Tabletop Game / Nibiru

The stars shone bright on that fateful night, more than four thousand years ago. Under the midnight sky, the Mesopotamian winds carried away the scents of incense, the echoes of laughter, music and joyous celebration. The temple's construction was over.

After weeks of festivities, prompted by the Third King's return, the city fell asleep. In their dreams, they saw the holy debts repaid—their souls lifted gracefully to the stars.

But suddenly, something happened. An instant of daylight tore the mantle of night apart, its shine blinding those below. The most deafening noise ever experienced by humanity accompanied the light—so loud, as if the cosmos itself let out a desperate cry. Petrified, they gazed at the sky above. Then they saw it—their dream, realized—for the one and only time.

Nibiru, their second home, passed by.

Nibiru is a science fiction Tabletop RPG published by Modiphius Entertainment, focused around the themes of memory, nature and artificiality. The Player Characters are called Vagabonds: amnesiacs lost in an ominous space station inspired by ancient Mesopotamia. A monstrous vulture feeding off of a collection of unborn planets, Nibiru's purpose is unknown—at least, for those that reside in it.

Nibiru's rotation creates an artificial gravity, the strength of which increases the further one travels from the structure's Core. The Core of this skyless world is a series of fission reactors, fed a steady stream of iridium by drones that scavenge the surrounding environment. Near the Core is Antumbra, where the majority of the human population live in enclosed city-states, for which the Core produces an abundance of life's necessities. Beyond Antumbra, concentrically further from the core, Penumbra is a more challenging environment. With heavier gravity, a colder environment and a more challenging ecology, life in Penumbra is difficult.

The Vagabonds are different from other peoples in Nibiru. They come from strange places called Habitats, each functioning as an archetype that changes not just the backdrop of your memories, but the mechanics of how you recall them. From Dreamlanders—people that only seem to remember the lives of other individuals—to Vagabonds of the Machine—who share the memories prompted by a sentience-inducing computer virus—each of the five habitats holds mysteries of their own, as well as unique mechanics. The Vagabonds must find a way not only to survive, but blend in without falling victim to powerful forces that seek to control them and their unusual abilities.

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This game provides examples of:

