The Circle of the Chosen

The Circle of the Chosen is a large clearing in the Discard Lands, just beyond the Seven Fingers. It is the place where, each new moon, sacrifices to the Z'bri are secretly brought by Tribal representations as part of the Pact of the Dome. Aside from the Watch tasked with bringing the prisoners there and a handful within the Sisterhoods, very few know of this practice - the tributes are almost always newly Banished, or sometimes Fallen that have been captured in Tribal Lands. No one keeps tabs on the Fallen after they have been cast out.

Because of the sacrifice and horror the Circle has seen, it has become a Gully - a place where the veil between the River of Dream and the realm of flesh has become thin. Spirits of past sacrifices haunt the Circle. Even before the inevitable coming of the Z'bri, these spirits will try to assail or possess anyone within the central circle of posts at the center of the clearing.

Beyond the immediate threat of the spirits, the looming danger is wild animals and the impending arrival of the Z'bri to take their tributes. The blood and scent of prey brings the predators, who often maim or even kill the prisoners before the Z'bri arrive. Often grisly remnants of sacrifices who did not survive being taken byt he Z'bri remain in the Circle or attached to the posts.

The Circle of the Chosen is a good in media res starting point for a Tribe 8 campaign. The Mild Consequence and aspects at the beginning are reflective of what has happened prior to the start of the scene - basically it shows the end results of being Taken Out or Conceding. The situation also lends itself well to "filling in the blanks" as far as character aspects and skills go. The players will need to make the most out of what they have in order to escape their bonds, possibly fight off predators, and flee before the Z'bri arrive.

Any sacrifices brought to the Circle of the Chosen have likely been abused, mistreated, tortured, drugged and dragged through the brambles. They automatically have a Mild Consequence reflecting those injuries. In addition, each character has two additional aspects: Bound to a Post and Disconnected From the River of Dream. The former must be overcome before the character can do anything physically, while the latter must be overcome before the character can use Synthesis or Technosmithing. For their trouble, each PC in a scenario starting at the Circle of the Chosen gets 3 free Fate Points.

The Circle also has one hidden aspect: Unexpected Help. This aspect is the result of an Evan matron (actually a Marian) named Lalani. She knows of the Tribes' use of the Circle and does what she can to sabotage it or otherwise help out. This includes weakening posts, loosening the metal rings the characters are bound to, hiding sharp pieces of metal or glass within cracks in the post or on the ground covered with dirt, rocks or leaves, and hiding bundles of food, rough clothing and simple weapons in the brambles. The guards who bring the tributes never pay attention to the Circle as they are intent on getting away from it as soon as possible, but PCs looking for a way out are sure to uncover the aspect and make use of it. While the Circle and its environs are too dangerous for Lalani to enter at night, either her or her son often keep an eye out around the homestead for any stragglers or escapees. When they find them, they covertly take them in until they are ready to travel and then send them on their way with additional provisions and clothing.

The goal of the scenario is to escape before the Z'bri arrive, so they aren't considered to be a part of the scenario (given the PCs' condition, it's likely they would survive). However, depending on the PCs and their abilities it's unlikely that predators will come into play. Typically these will be a small pack of wolf, a pair of Ontos, or if the GM really wants to make them fight a Skuller Bear. While not Gek'roh, even normal animals in the woods are often Tainted in some way, and can also be diseased. How the predators are handled depends on the group, the situation, how the GM wants to handle that kind of tension and pacing, etc. Suggestions can include a timer, a stress track to represent the danger getting closer, etc.

Aspects 

• Haunted By Sacrifices Past
• The River of Dream Is Closer
• Unexpected Help (Hidden)

The area is divided into three zones.

• The Inner Circle which is comprised of a number of posts surrounding a patch of barren dirt. The Inner circle defines the boundaries of the Gully.
• The Outer Circle, between the Inner Circle and the Brambles, comprised of patchy grass and a few stunted, dead trees.
• The Brambles, a barrier of thick vines and thorns that surrounds the Circle and acts as a barrier that must to be overcome to exit the Circle into the dense forest beyond. Every time the Brambles are cut through when sacrifices are brought, they grow back at an almost impossible rate.

