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Mint Plays Games: NIbiru

The Pitch

Nibiru is a game about amnesiac characters called Vagabonds, wandering a gigantic space-station habitat in a speculative future, trying to keep their identities a secret even while working to uncover pieces of their memories that they’re slowly starting to recover. It’s a unique game because you create your character backstory as you play, rather than inventing your backstory during character creation.

I find it hard to describe the setting of Nibiru, and I think that’s because there’s so much lore placed inside this game. The locations of the setting are divided into three sections: the Antumbra, The Penumbra, and The Umbra. The Antumbra is located in the centre of the space station, is the most easily habitable, and acts as a series of urban cityscapes, ripe for political intrigue and big social games. The Penumbra is a series of colonies, struggling to maintain control resources, and pushing back against the powerful, well-funded city states of the centre. The Umbra is the barely survivable borders, where gravity pressure, floods and blackouts constantly threaten your life, and small communities try to get by in a setting great for exploration and eerie adventures. Any given group is expected to find ample inspiration in just one of these areas; you certainly aren’t expected to explore the entire breadth of the station (although you can if you want to, of course. It’s your game).

Being a game about amnesiacs, character creation is rather simple. Because you are playing amnesiacs, you don’t have to select a skill list, but rather build your skills alongside your memories; every time you recall a memory, you either give yourself a negative modifier and earn Memory Points, or you spend previously earned Memory Points and give yourself a positive memory. But at the beginning, all you need to do is choose a habitat that carries themes that feel resonant to you, and think about how that might affect your character. However, the Habitats give you the core themes of what you want your character’s story to be about, and I think they’re very special.

The Habitats

There are five Habitats: The Machine, The Leviathan, The Dreadlands, The Dreamlands, and Brighttown. If you are from The Machine, you were some kind of robot or AI in your past life; at some point you gained sentience, and now you’ve awoken in a human body. If you are from The Leviathan, you were originally some kind of animal, driven by instinct; and while your body is different now, those instincts are still there. Dreadlands inhabitants suffer false recollections provided by a parasite called The Nightmare, which turns all of your skills into negative memories, but still shelters and protects you, and gives you plenty of chances to re-try something you’ve rolled poorly on. Dreamlands inhabitants do not collect one set of memories, but rather find themselves reliving periods of various other lives, of people that they meet as they go about the world. And finally, Brighttown players can play versions of themselves, dropped from the mundane world into an alien environment that still occasionally turns up artifacts of the world they came from; pieces of their old life continue to haunt them.

I played a two-shot of Nibiru over the past few months. I had four players for this game, each of whom picked a different habitat to play with. We didn’t have anyone to play the Leviathan habitat, but all of the others were represented. Our first session involved introducing the players to the system, while the characters woke up in a tank of water and found themselves meeting a small settlement that needed help sending aid to their neighbours. Our second session involved a voyage through a series of flooded corridors, dealing with hostile wildlife and suspicious patrols on their way to a hidden settlement built around a strange landmark. From a GM’s perspective, it was a simple delivery mission: get something from point A to point B, and deal with whatever obstacles pop up in front of you.

The Mechanics

This game only uses d4's. In order to do something in Nibiru, a character must make one of three rolls: a regular roll, a contested roll, or a special roll. A regular roll involves rolling 3 dice, adding or subtracting dice according to relevant modifiers, and looking for at least one 4. A result with at least one 4 is a success; a result with no 4’s and at least one 1 is a critical failure. A contested roll involves two players rolling 3 (or more) d4’s and adding them up. The highest total determines who wins out. Finally, a special roll is invoked by the GM whenever the character engages with a special mechanic of the game, either a Stress test, a Habitat mechanic, or some other special rule. Typically a 4 is good and a 1 is bad, but there can be more nuance, depending on what you’re rolling for.

Just from the two-shot, I could tell that Nibiru is more designed for the long haul. Character progression is slow, using two different kinds of experience points, and characters will level up only after filling a journal page with eight memories. Creating these memories is one way to spend these experience points, as well as a way to generate more. This encourages most players to switch between creating positive and negative memories, generating both positive and negative modifiers to any given roll. The biggest advancements happen at the end of the journal page, where characters write something called a Revelation - a special power that uses the second type of XP as a resource, to allow the players do something unique and powerful, such as experience premonitions of the future, or cry black tears that can be used as a poison. Over our two-session adventure, we got nowhere near receiving a Revelation.

That being said, we did play enough of a game to get a good taste of what I think is the most interesting thing about Nibiru - the memories.