• Amnesiac Hero: Vagabonds have one very important thing in common: they awoke in the cold of Nibiru without most of their memories. Theirs is the struggle of remembrance. Their old lives are broken; their new lives will see them struggling to pick up the pieces. All of this, while wandering in a world they cannot comprehend. The rules allow for storytelling to happen not only forwards (living through the adventure and getting to determine the fate of your characters) but also backwards, as the unveiling of each new remembrance reveals the tales and tribulations that comprised your characters' past lives.
• Arcadia: Vagabonds of BrightTown come from a small countryside village, seemingly removed from the rest of the station. People from BrightTown are extremely nostalgic, as they yearn to return to a vivid past in a sunny land that bears absolutely no resemblance to the cold landscapes of Nibiru.
• Asteroid Miners: Although people are completely unaware of the universe outside of the space station, an army of small drones collect material from the surroundings to supply Nibiru. Comets and icy rocks are a rich source of water, whereas asteroids can provide minerals. The most important resource is iridium, which fuels the nuclear fission reactors located in Nibiru's Core.
• Benevolent A.I.: The Children of EUROPA are charitable, loving and caring. They work together with their people, helping to keep order and fostering cooperation and wellbeing, and march alongside rescue forces when tragedy strikes at other peoples.
  I don't think they have a 'true purpose'. Do you have one? I think that's something that changes with time. The constant with them is kindness, and that's what they have taught us since we were young. They show us what a society built on care and compassion looks like, and in any case it's our purpose, to them, to show that we can follow their example.
• Big Bad: The nexi of Enki's Covenant work from the shadows as informants, and following tracks, whispers, and every rumour of Vagabonds they can get hold of. At best a nexus will look to capture Vagabonds to take them to their bosses. At worst, a nexus will be so well connected that they'll be able to mobilise local militias, pressure governing bodies and use law enforcement to track down any unlucky Vagabonds that fall under their radar. Enki's Covenant is terrifying because of their reach: they are the reason why Vagabonds hide their true identities, and their existence is the reason why Vagabonds can never truly find calm.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Almost all lifeforms in Nibiru are bioelectric in nature: their bodies work like a complex circuit—seizing electric power, preserving it and using it to keep the spark of life from fading.
• Booby Trap: The way into Sakkara is guarded by the Unseen Trail, a seemingly clear path, two kilometres long, riddled with more than two hundred spring traps that make it virtually impossible to traverse. It is said that citizens of Sakkara are tattooed with a nigh incomprehensible pattern that shows the way into the city.
• Book Ends: Many Vagabonds end up in Umbra after their arrival to the human domains. This makes it a perfect place to make a cold start for your group. Understandably so, it's also a great place to end your group—hardly anyone who ventures past the Umbraic frontier ever returns.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": In Nibiru, no animal we know in the 21st century actually exists, and the creatures called 'lions' and 'sheep' are only somewhat similar to the creatures we think of today.
• Cargo Cult: The Cults of Silence centre around the belief of šiknat napišti: Nibiru is a living thing, the Core is its heart and electricity is its lifeblood. An original sin (whose nature has been lost to time) made it so that electricity would be harmful to humans instead of empowering.
• City on the Water: Tanis is a flooded vault whose water level has sharply fluctuated across its history. Due to this, the village is built on impressively tall steelweave pillars, with dozens of bridges and hanging shacks.
• Cobweb Jungle: Webworms are capable of spinning a thick, conductive web to capture prey. This web is spun across miles-long tunnel networks, always converging in a power generator.
• Death World: More than 1000 kilometres away from the Core, the artificial gravity becomes so oppressive that your heart has problems getting blood to your brain. Hallucinations, loss of consciousness (which is usually deadly at this point) and the weight on your body makes it nigh impossible to traverse Umbra. A few bold individuals dare venture here, lured by the promise of forbidden lands, as well as answers about the nature of the Skyless World, but when treading the expanse of 2G, only the best equipped, boldest and most ambitious survive (and even then, no one manages to go much further than the oppressive 2.6G where many of Nibiru's lost facilities lie).
• Divine Right of Kings: The Assyrian religion focuses on the original tale of the People's Shepherd, and establishes a lineage of Primarchs that are said to descend from the person whom the Shepherd entrusted with its teachings. This creed is held only in Ashur, its dependencies, and in the Penumbraic diaspora.
• Due to the Dead: Many religious traditions across Nibiru place great importance on funerary rites, which led to controversies in distributing paleweed, which requires a fresh corpse to grow.
