the larger societal imbalances started to spark.  

State credits exist as a currency today, and have imposed a kind of artificial scarcity that affects resource distribution. The more credit you have with your city-state, the more resources you are allocated. In the beginning, the system "seemed" to work since there was plenty to distribute and redistribute for everyone. Yet this model wouldn't work in the long run.  

State credits today even work past borders; they are used across Penumbra, for example, to buy labor in exchange for citizenship. Too late did societies found that their credit-based economy wouldn't work once resources started getting limited.  

The "idea" behind credits is that they represent the efforts you've made to make your city-state richer. The reality, however, is that (both inside the walls of the vault and outside), they've made everyone else poorer.

Nibiru Update #11 - The Wild
over 5 years ago – Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 05:29:44 AM

Hello Vagabonds! It's time for a lunch time update :)  

Yesterday we climbed anoter £500 and gave the cool news that our third and fourth stretch goals are down £1000! Yay!    

I wanted to remind you and all the newcomers that there is such thing as the Pilgrimage, which is a social game of sorts that you can enter here. The idea is that by retweeting, suscribing, etc. via that link, you get Steps, which unlock free PDF adventures you'll receive in adition to the rewards of your pledge. The more steps you earn, the more adventures you get (which are all part of a four-episode series centered around the journey of a caravan of Pilgrims on the way to the Core of the station).

Today I felt like chatting about another Habitat! We covered BrightTown already, so I thought we could follow up with the Wild. 

The Wild is, esentially, Nibiru from the eyes of the many non-human life forms that inhabit it. This means that, when you create your Vagabond of the Wild, you are going to go through our index of creatures, pick one, and write all of your memories as if you'd lived your past life being one of those creatures. Because you did! 

Playing a Vagabond of the wild means focusing not too much on what you did back in your past life, but how you did it and how you sensed the world around you. Of course, it means you won't be writing memories about "computer hacking" anytime soon, but it does make it so that most memories have to be thought within a wildly different context. 

 The habitat also has a particular connection to one of the legends of Nibiru; that of the Leviathan. The legend speaks of an enormous creature that lives beyond Umbra, and that is connected to all living beings (with the exception of humans). Vagabonds of the Wild can contact the Leviathan via synapse, which can result in a series of varying, strange effects: from accessing the stored memories of a whole new species, to awakening the dormant survival instincts of the Vagabond, to even using the Leviathan as an interpreter to communicate with other species. A world of opportunities open up for primal takes on storytelling!

Nibiru Update #10 - Enki's Covenant
over 5 years ago – Mon, Dec 10, 2018 at 06:42:39 AM

Hello Vagabonds! Hope you had a great weekend. Let's do a bit of a status report!  

The weekend saw us go up £1000! Y'all are amazing! Nibiru is being talked about and the effects are noticeable :)  

During the last week I spent a while sourcing manufacturers for one of our stretch goals (the dice). I've got new quotes and I'm happy to say we can drop the target of our last two stretch goals by £1000! This means we are currently less than £2000 away from that awesome map making it to the book, and less than £4000 away from those beautiful dice becoming a reality.  

I'm confident we can reach all of the current stretch goals, given the current rhythm we established. We are now earning about £500 per day, so it should be just a matter of days before we unlock the following stretch goals (while at the same time revealing new ones!).  

Today I wanted to talk a bit about some of the main antagonists of the game's setting; Enki's Covenant.  

Enki was a visionary among the Antumbran academic sphere: someone with a deep interest in unveiling the mysteries of what was beyond Umbra. He made a series of big discoveries over his lifetime, but ended his days lamenting not being able to come up with a solution to Kabadu.  

Kabadu is the mystified name given to artificial gravity by the Enesu (the peoples of Penumbra and beyond). The issue was simple: there's a point beyond Umbra where Kabadu is so strong that humans cannot survive it. Due to the labyrinthine nature of Nibiru's landscapes, wireless communication is very limited, making it very hard for unmanned missions to travel into Umbra as well. Even with that, the Covenant never ceased their exploration activities, and with time shifted to try to push the boundaries of science and technology.  

When did they first discover the existence of Vagabonds, no one knows for certain. But, Immediately, they saw in the amnesiacs an invaluable opportunity to learn about what was beyond Umbra. These people came from the place we want to get to! The answer to their questions ended up coming from the most unexpected of places.  

Granted, their treatment of Vagabonds was not particularly pleasant. Though some conducted investigation in an ethical manner, many attempted to use the Covenant's resources not just to track Vagabonds down and take them against their will, but also force the memories out them via experimental methods. These people made Nibiru an unsafe world. The Covenant already had community leaders and a presence across most settlements via their Nexi—scientific envoys that reported and relayed information to the Covenant's leadership.  

There are people within the Covenant seeking to change things, people seeking to use Vagabonds to gain knowledge, and people trying to get to them only for power gain. Regardless of individual motivations, all of them represent (to varying degrees) a danger to the player characters, and the main reason why Vagabonds should keep their true nature a secret.

Nibiru Update #9 - Time
over 5 years ago – Sat, Dec 08, 2018 at 06:17:00 AM

Hello Vagabonds!

BAM! That first stretch goal is unlocked! Thank you everyone for helping us get past it. Next up is that sweet map of the Skyless World. Also, the fourth stretch goal has been revealed, and it's an extra chapter to the book. This chapter will mostly be written by out astrophysic adviser, Joaquin Garcia de la Cruz. Joaquin is a researcher at the Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, and has been an active part in tackling the bigger problems we faced with world building and Nibiru. The chapter will focus around certain aspects of life in the station, how is it that some of the most complex structures in Nibiru work, and a host of related ideas for you to bring to the table!

I wanted to talk to you today about time, and how it is measured in the station. On Earth, the sky, the sun, the stars and the moon give us a great framework to measure and scale time. But how does it work when you don't have all of that? What other parallels we can draw from Earth to explain how the people of Nibiru measure time?

So... heartbeats. We have them. Nibiru has them. The Core spreads energy outwards, recharging a myriad of nodes that feed each region with electricity, and it does so with a certain delay. This delay is of about three months, which is the time that passes between node recharges, and it is noted a Cycle. Cycles where first noted when people observed the light patterns of the station, recording the intensity of the light as it varied over the three month long period. This change in intensity was prompted not due to a lack of energy, but due to Nibiru's in-built energy saving features, and they had the side effect of inspiring people to use it as a measure akin to our years. Ages, generations, all of those are measured in cycles.

It's worth to note that cycles do not last the same throughout the station. What's called True Cycle (also the Assyrian Cycle), is entirely based on the city of Ashur and the measurements it produced. Out in Penumbra, and moreso in Umbra, cycles are longer than three months, and malfunctioning or depleted nodes tend to have an effect on how communities track time. Many of them use not just the Assyrian Cycle but a local Cycle that helps agriculture in the area, as well as a Transient Cycle that aids travelers, helping them tackle routes under the best lighting conditions possible.

When it comes to shorter periods of time, lapses and fractions of lapses come into play. These have a much more obscure origin, with people theorizing that it referred to the sleep cycles of their ancestors, whom went to sleep at the same time under the native vault skylights. These are roughly 23 hours long, and are the main replacement for days in Nibiru.

Tune in for our next update—and remember to help us push the campaign via Facebook and Twitter. Lets make this weekend count!