Why I Like Tribe 8 and The Whispering Vault

Tribe 8 and The Whispering Vault are very different RPGs which have a few things in common. One is that they're both horror games; another is that they dwell on the absolute highest peak of the Pretentiousness Range. In Tribe 8¹, characters are members of the Seven Tribes, the last remnant of humanity in post-apocalyptic Montreal, serving inhuman goddesses made of scrap iron. Eventually you find out that All Is Not As It Seems with your beloved gigantic twisted metal mother-figures, and do a runner to hang out with the exiled eighth tribe, thus justifying the title.

The aforementioned pretentiousness comes in a variety of forms. The Fatimas (the junkyard goddesses) are named for various mythological/historical women, including both Mary the Mother and Magdalen the, uh, "Lover", just in case you weren't getting enough brick-blunt Judeo-Christian imagery in your media diet². There's absolutely scads of background material, including the kind of poetry even OWoD-era White Wolf would blush at³, which illustrate and flesh out a rich and involved society which is, at its heart, actually kind of boring. NPCs have keywords attached about the kind of impression they're supposed to make on the PCs. Credit where it's due, this is actually a good idea, but the keywords are often at odds with each other: Playing a character as "subdued, demanding and understanding" is a hell of a feat, and it doesn't help that the keywords often have bupkis to do with the character's written description. Magic involves contacting "the River of Dream" and patchouli-er concepts still, and the rules are about as clear as a six-bonghit conversation. And all the characters look like post-apocalyptic Goths or D&D psionicists (not that there's any difference). I find the game's artsy faffings-about especially delightful because Tribe 8 uses Dream Pod 9's Silhouette system, which started as a set of easy, simple wargame rules and became the system used for DP9's hard sci-fi mecha games⁴ Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. Silhouette is big on rules exactitude and realism⁵, but low on the kind of narrative-mechanic interplay that Tribe 8's artsy attitude would seem to require⁶. But hey, if you want to run a crossover between post-apocalyptic magic poetry barbarians and hot-blooded mecha pilots from Jupiter, no problem! Well, no mechanical problem, anyway - That sounds like a thematic nightmare, or Rifts, or both.

Hey, Rifts! Speaking of ludicrously overpowered characters (now that's how you segue), if playing a Quebecois savage after the End doesn't grab you, there's The Whispering Vault, in which you play an Enlightened Stalker who incarnates in a Vessel created by the Weavers to Hunt Shadows and Unbidden Aesthetics and Mend Enigmas in the Chronosphere on behalf of the Powers of the Realm of Essence. Yeah, the Law of Capitalization is working overtime in Vault. What that mess of Big Important Terms means is that the PCs are freaky immortals with pocket dimensions, loads of magic powers and personal monster servants who triapse across all of space and time⁷ doing the dirty work of keeping reality together. Of course, they also used to be human, so you get that same rich vein of What Have I Become that's been buying White Wolf's Cure albums for two decades now. To be fair, Vault at least admits up front the distinct possibility of the PCs using their supernatural badassery to carve their way through the exceedingly fragile mortal realm without remorse - you have to define five virtues, flaws or memories (sorry, Virtues, Flaws or Memories) as your character's "Keys of Humanity", and the most passive-aggressive sidebar since the "violence is bad, kids" intro to Unknown Armies' combat section suggests that one of them really ought to be Compassion. The "monster PCs" thing plays into the other trouble of White Wolf games, the difficulty of having a mood of brooding horror when the average PC can punch cars in half and has a horde of chittering time eaters on numinous speed dial. And, of course, completing the trifecta, there is poetry (Also, don't try to make heads or tails of the illustration on that page. The art in Vault is seriously all over the place).

So there's me making fun of a couple of very '90s RPGs for being oh so very '90s. But this series of posts isn't "What's Goofy About...", so let's turn to the other thing these games have in common: To whit, the baddies. The monsters of both games are spirits who crossed over into the physical plane and went a lot nutso when they were overwhelmed with the assortment of physical sensations we meatpeople take for granted. In Tribe 8 they're called the Z'Bri, in Vault the Unbidden, but the backstory's the same for both. I dig this trope, even though I have to admit it often boils down to a variant on immortality envy. Sure, spirit beings, you exist in a timeless realm of pure emotion and thought, but have you ever gotten a boner? Or eaten ginger beef? Or gotten a boner while eating ginger beef? Apparently, it's enough to drive otherwise peaceable spirits to addictive madness⁸. Our everyday mundanities are spectral heroin.