Skills

Great(+4) Spiritual Blitz

Spirits within the area of the Circle of the Chosen will mob anyone left there, resulting in apparitions, hauntings, spiritual assaults and possibly even possessions. The Circle can exercise use of this skill on any character that is still within the Inner Circle.

• Overcome: Spiritual Blitz is not normally used to overcome obstacles.
• Create an Advantage: The spirits of the Circle can use Spiritual Blitz haunt, harass, and discover information about those that are in the Circle. Most characters can defend against having these advantages placed with Will or (if they have overcome the Disconnected From the River of Dream aspect) Synthesis.
• Attack: Spiritual Blitz can be used to mentally attack targets. These attacks can be defended against using any appropriate skill for defending against mental attacks.  
• Defend: Spiritual Blitz cannot be used to defend.

Faces

Wolf Pack (Fair NPC Mob)

Aspects: Pack Hunters, Unsettling Howl, Tainted (optional)

Skills: Fair(+2) Fight, Average(+1) Athletics, Average(+1) Notice

Stress: O

Stunts

Go For The Throat: Gain a +2 bonus to Fight on a target that has taken a Moderate Consequence.

Remember that the wolves use teamwork to attack their prey, gaining a +1 bonus to Fight for each additional wolf.

Onto (Good NPC)

Aspects: Ambush Predator, Great Cat, Tainted (optional)

Skills: Good (+3) Fight, Fair(+2) Athletics, Average(+1) Notice, Average(+1) Stealth

Stress: OO

Stunts

Tremendous Leap: Once per exchange, the Onto can move into an adjacent zone and attack. Alternately, the Onto can move two zones with one action.

Skuller Bear (Good NPC)

Aspects: Large Bear, Mad With Disease, Rotting Away 

Skills: Great(+4) Fight, Good(+3) Physique, Fair(+2) Athletics, Average(+1) Provoke

Stress: OOO

Stunts

Bear Hug: +2 to physique rolls when creating an advantage to grapple or hold on to an opponent.

The Zetetics

zetetic [zəˈtɛtɪk]
adj
proceeding by inquiry; investigating
[from New Latin, from Greek zētētikos, from zēteō to seek]

"Despite our failures to date, I still cannot believe that the River of Dream is completely unexplainable in scientific terms. It is a part of the universe, falls under the same laws as everything else in the universe, and I will unravel its secrets and its power..."
From the journals of Hanna, rogue Keeper

The Zetetics

Aspects: We Will Create A New World, Our Next Experiment Will Work!, They Fear What They Don't Understand

The Zetetics are one of two groups of Keepers within The Institute, the other being Clarice Chalk's Keepers. They mostly keep to themselves, inhabiting a section known as the Workshop. They have no interest in and actively avoid the medical wings were Chalk's Keepers are active, and through SlaveBeta Z'vatis has kept the Z'bri presence a secret. Their latest project is a massive device that is intended to redirect the flow of the River of Dream through Hanna, allowing her to merge Synthesis and Technosmithing into something she is calling Syncresis.

Hanna

Source: DeviantArt

Aspects:
Rogue Keeper, Obsessed With The River of Dream, Collective Memories of the Past, Well Known In Talon Nexus, No One Understands My Genius

Hanna is around 30 summers old, with brown hair and eyes. Woven throughout her hair are glass beads and disks, and she has a tattoo of a magnifying glass on her right hand. She is never without her trademark magnifying goggles (not unlike those that modelers or electricians once used), and also will have several pocket magnifying glasses on her at any time.

Skills:

• Great(+4) Crafts
• Good(+3) Lore and Investigation
• Fair(+2) Technosmithing, Resources, Will
• Average(+1) Contacts, Dreaming, Shooting, Survival

Stunts:
Ignite, Jury Rig

SlaveBeta

Aspects:
Deranged Machine Monk, Z'vatis Is My True Master, Metal > Meat

SlaveBeta is a Machine Monk who is under the control of a Melanis Z'bri named Z'vatis. Very little of his body is still flesh and blood - he owes his tortured existence to both Dr. Chalk's experiuments and Z'vatis' implants

Source: Flickr

Skills:

• Fantastic(+6) Fight
• Superb(+5) Physique
• Great(+4) Shooting
• Good(+3) Crafts
• Fair(+2) Provoke
• Average(+1) Will

Stunts:
Modular: Because SlaveBeta is more machine than human, he can quickly reconfigure himself for nearly any task. Once per session, he can swap the ranks of any two skills when making an Overcome roll or Create Advantage roll. The ranks remained swapped for the remainder of the session, but only for the purposes of Overcome or Create Advantage.

