Game: Tribes of Mother Night
Publisher: Flying Mice LLC
Series: F20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 27th, February 2005
Reviewer’s Rating: 7/10 [ Good ]
Total Score: 7
Average Score: 7.00
The Tribes of Mother Night are shape-shifters. They are the Ekhaet and share the world with the Haeloti. In the beginning there was Darkness and she had two sons, brothers, Eur and Haelot. I’ll skip the creation myth story… but it’s worth reading in the PDF as it’s written well. Essentially “man” ends up either worshiping Haelot, represented by the Sun, or being harassed by him. Those he harassed are saved by Darkness, she turns them into animals, and then when the danger passes they turn back.
There are seven countries on one small continent. Three largest of these countries are Ylosia, the Sun Empire. We have the collection of cities known as the Federation of Bazhuel. The dark horse powerbase is the Kingdom of Lhalheim. The other countries tend to be in the thrall of the Shining Order anyway.
In the Empire if you have more than 1/8th Ekhaet blood then you are considered a second class citizen. You have to wear a badge labelling you as the second class citizen and you have fewer rights than everyone else.
One of the themes of the game is about prejudice. It helps very much if you have a mature gaming group who can cope with and explore this.
The Ekhaet are nomadic travellers. They travel around the continent in brightly coloured wagons. In private they don’t hide their shape-shifting powers. The Wanders are one of three main groups of Ekhaet and it’s the Wanders who are known as the Tribe of Mother Night. There are also The Lost. These are those with Ekhaet blood but who have not yet heard the call of the blood, not yet met their animal-selves, and who are left to live with the Haeloti. Then there are The Veiled. These Ekhaet do not travel; they know who they are but live with the Haeloti anyway, The Veiled often keep their true nature a secret and work to find The Lost or aid other Ekhaet in trouble.
You don’t get much more campaign material in the book. No. Tribes of Mother Night is a campaign idea and a nudge in the right direction. It’ll take an experienced GM to pick up those wagon reins and roll with the concept. That’s alright though, it’ll probably take an experienced GM to be “hobby aware” enough to be buying Flying Mice products online and in PDF form (or even reading this review).
There are 116 pages in the $8 RPG and so clearly there is a lot of material still to cover. Tribes of Mother Night is also a complete rule set for F20. That’s not a typo; the system isn’t D20 but F20. That’s skill plus stat plus d20. Needless to this is an easy and graceful system but it’s not one that digs deep into the minutia of accuracy. That’s fine by me. I prefer the abstract rules to those which scientifically try to re-create the laws of physics, biology and chemistry with dice.
On the F20 scale characters in Tribes of Mother Night begin game play as Competent (Level 5).
Stats are broken up into groups. There are four groups and three stats in each. The Body Group includes Constitution, Strength and Toughness. The Grace Group includes Dexterity, Movement Speed and Reflexes. The Mind Group contains Charisma, Intelligence and Technical and the Spirit Group has Creativity, Gnosis and Willpower.
Gnosis is a bit of a blunder. Tribes of Mother Night is the first F20 product I’ve read so I’m left with the impression that the authors, Tim Kirk and Clash Bowley, created a game with werewolves and with gnosis for spirit matters. It’s hard, of course, not to think of White Wolf’s Werewolf range (currenly flagshipped by Werewolf: the Forsaken). This is a shame as the two games are very different.
F20 and Tribes of Mother Night use Character Professions (a class / occupation concept) to define which set of skills, talents, perks and powers a character can have. Skills are also divided out into groups and also link to either; Body, Grace, Mind or Spirit. Characters with some experience in a profession can upgrade to a choice of Advanced Professions.
There is magic in Tribes of Mother Night. The Magician profession which most obviously reflects this – magicians manipulate threads of probability, fate and fortune to achieve their magical effects. Other professions like Thread-Seers or even Priests of Haelot also tap into magical abilities.
In addition to different professions there are different types of animals the Ekhaet can shift into. There’s the usual wolf and canine style of shape-shifter, feline and bear but there’s also deer, lizard, rabbit and nightwing.
There’s a system in F20 where characters can take onboard Disadvantages in return for points back. I must admit I do quite like any Disadvantage / Advantage rules as they do tend to encourage characters to be less “samey”; for example two Duellists might be very similar in terms of skills and stats but add a Disadvantage and the two can suddenly be very different, oh, say one of them might be prone to berserk rages. If you’re lucky then you game with gamers who’ll give their characters interesting personality traits and disadvantages without any point compensation in reward.
There are some interesting twists in the experience point suggestion list. There’s a flat rate of experience points rewarded for every hour of real time spent playing the game. This is in addition to the usual rewards for doing well and roleplaying well. There are even experience points for helping the players out by buying pizza and spending real money. Some gamers might balk at this but I accept experience points are a “meta game” issue. I think I’d tailor my experience point rewards to suit the style of the gaming group.
There’s a menagerie of critters at the back of the PDF. Here we have enough encounters to keep the countryside dangerous. This pairs well with a rather nicely spelt out “How good are my stats” section which explicitly defines “poor” vs “average” vs “good” and so forth.
I like the F20 system. It’s as good as any other system which makes heavy use of just one die for the common mechanics (like other 20-sided systems F20 rolls other polyhedral for damage and other quirks). The abstract and fluid nature of F20 suits the mood of Tribes of Mother Night well. I don’t see Ekhaet worrying whether an extra face on a dice would bias the mean roll.
I like the Tribes of Mother Night too. It’s worth repeating that PDF really is more of a campaign idea than a full campaign setting. That, though, is just fine with me. The very fact that I’m inspired enough to create those missing cities, danger prone roads, trading centres and church infrastructure is testament to just how successfully the game has lured me into taking the bait.