The Memories

We began the game with an opening scene of each character pulling themselves from the water, gasping for air, and being confronted with their very first link or memory - something that established each characters’ expected tone. Our Machine character wanted to recall a series of disjointed recollections of the space-ship they were responsible for, and hint at the tragedy that caused them to lose the entire crew. Our Dreadlands character began a series of memories of things going wrong around her home; people arguing and breaking in, threatening those that she held dear. Our Dreamlands character began telling a series of stories about the man he woke up next to; following the confusing tangle of events of his life journeying through the Umbra, and our Brighttown character described to us a memory of something incredibly familiar: a movie theatre, and the ticket that came with them to this new, alien world.

These memories weren’t just establishing character backstory, they were giving the players a chance to build a history collaboratively, and build parts of the world. They also gave the players control over what kind of tone they wanted to set; a Dreadlands player that is consistently creating negative memories is setting a gritty undertone that contrasts the bright, but distant memories of Brighttown. The different themes of the habitats were also clear signposts: a Dreamlands player knows that at some point they might have to help the NPCs they meet reconcile with lost parts of their past, and the decisions they make about what parts to reveal and what parts to keep quiet about says something about who their character is - and how they judge the other people they meet in Nibiru.

The Letdown

My biggest letdown regarding Nibiru is not what it provides, but what it lacks: incentives for the characters to relate and depend on each-other. The players had no reason to turn to each-other while they were wrestling with their own personal emotions: I suppose thematically, they might have had a narrative reason to do so, but there was no mechanical prompt or reward.

It was rather easy to emotionally or physically isolate oneself from the group, working together when only you were in danger, but not sharing their memories or working through their lost paths together. In some games, like Thirsty Sword Lesbians, or Last Fleet, characters are drawn or pushed together, seeing each-other as resources or tools to use, but in either case forcing the characters to confront each-other’s vulnerabilities. Nibiru’s introspection makes for a rich character experience, but in isolation, and as a result it was more like telling four separate stories, than one cohesive one.

The Takeaway

One thing Nibiru reinforces for me is the fact that you don’t really need a backstory for a character in order to find them worth playing. And the themes introduced in Nibiru’s habitats have me thinking about how baking the themes of the game into the character backstory that you do have can tie your players more closely to the setting than otherwise. As amnesiacs, your characters have a solid reason not to know any of the lore, but the fact that the players know where their memories are coming from give them enough agency to hint towards the kind of stories they want to tell. Nibiru is a game about discovery: discovering who you are, and what the world around you is like.

Nibiru is also a game with plenty of space for tragic stories. Your character sheet has space for a number of symptoms that will start to affect your character should they take too much mental damage, and these symptoms can range from hearing voices to experiencing delusions. There's a lot about mental health and memory loss tied up in the mechanics of this game, which means that as a group you need to have a talk about what sorts of themes you're comfortable experiencing, and whether there's any consequences you need to avoid for safety reasons.

I think Nibiru has the potential to create a very emotional experience for your table, but I think that you have to play this game with folks who you can expect to naturally turn to each-other even as they introspect. Mechanically, it's beginner friendly, but when it comes to role-play, it demands a level of vulnerability that I'm not sure every table wants to have.

You can check out my spreadsheet play-kit for Nibiru here.

#mint plays games #tabletop games #indie ttrpgs #nibiru

The third head - And one to be mad, whose ideas will change history

Feat. Eli- high priest of Anu.

Representetive of the academy Babylon.

Have you played Nibiru ?

By Federico E. Sohns

Remember Your Past. Secure Your Future

Nibiru is a Science Fiction Roleplaying Game of Lost Memories. Players take on the role of Vagabonds: amnesiacs lost in a massive space station, home to millions, where stories of drama and struggle are written on a daily basis.

An introduction to the Skyless World, and to human history on the third Flicker. Three fully detailed chapters with sample settlements and maps, for the known regions of Antumbra, Penumbra and Umbra, and featuring a large foldable insert to track your journeys across the Skyless World. The innovative MEMOs System, which builds your character as you unearth and write their lost Memories, rewarding your creativity. Revelations give extra dimensions to your writing. From rewarding you for writing in rhyme or creating expansive story arcs, to concocting poisons made of your worst memories and "storing" moments of your past into objects, Revelations take the MEMOs System to a whole other level. A deep and detailed bestiary of creatures and AIs to populate the Skyless World with, full of interesting details and engaging storyhooks. An origin story for your group to start off right from the get go, serving as an introduction to the weird world of Nibiru. And much more!

Have you played ?

Yes I have played it

No but i've read it

No but I've heard of it

Never heard of it

Voting ended onJul 24, 2025

#ttrpg #tabletop rpg #poll #poll time #2020s #nibiru #argentina