Tribe 8's Z'bri are divided into four Houses, based on the four Classical humours⁹ and matched to the relevant temperament: The Melanis are brooding, the Sangis are way too happy, the Koleris flip out and kill people all the time, and my favourites, the Flemis, are just fat gobs of flesh that want to absorb your body and consciousness¹⁰. They were apparently summoned en masse by human ennui, kind of like a horrible monster invasion version of the Phantom Tollbooth, and then got stranded here in Materialville. Naturally, they then proceeded to slaughter the majority of the world's population, tear down civilization and put whoever was left into camps¹¹ for body horror-related purposes. This gets conveniently overlooked by a lot of the game's writing, which advocates a more Sympathy for the Devil approach. Yep, apparently they wiped out most of humanity and tortured the survivors because they know they don't belong here, but can never go home again. Because in '90s RPGs, even the alien Nazi spirit rapists have tragic and sympathetic backstories.

There's no sympathy on hand for Whispering Vault's Unbidden, though. As spirit Aesthetics, they're responsible for creating our world and everything in it, but it's a strictly build-but-don't-touch deal. Rules get broken, they bugger off to the physical and leave a hole in reality where they should be creating it, and it's up to the PCs/Stalkers to Hunt¹² them down, Mend¹² the hole (sorry, I mean the Enigma, god forbid we leave such an important concept uncapitalized) and Banish¹² the lawbreaking dope to the titular Whispering Vault so he can wait out the apocalypse. Unbidden can have hordes of lesser manifested spirits to help them out, too, because what good is physical existence if you can't share it with your friends? While the Z'Bri conquered the world, most Unbidden know they can't really fight the Powers and their rules and are just trying to hold out as long as possible, which casts the Stalkers as jackbooted reality thugs enforcing laws they don't understand.

I can understand that the concept doesn't grab other people, and an 'addiction to physical sensation' can be argued to be just 'Chaotic Evil goes to art school'. But I've always dug spirits, faeries and similar critters from places where the rules are different, and the hijinks of the the enfleshened seem like fun times. Plus there's something about the conceit that really seems to free up the artists - a lot of these guys look really cool¹³.

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1. I am legally obligated, every time I bring up Tribe 8 in any context, to mention that the game shares its name with a "dykepunk" band which consistently kicks its ass in Google rankings.
2. I may be overcritical on this point because I legitimately thought the Fatima naming convention was really cool when I was 17. There were a lot of things I thought were cool when I was 17.
3. Then again, they greenlit the Book of Nod, so they pretty clearly have no shame.
4. "Hard sci-fi mecha" is of course a contradiction, as any number of unfun nerd types will tell you.
5. Well, tabletop RPG realism, which is to say 1) lethality and 2) multiplication. 
6. The alternative-bookstore magic system in Tribe 8 does actually patch one of the major weaknesses of the Silhouette system, namely that there's absolutely no reason not to dumpstat Psyche, since you don't use it for anything. Which is how I ended up playing a hotshot starship pilot with psychotic depression.
7. That's the old Doctor Who version of "all of space and time", which is to say "Mainly Earth, mainly the present day or easily recognizable/stereotypeable historical periods". 
8. Of course, since the most obvious overwhelming physical sensations are sexual, this gets real pervy real fast. 90s game designers loved that shit, since it gave them a ready-made excuse to put taped nipples in the illustrations and toss sly references to weird ghost rape (or, at best, weird ghost consensual sex) all willy-nilly.
9. Which makes so little sense that it actually reduces the net total of sense in the universe, but whatever.
10. Certainly a unique take on "having a calm, unflappable disposition".
11. No, really. Camps. Just in case the "Eighth Tribe" thing was too subtle for you. And yet again, White Wolf did it first.
12. Hunt, Mend and Banish are apparently capitalization-worthy concepts. I've mentioned this already, but damn that's stupid.
13. For the reference nobody will get, they're kind of like the monsters from the Book of Unremitting Horror, but without the weird obsession with lakes and drowning. There are like four lake monsters in that damn book.