In November 2023 we presented the all-new Nibiru Bundle featuring Nibiru, the Araukana Media SFRPG of lost memories on a continent-sized space station. Your amnesic Vagabonds venture from the Core Sectors of the Antumbra to explore the vast high-gravity frontiers of the outer disc. In that Skyless World you’ll recover your past, gain new abilities through Revelations, and carve a new life. The game’s rules foster creative writing; players produce bite-sized bits of character background to advance the story. For fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Martian, Ringworld, The Expanse, and Rendezvous With Rama, this monstrous ancient machine makes a compelling backdrop for narratives of loss and recovery, of captivating mystery, and of the tremendous varieties of human experience.
Nibiru, the station, orbits the star Fomalhaut 25 light years from Earth. The station is thousands of years old, its purpose shrouded in mystery. Nibiru is a rotating disc 2,200 miles (3,600km) in diameter with an interior area of 3.9 million square miles (10M sq km), roughly the size of Canada. The regions of its dark interior have different centripetal gravity, from the hospitable Core Sectors of the Anteumbra region (0.8 Gs) to the ragtag settlements of the Penumbra (1.4 Gs) to the final frontier, the sparsely populated Umbra (2.4 Gs and up). Excessive gravity makes 80% of the station uninhabitable. Weird wildlife and rogue Artificial Intelligences inhabit the entire disc. The colossal setting supports many campaign styles: political intrigue in the civilized Vaults of the Core Sectors, resource management and colonial resentment in the exploited Penumbra, and gritty survival in the unforgiving high-G Umbra.
Though the setting is incomparably exotic, Nibiru is intensely character-focused. As a Vagabond, you have no memory of your past nor your arrival on the station. You have one of five offbeat “Habitats” (origins), which can be specific (you’re a rogue AI or wild creature posing as human) or abstract (you may embody the fictitious “Dreadlands” or connect to the collective unconscious). Your Habitat determines your goal, or Beacon. In pursuing your Beacon you earn Memory Points, which you can spend to write a Memory Entry in your Journal – that is, you literally invent and write some snippet of a past event on your character sheet. These memories provide positive (or negative!) modifiers in play.
After eight Memory Entries you can unlock a Revelation, a hidden power; if you wrote down negative memories, or very detailed entries, the Revelation costs less. A Revelation can be meta-narrative (you can choose a character from your past life to arrive in the story, or narrate a premonition that will come true), or the Revelation might be more concrete, like a poison distilled from your sorrowful remembrance.
Aside from this set of memory mechanics (called the “MEMOs System”), Nibiru resolves most tasks using a rules-light system of “Normal Rolls”: rolls of 3d4 where any 4 means success. High-gravity settings can impose penalties. Certain character powers and features use Special Rolls of one to six d4s. Players can spend Influence Points to reroll dice, add details to a situation, or power Revelation abilities. Characters can take damage to both Body and Mind. The damage tracks have only four spaces, meaning every combat is potentially deadly.
In a fine August 2020 YouTube video, reviewer Dave Thaumavore praised Nibiru: “This is a very well conceived and thought-out world with deep cultural descriptions and wildlife that makes sense in the context. The harsh realities of living on an ancient fission-powered behemoth of a space station are captivating. […] I really appreciated the idea density and originality of [Nibiru]. There’s a lot of novelty packed into 200 pages, and the setting has really stuck with me.”
This Nibiru Bundle presented the entire game line for an unbeatable bargain price: the full-color 207-page Nibiru core rulebook (plus the pay-what-you-want Quickstart Guide and the free character sheet); the 113-page rules expansion Xanadu; and three short Nibiru adventures: Boiling Point, Family Matters, and Foundations. Both the Nibiru corebook and the Xanadu expansion include complete audiobook versions in DRM-free MP3 format.