• Emperor Scientist: Nineveh is ruled by a complex AI called EUROPA, which controls the city's administrative bodies, and its tech production is unrivalled.
• Eternal Engine: The Core is the basement upon which everything in Nibiru is built: an incredible machine that works over millennia to power the entire station and all its facilities. Each of its eight power generators work in a constant cycle, consuming iridium radioisotopes to produce massive amounts of electricity, which is then distributed across the station following that same cycle.
• Fake Memories: The Dreadlands are a fictitious habitat comprised of a collection of stories in the vein of Oedipus the King and Hamlet, inserted into an unborn mind. Left to grow as the seed of a fake life, they become as real as they can get.
• Fantastic Flora: Although plant life exists in Nibiru, it's quite rare in comparison to fungi. A myriad different fungi species spread across all corners of the station in a polychromatic, eerie tapestry of otherworldly lifeforms.
• Gadgeteer Genius: The Pleiads are a small group of inventors from Enki's Covenant that devoted their lives to creating wondrous machines that would enable communities to thrive in Penumbra. Examples include a windmill built in a Torus-divergent vent that powers the settlement, as well as flower-shaped, light-absorbing piece of engineering that powers the small village of Oxydia.
• Giant Flyer: The 20-metre long serpents of Azure swim in the currents of electromagnetic power, their bodies gliding by the arcing lightning in the very bowels of Nibiru. Their limbs are superconductors, taking advantage of their habitat's weak gravity to soar and glide in spirals around the great power generators found near the Core.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: In addition to their English names, all creatures of Nibiru have a native name in the Akkadian language: akkilu (lion), karatu (slicer), iqnû ušumgallu (serpent of Azure), kuliltu (mermaid) and so on.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Rogue Affliction is a virus-like phenomenon that affects AIs throughout Nibiru, awakening a consciousness that makes machines behave like humans.
• Heavy Worlder: Under the weight of crushing gravity, the people of Penumbra and Umbra are shorter than average. Muscle mass is more dense, and their eyesight, while poorer than that of the Arku, is better accustomed to the dark.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Living in Antumbran cities for Vagabonds entails hiding in plain sight. Abandoned underfloor complexes, highly secure living quarters and off-limits facilities are some of the locales where these groups live.
• Hive Mind: Skitterbot AIs have their Core stored in a portable central, which sets up the behaviour of a swarm of tennis ball-sized mobile platforms called 'limbs'. A single limb might be able to read your messages, make calls, store small objects, and perform cleaning duties, while a group of them can be used to render video in 3D, cordon off a perimeter, perform CPR, and a myriad other functions.
• Horse of a Different Color: Assyrian legends tell that the first Arku rode leapers along with the People's Shepherd into the great unknown. Throughout time, leapers have been bred as mounts and domesticated to find power sources in far off places.
• Human Resources: A fresh corpse is required for paleweed's properties to set in. The Wandering Necropolis of Nergal travels the Torus, visiting connected towns every few cycles, and holding in each a departure ceremony wherein families would trade in the body of a recently deceased family member for a portion of Nergal's harvest.
• Illegal Religion: Due to their debauchery, the Lightbringers, a sect of the Pilgrims, are outlawed in Antumbra and Suruptu.
• King of Beasts: Since the dawn of humanity, lions have been looked at with respect and reverence—walking representations of all that is glorious, proud and free. Some cults of dawn regard them as rulers over all other living things. The Assyrians refer to the term lionesque as the ideal of what a people should aspire to be like.
• Land of One City: The Core Sectors harbour a collection of city-states, each its own set of laws and edicts, largely promulgated by elder councils, priesthoods and monarchies.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Most Arku kids participate in a Covenant camp during their education cycles, but it's likely they won't remember anything at all when asked. Enki wouldn't want to linger in people's collective consciousness for too long.
• Layered Metropolis: Built within a large oil tank, Suruptu's districts protrude from the vault walls, growing downwards at the beat of its oil processing platform. A series of elevator platforms bordering each of the city's levels, going up and down like a conveyor belt, help people move from one place to others.
• Light Worlder: The Arku, who live in the Core Sectors, are, first and foremost, adapted to low gravity. The artificial gravity in Antumbra is roughly 30% lower than that of Earth, which means that these people are usually taller, have more delicate bones, and lower heart rates.
• Luring in Prey: Shocktails usually roam the power lines of Antumbra, squeezing their bodies into the clumps of cables and letting their cable-like worm of Erra symbiont hang loose. Creatures that touch the cable or try to feed from it are suddenly squeezed by the worm, and the shocktail quickly curls to sink its razor sharp teeth in the victim's neck.