The Workshop (Location)

Source: TravelPod

Aspects: Atmosphere of Spiritual Despair, "Do You Hear Voices?", Poisoned Dreams

The Workshop is an area within the labyrinth of rooms and corridors inside The Institute. It contains a machine shop, a work area where the machine is being constructed. The Workshop manifests its own dedicated entrance to the physical orb through a series of tunnels in the Discarded Lands and, because of this, is also accessible from the River of Dream even when the Institute is not materialized. Even so, the interface between the Workshop and the outside world changes and corrupts the flow of the River. Z'vatis knows this, which is why he had SlaveBeta bring Hanna to the workshop.

Background

Hanna was a rising star and highly regarded as one of the most brilliant minds in Olympus. Over time, she began to take an interest in the River of Dream and Synthesis. Her studies turned toward less conventional areas such as the paranormal, ESP, psychedelics, etc. Hanna began sneaking into Tribal lands to secretly observe Synthesis use, as well as associate with Synthesis-using Fallen. The Elders in Olympus became concerned because of her trespasses into Tribal lands and warned her she needed to change the direction of her inquiries. Hanna continued her research anyway, often in secret. Her first real experiment in trying to harness the River of Dream through technology ended in tragedy. A second Keeper was reduced to a mindless husk and Hanna was badly injured. After a several week stay in the infirmary, Hanna was imprisoned to be tried for endangering the security of Olympus.

While awaiting her trial, she met another prisoner named SlaveBeta. SlaveBeta was a Machine Monk. Worse, SlaveBeta was under the influence of Z'vatis, A Melanis Z'bri working out of The Institute. Z'vatis became convinced Hanna's research held the key to opening the Fold, and through SlaveBeta arranged for the two of them to escape. Once free of Olympus, SlaveBeta led her to The Workshop where they began reconstructing her research and performing experiments.

Over time, a few other exiled Keepers joined the group, which Hanna named the Zetetics. Her obsession has continued to grow, fed by both Z'vatis' direct influence as well as the overall effect of being within The Institute. The other Keepers in the Zetetics are likewise becoming somewhat unhinged. Hanna's experiments have become more dangerous and grisly, and it's only a matter of time before her activities get noticed.

The Zetetics are growing from a very slow trickle of disaffected Keepers and even a few Fallen. Hanna was known around Talon Nexus and even Hom prior to her imprisonment, and occasionally people still seek her out for help. Some come to the group because they have nowhere else to go, others because they have heard about the experiments, and others because they have had visions or dreams leading them there. This latter group are often fodder for Hanna's experiments. The remainder guard The Workshop, gather needed supplies, or assist with the experiments. The machine shop is capable of producing reasonably complex parts, so the Zetetics tend to be rather well equipped - even for Olympian Keepers. If the Zetetics continues to attract new members, at some point they will be a bigger threat than the Machine Monks. Fortunately there are multiple groups who would try to stop her, provided it's not too late - specifically the Fatimas, other Keepers, the Guides and key Fallen such as Veruka the Wraith.

Giving the Keepers Some Love

Cross posted from Aggregate Cognizance


For the most part, the portrayal of Keepers in Tribe 8 has skewed toward a few archetypes: the hard boiled survivalist, the over curious yet-open-to-that-hippy-crap youth, the doddering wizard-stand in, or the tech-obsessed lunatic (as in the Machine Monks). Many times they are depicted as reluctant allies - often relegated to the role of firearm and ammunition dispensers. When they act as antagonists, often they're more of the gun-toting, "Get off my lawn!" type and not nearly as multi-faceted as, for example, Tribal antagonists.

Given that Tribe 8 is about the Fallen and their plight, this is  somewhat understandable. Keepers just aren't the heart of the game. It's still a damned shame.

At one point,  there was a Keeper supplement in the works called Word of the Keepers, which fell by the wayside and was never released. It was pitched as:

TRIBE 8: WORD OF THE KEEPERS
Enigmatic and reclusive, the Keepers are those who hid themselves away during the Fall of the World Before, and now devote themselves to the preservation and recreation of ancient technology. Word of the Keepers is both a sourcebook and player's handbook for incorporating members of this group into your Tribe 8 campaign.

