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Tribe 8 Player's Handbook 1st Edition
 
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Tribe 8 Player\'s Handbook 1st Edition
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Tribe 8 Player's Handbook 1st Edition
Publisher: Dream Pod 9
by Nathan P. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/10/2014 17:59:16

If you don't know anything about Dream Pod 9 in general & Tribe 8 in particular, here's some details.

Dream Pod 9 first came to my attention in the mid to late nineties when they published a small unit, tactical Mech wargame called Heavy Gear. Heavy Gear was set on a world classically 'far, far, away'. It was pretty tight & met with enough fan approval that they went ahead & published an RPG to go along with it so all of us could play the operators of the 'Gears' as Mechs in that game were called. The mechanics of the RPG were largely based upon the mechanics of the Tactical game, but unlike other examples of that variety, they actually worked fairly well; thus spawning two more 'game worlds' using essentially the same core mechanics, which they came to call the 'Silhouette System'. Why is this important? Because the 'Silhouette System' predates WotC's 'd20' system by a couple years & unfortunately has not seen much support since the turn of the Century. I say unfortunately because it really is a very nice, robust little system. Not to mention the imagination which went into developing the world of Tribe 8 itself. All of which combines to me really liking just about anything having to do with them. Which brings me to the T8PHB. As is the case with all DriveThruRPG's Silhouette offerings, it is an example of a physical book scanned onto PDFs which qualitatively are going to be inferior to direct PDFs. This is not to say the scans are bad, just not as good as direct PDFs. That said, anything which keeps this game out where new players can discover it & hopefully enjoy and be inspired by it is a good thing in my mind. I can't really say enough good things about this book, it manages to take one of my biggest concerns with introducing new players to the game (how do I introduce ALL the nifty world info without risking the players finding out things they & their characters shouldn't know yet) and at the same time provide at least the basic info of Character Creation and action resolution & put it all into one book. Sadly, it looks as though this & the Second Edition version of the T8PHB were the LAST materials that Dream Pod 9 published for the setting. I'm still not certain WHY they felt it was necessary to publish a Second Edition of this book, but until I pick up (or more likely download) a copy, I''m forced to suspect it had something to do with them publishing a 'Silhouette Core' system, which seems to have been similar to Steve Jackson Games' GURPS system in that it was intended to use the core rules for all the game worlds with 'World Specific' setting books, but again, until I have the opportunity to read them, this is pure speculation on my part.

In summary; if you are interested in an alternative to the 'd20' system variants out there & interested in a kind of 'mind's eye' view of what Canadian Gamers can come up with, you would do a lot worse than to give Tribe 8 a try & if you are giving Tribe 8 a try, you can do a lot worse than to start with this book.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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Tribe 8 Player's Handbook 1st Edition
Publisher: Dream Pod 9
by Jonathan B.
Date Added: 08/09/2004 21:37:58

Truly odd -- a postapocalyptic role-playing game set in Montreal, of all places, in which the player characters are a member of a primitive tribe that lives in the ruins of La Ronde, an amusement park that really exists. Anyone who's lived in Montreal has to play the game for this reason alone. But not just Montrealers (or ex-Montrealers like myself) are the target audience -- the game has a surreal feel that reminds me much more of John Crowley's novel Engine Summer than the typical violent postapocalyptic worlds like Twilight 2000 or Gamma World. The one thing to be cautious of is that like most of Dream Pod 9's stuff, there is a definite story arc to the supplements, which like all story arcs gives structure, but are a bit hard to use if events occur differently in your campaign than what the authors intended.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
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