• Merchant City: Nimrod has become more a gigantic trade house than a city; a bloated maze, full to the brim with all kinds of goods.
• Metal Muncher: Firecrawlers drink the molten steel found in Nibiru's metal forges.
• Microts: The most used units of time are the Flicker (which lasts for an unknown duration, beginning with the initial startup of the Core's functions, and ending with its shutdown), the Assyrian Cycle (which measures the period between energy bursts experienced at Ashur, and equates to three months), the True Cycle (a locale-based unit that measures the period between energy bursts at each vault, which can range from 3 months at Ashur to 7 in Umbra) and the Lapse (which reflects the peoples of Nibiru's sleep cycle, and lasts for 22 hours).
• One to Million to One: In Antumbra, Settler AIs can disassemble themselves to transport their own limbs through narrow service tunnels, before reassembling in the depth of the Outback Domains.
• Our Mermaids Are Different: Mermaids are aquatic parasites that inject a powerful toxin into victims, close their metre-long jaws on the prey's legs, align and sink a long tendril into the spine, and wrap a flexible 'collar' around the neck. The mermaid's toxin delays rigor mortis, enabling the creature to send electric pulses to the limbs of its prey, triggering its reflexes. Mermaids will then swim to the surface and use this trick to lure people into helping the seemingly living corpse.
• Our Sirens Are Different: Wind sirens are predators that make use of a potent neurotoxin that they release through spores, which are carried by the wind through Nibiru's air circulation systems, sometimes travelling for tens of kilometres before entering a prey's olfactory system. The victim becomes extremely sensitive to the high frequency sounds sirens are most adept at producing (from which they get their name), which seem to work in unison with the toxin to guide addled victims to the siren.
• Panacea: Ghost fungi, also known as paleweed, presents almost miraculous medical properties, which led to its harvest and widespread distribution throughout Antumbra. After just a hundred cycles, the introduction of paleweed almost doubled life expectancy in the recipient communities.
• Past-Life Memories: The Dreamlands represent a compilation of memories: the missing pieces of other people's pasts. To be a Dreamlander is to have lived uncountable lives through the eyes of others, a phenomenon that blesses them with a great degree of empathy and understanding.
• Planet Spaceship: The eponymous Nibiru is a disc-shaped space station, roughly measuring 3600 kilometres in diameter, near the star Fomalhaut. Its rotation generates artificial gravity in such a way that approximately 20% of its total surface can be inhabited. Human societies have traversed much of Nibiru for thousands of cycles, and yet, most of it is still undiscovered.
• Proxy War: As competition for resources increases and social unrest grows in Penumbraic colonies, competition between their Antumbran patrons becomes more aggressive and dangerous, to the point that small proxy wars might spark.
• Rapid Aging: In Umbra, 2G gravity means your metabolism has to constantly run on overdrive to keep you conscious. Though your body can get used to it, life expectancy in Umbra is about a third of that in Antumbra.
• La Résistance: In the Asappu Pillar, a small encampment has been established by the local farming community, hidden away from the eyes of the UWOL01, an Archaean outpost that taxes their product and relays information back to Archaean branches of government in Penumbra. The farmers hope that they'll be able to break free from the outpost's domain.
• Riddle for the Ages: The amnesiac Vagabonds, hidden from the peoples of Nibiru, might be its biggest and most intriguing secret: a group of humans descending upon the station, bearing strange recollections of wild, otherworldly existences. Existences that, for one reason or the other, have been kept away across the cycles of history, hidden in the mists of time.
• Rite of Passage: Many Umbraic traditions involve multiple rites of passage that help build a strong sense of trust between the Umbraic peoples.
• Robot Buddy: The Children of EUROPA take a very active role in modern Nineveh society. All records of the city's construction depict them working together with their people, helping to keep order and fostering cooperation and wellbeing. They live with families, assist the elderly, care for the little ones, and tend to be almost constantly on the move—not just entertaining humans, but also finding the time to have fun themselves, playing ball, singing, cooking and dancing.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Waywatcher AIs can execute a self-immolation routine, in which they overcharge their core to its literal melting point.
• Settling the Frontier: Penumbra is the largest populated sector of the station, sparsely dotted by small settlements and colonies, where hard-working industrialists and fortune seekers live. The settling of the Flooded Countries is now seeing people living in places that would have been considered unlivable a hundred cycles ago. Exploration and colonisation is still one of the most profitable ventures in Nibiru, but it is also more expensive and out of reach than ever before.
