The world continues to have ended in 1998’s Tribe 8. A thousand years ago, the world came to an end. It may have been on its last legs already but the arrival of the Z’bri tipped it over the edge. Are they aliens? Demons? Monsters from another dimension? To this day no one knows, but they destroyed human civilization & were well on the way to exterminating the last humans alive until the Fatimas appeared: first Baba Yaga, then Eva, Tera Sheba, Dahlia, Mary, Joan, & finally Joshua. Representatives of Goddess on Earth, each possessed certain powers that they could bestow a portion of upon their followers. Joshua was assassinated & Mary died of illness to be replaced by a petulant, capricious child Fatima, but in the end the Seven Tribes prevailed. A stable-ish human homeland was established. But as so often happens, scratch a revolutionary & a reactionary bleeds; the Fatimas became hidebound gatekeepers of orthodoxy, & those who violate their laws, kick too hard at the boundaries of tradition, or rebel against their assigned Tribe, are exiled. Most who suffer banishment by the Fatimas are cut off from Dream, the spiritual essence of the world, & quickly sicken & die.

The PCs in Tribe 8 are cut from sterner stuff, or more magical. Despite being cast out they remain connected to Dream (the spirit world). They’ve joined the ranks of the Fallen, a mysterious band of rejects who shouldn’t be alive & have come together to fight for the survival of their little community.

Chargen in Tribe 8 would usually begin with the players deciding some basic information about the Cell (party, coterie, you get the idea) they belong to, but I’m only up for one character a day so we’ll jump straight to the individual.

Micheline Shadow Eye is so named not for any failing of literal vision, but for her gloomy outlook. She is daughter of a death doula, as was her own mother, & her grandmother, her great-grandmother, & on beyond reckoning. It was taken from granted since birth that she would follow in the family line. So in fact she would have done, if one of her independent experiments hadn’t gone so disastrously wrong.

Micheline, unlike most of the Fallen – indeed, unlike most members in good standing of the Seven Tribes – has joined in the search for the lost knowledge of the World Before. In her quest for ways to ease the passage of her charges from this life, she found ancient references to methods of relieving intractable suffering from certain illnesses. After a dangerous voyage into The Rust Wastes to gather the materials mentioned in the source texts – dangerous not just to her own life but to the fragile peace between the Seven Tribes & the Fallen – she returned & set about trying to sooth her patients.

She had failed utterly to understand how dangerous the chemotherapy drugs were when administered by someone with a tenth-century understanding of medicine. Rather than granting a gentle departure, Micheline inflicted unspeakable agony that outstripped the torment their tumors were already causing. In the end the only compassionate thing to do was to serve up a cup of death cap broth & bring their misery to an end.

Micheline had sinned doubly against the Fatima. She had not just failed to give a good death, she had sought to invent new treatments out of whole cloth. Incompetence compounded by blasphemy couldn’t be forgiven. She was formally exiled from the Tribes & cast out to die. Which, of course, she didn’t. She lived on, astonished to find that she didn’t need a Fatima as an intermediary, that she could commune directly with Goddess on her own.

She would have turned her back on the Seven Tribes at that point. Would have, if it weren’t for the horrible visions she had been shown during the ritual. Her mistake was just the beginning. There were things out there in The Rust Wastes, things that were stirring & would do far worse than she could have imagined. Things that would bring not just suffering, but a death that wasn’t death. A death that killed the mind, severed the spirit, but left the body roaming the land, inflicting the same hideous fate on others. The soulkillers are coming, & like it or not Micheline has to do what she can to stop them.

Once your backstory is finished, you determine your tribal origin, which determines your first Eminence (area of shamano-magical expertise). Micheline was a Yagan (no surprise there) & her Eminence is death (speak with ghosts, cause objects to age, place a person in suspended animation, &c).

After that, you choose your outlook & second eminence. This reflects that changes you’ve undergone since being exiled. Micheline’s a Doomsayer (after that vision, no wonder) & her second Eminence is mystery (decipher codes, hide objects, vanish from sight, &c.)