Opining about the relative incompleteness of the Tribe 8 core books is especially poignant considering how many books were released - surely something like the Keepers could have been slotted into the line a lot earlier. While Tribe 8 2nd Edition featured Keepers more prominently than other books, they still amounted to a couple of decent factions (the Sanjon Keepers) and a motley assortment of groups that are just downright xenophobic, isolationist, hostile, weird, or most often some combination of all four.

Yet there are some fascinating tidbits and unexplored facets to the Keepers. The first is that Keepers are, without a doubt, the only ones who know exactly how much time passed while the bulk of humanity was in The Camps. At least one group of Keepers, mentioned in the Tribe 8 Companion, has only recently emerged from their high-tech bunker. While I'm hesitant to drag realism into it, I can't see how they could have stayed down there for too horribly long.  I've seen estimates for the time between The Camps and the Liberation ranging up to 300 years, on account of the amount of knowledge the Tribals lost. Given the overall amount of decay and ruin seen around Vimary, that figure seems way too long - I'd put it at less than 100 years. The Keepers surely know, but in the published books they aren't telling.

As a side note, for those wondering how the humans in the camps could have lost everything in the span of only a decades, it's simply because of the Z'bri. For those in the Camps, hundreds of generations could have passed, as the Z'bri used Sundering to accelerate their lives and resurrect them again (there are descriptions of Z'bri doing this in various books). Also, the opposite is true of the Keepers - while the wholesale destruction of modern civilization naturally led to a loss of a tremendouds amount of knowledge, given the Keepers' persistence at trying to uncover the past after a couple of centuries they would be much further advanced. Their loss of knowledge, if it has been less than a century, is still difficult to explain - but it can be fudged or chalked up to supernatural reasons a lot easier than explaining two centuries or more of very little progress.

Another piece of information apparently lost in the plethora of setting material is the Ancient One. While later books, and especially Tribe 8 Second Edition, mention "The Ancients" in Olympus, Tribe 8 First Edition says "the Ancient One." The implication here is that there was a single person, entity, or something else at the heart of Olympus. Does he predate the Camps? Is he the equivalent of a Keeper Fatima? A Keeper mech? We don't know because that little blurb was never explored.

I think "never explored" pretty much sums up the state of canon Keepers in Tribe 8. The Olympus Keepers are pretty much our template for what a "Keeper" is. Yet they turned out to be just one group among dozens, each of them a following a cookie-cutter pattern of "Find an industrial-looking location, insert Keepers with goggles and gas masks, make them not trust people." As antagonists or protagonists they are little more than cardboard stand-ups with remarkably little to flesh out the things that could make them truly stand out. While I appreciate that the Sanjon in Tribe 8 Second Edition got their own city and have a write-up, I kind of only got out of it that they dress like the Morton's Fish guy and make people drink alcohol out of dead cod. The closest we get to some kind of non-superficial variety are the Novohuron, who are described as "like Keepers."

For my part, I've tried to battle the two-dimensional nature of the Keepers with a Keeper antagonist, Hanna. She was actually involved in my game with meta plot, dealing with the Institute, Abonom and Agnes. Basically, she is the head of a Keeper group called the Zetetics who are dedicated to discovering a way to harness and control the River of Dream. Hanna isn't a horrible person beyond being highly motivated to seeing her theories and experiments through. In many ways, she is a pawn being played by other groups, including her own kind.

While obviously not every Keeper character or group has to be unique, as it stands they are entirely too homogeneous. They're behind the curve, especially given their story potential. In my fantasy world where Word of the Keepers was actually published, the Keepers would have unquestionably been on the forefront of the curve instead of hiding out in the tunnels underneath it. For now, I'll just have to take solace in my personal reconstruction of Tribe 8 using Fate Core, where I'm able to inject a little bit of variety to the Keepers.

Revised Technosmithing

Cross-posted from Aggregate Cognizance.

In keeping with the Keeper theme for today (har har), I've also finished with my revised Technosmithing write-up for Fate Core. It has some interesting features that set it apart from Synthesis and I think gives Technosmithing more character. You can grab it from Google Docs at the link below.

Fate of Vimary Technosmithing Draft