• Shedu and Lammasu: A recurring image in many ancient steel carvings across Antumbra, Lammasu are mythic Harbingers that protect whatever it is Nibiru deems of great value. They'll almost always find you first, with little in the way of warning, and generally with the purpose of dispatching whatever they deem a menace. It's been whispered, since the arrival of the first amnesiacs at the station, that Lammasu sometimes come into the aid of Vagabonds in dire times, but encounters of this kind almost always signify the complete loss of one's past memories.
• Shining City: Ur has preserved most of its traditions intact across the ages of Nibiru. Its beauty and its people's unique craftsmanship have attracted many a curious philanthropist, yearning to carve themselves a piece of the vault to call their own. For better or worse, the resources poured into Ur have enabled it to stand the test of time as a true relic of the past.
• Starfish Language: Vagabonds of the Machine can speak and comprehend an otherworldly language, which resonates in frequencies inaudible to most. This language is only utilised by the oldest systems of Nibiru—strange mechanisms, long lost in to history, that lay dormant in far away corners of the world.
• The Symbiote:
  • Shocktails are creatures that live in permant symbiosis with the invertebrate worms of Erra. The worm of Erra feeds from the shocktail's nutrients, and the shocktail uses the worm's body, their electric flow and their likeness to cables to hunt.
  • The Asappu are symbiotes that establish a mutually beneficial relationship with an individual of a different species, usually a human. The human host sees a drastic decrease in brain activity, as a big part of our bodies' electric current is transferred to the Asappu. In return, the Asappu employs an arsenal of organic compounds that serves to enable human life in Umbra.
  • The Nightmare is a parasitic lifeform connected to the amygdala, in the brain's medial temporal lobe, of Dreadlanders. It instinctively protects its host, and feeds off the Vagabond's recollections.
• Theme Naming: The city-states in Antumbra are all named after historical cities in ancient Mesopotamia.
• Transferable Memory: The strange phenomenon responsible for collecting the memories of a Dreamlander involves a disease that robs people of part of their past. Imagine that your life went on as normal and, one day, you woke up to realise that you cannot remember what happened during the last three months.
• Tube Travel: The Torus is an oval-shaped, hollowed-out ring, which distribute air and oxygen throughout Nibiru. After the construction of the Ascendants and the foundation of the first permanent Penumbraic settlements, the Torus became a somewhat viable communication and travel route.
• Underwater City:
  • Myrna is built in underwater compartments, with technology providing oxygen from the water.
  • Located in a small vault close to the waterways of Lonespark, Ounnur is a shallow water settlement—the lake surface being just a couple metres over the vault's floor.
• Uplifted Animal: The Wild represents a collection of memories gathered from a wild creature, processed and then stored into a human body. Vagabonds of the Wild inhabit a place in between reason and wild instinct: they woke up with the faculties of speech and complex thought, partaking in communion with the human societies while knowing that there's something primal within them, ready to scuttle, claw, swim its way to the surface. It is up to them to decide which of their conflicting natures will reign over the other, and finding a balance is a key part of what means to be from the Wild.
• Uterine Replicator: Within a Birther AI's frame is a series of vats that allow a fetus to develop throughout its entire gestation cycle in optimal conditions.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: An old tale from the Umbras, the Garden of Solitude, is centered around a farmer by the name of Io who lives far from the rest of the world. In the tale, Io becomes friends with a strange, animal-like creature from the Umbras, called Aurya, which resembles a human with a bizarre, ostentous piece of headwear. Aurya is usually posed as a representation of Io's changing sense of self, but the similarities between this character and the vision of an Asappu/human communion suggest that the folktale's original author might have seen one such creature in their lifetime, which could have served as an inspiration for the story.
• Vestigial Empire: In the past, the Assyrian Supremacy reigned over most of the Core Sectors. Today, their empire is a distant memory, and its people stand divided at a crossroads between the weight of Ashur's legacy and the necessity of keeping up with the current age.
• Warhawk: The Sisters' culture is based on devotion to their leaders' family values and martial prowess. The Sisters hold the only professional army in the world, and are seen as an interventionist state, which keeps other states very wary.
• Wrong Side of the Tracks: The Little Sisters is a collection of ramshackle compartments, bleeding out of the vault's base and into its cable-riddled bowels. It serves as home to the poorest communities of Ashur, those that have partly left the system (and some that outright live outside of it).

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