Now it’s time to buy attributes. You have 30 points to spend; human average is 0 & costs 1 point, attribute value 1 costs 4 points, & on up. You can get extra points by taking negative attributes, but I’m not feeling that option. Micheline ends up with these stats:

Agility 0
Appearance 0
Build 1
Creativity 0
Fitness 0
Influence 1
Knowledge 1
Perception 0
Psyche 2
Willpower 1

In a world where most people are straight 0 across the board, a Tribe 8 character isn’t superhuman but they’re still a force to be reckoned with.

Your PC has 40 points to buy skills & Synthesis abilities (the in-game name for working magic). Micheline wants to be able to bust out the magic, so she only spends 30 of her points on skills. As before, even a 1 or 2 in a skill is a significant edge over a regular Jo.

Dreaming 2
Healing 2
Herbalism 1
Melee 1
Notice 1
Read/Write Tribal 2
Read/Write Galish 1
Survival 2
Techlore (Life Science) 1

PCs who want to use Synthesis to tap the power of their Eminences (or in other words connect to the spirit world to use magic) need to buy the Synthesis skill & sister, does that not come cheap. Micheline needs to spend all ten of her remaining SP to get to level 2. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but Tribe 8 runs on the Silhouette system: roll a pool of d6, only the highest one counts, add relevant attribute, multiple sixes count as 6 + [number of additional sixes]. Even a skill level of 2 is enough to hit the most basic target number for just about any Eminence most of the time.

There are some derived attributes as well:

Strength (Build + Fitness) / 2 round down = 0 + 1 / 2 = 0 (raw muscle power)
Health (Fitness + Psyche + Willpower) / 3 rounded = 0 + 2 + 1 / 3 = 1 (general robustness)
Stamina (25 + 5x[Build + Health]) = 25 + 5x(1+1) = 25 + 10 = 35 (what it sounds like)
Unarmed Damage (3 + Hand-to-Hand + Strength + Build) = 3 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 4 (about average)
Armed Damage (3 + Melee + Strength + Build) = 3 + 1 + 0 + 1 = 5 (but she’ll cut you!)
Flesh Wound (Stamina / 2 round up) = 35 / 2 = 18 (minimum damage to cause a flesh wound)
Deep Wound (Stamina) = 35 (minimum damage to cause a deep wound)
Instant Death (Stamina x 2) = 70 (minimum damage to kill her on the spot)
System Shock (5 + Health) = 5 + 1 = 6 (resistance to bodily trauma)

The character is finished off by selecting what sounds like reasonable gear for their backstory & current circumstances. Like most Yagans, Micheline’s personal effects consist mostly of ritual gear & clothing, but she’s also acquired a few unusual bits & bobs in the course of her research into the death customs of the World Before. She also carries two knives; one a ritual knife that will be considered cursed if it ever draws blood, one a mundane tool for practical uses & self defense. Marceline’s no scrapper, but it’s a dangerous world out there & she’s no fool.

You might have noticed that Marceline’s backstory is loosely based on the Goiânia accident. Reading through the Tribe 8 setting it occurred to me just how much worse an incident like that could be in a post-apoc world where magic was real, no less.

Name: Marceline Shadow Eye
Birth Tribe: Yagans
Fallen Outlook: Doomsayer

Agility 0
Appearance 0
Build 1
Creativity 0
Fitness 0
Influence 1
Knowledge 1
Perception 0
Psyche 2
Willpower 1

Strength 0
Health 1
Stamina 35
Unarmed Damage 4
Armed Damage 5
Flesh Wound 18
Deep Wound 35
Instant Death 70
System Shock 6

Synthesis 2
Eminences: Death, Mystery

Equipment:
Yagan robes shredded into strips from the waist down for more freedom of movement, worn over tightly woven wool breeks, leather boots, ritual dagger & other materials, everyday knife, homemade Gaelish-Tribal dictionary (some of the equivalents are a little off since she had to extrapolate them from context), magnifying lens, a dozen plastic sleeves for preserving sheets of paper, scraps of ancient journal articles