Year 50,000: The Teyo Nami and the Moon Tiger

Previous history
     Year 0: The Kufu acquire a medicine man
          Year 30,000:  The Ayuté have two toolmakers

(The myth I gave them to prepare for this Event was The Tale of the Tiger and the Toolmaker.)

Since the competition of the toolmakers, the Teyo Nami has been divided into two types of person: the Strong and the Cunning. As each lives, hunts, works and breeds according to that which he does best, these tend to reinforce themselves. There are men and women of each type — the Strong women are the most numerous, followed by the Cunning women, the Cunning men and the Strong men. Due to the effects of a certain blue stone fruit on the local diet, more women are born in the tribe than men, by a factor of about 4:1. Most men in the culture are shared by several women.

The tribe is led ostensibly by a man, the biggest of the Strong men; but he is advised by Strong and Cunning women who are hunters, scouts, and craftswomen. They report to him, and he decides, but they hold the real power (and he serves to settle their arguments). These positions are filled by competition, driving the most skilled warriors and cunning craftsmen to the top of the heap.

They are, however, isolated on the south central island. They have for millennia been a fishing culture, armed with light weapons, and familiar with the ways of the water. Now they are beginning to encounter lands more arid and harsh than those they are accustomed to. The changing climate is not being kind to the island ecosystem, and the shifting climates of the southwest became filled with the rotting carcasses of dead animals that could neither survive, nor adapt, nor escape.

One predator that the Teyo Nami have tried to avoid is the moon tiger, a strange adaptation: each is merely a memory of an animal that had once lived there. A moon tiger appears as a ghostly, stalking feline skeleton, barely visible on the savannah during the day; at night it is a fully living tiger that prowls for spirits to devour; at sunrise and sunset it is visible as a strange overlap between living and dead. Stranger still, the moon tiger is an astral entity and its diet is the silver cord between drifting spirit and living body. When it attacks it does not kill; it merely disconnects the soul. The plains are filled with the wandering spirits of the discorporated; the graves are filled with empty-vessel tribesmen who lost the will to eat, hunt, or sleep.

The current leader is Vazet of the Oaks (Strong M, 32), a very good example of the Strong male: swift to decide, good hunter, powerful, and oddly enough, also good with his tools. He has just come back from an expedition where four of his people were lost to moon tigers.

They are Gantor of the Rushing River (Strong M, 30), Hemmon of the Storm (Cunning M, 32), Leba of the White Sand (Cunning F, 39), and his own wife, Yolani of the Tall Grass (Strong F, 26).

The revered and uncannily strong medicine man, Pasht of First Light (M, 48), believes it is not impossible to put the spirits back into the bodies, and he may have a spell for this. This, however, is not the problem.

Pasht can find spirits on the plains, and he believes he knows which are the four spirits, because the spirits are haunting the place where the four were killed. What he doesn’t know is which spirit is which, and there is no time for research — to stay in the area where a moon tiger prowls is worse than suicide. And since Yolani and Leba are part of the Council of Women, they have rightfully earned their positions — how dare Pasht fiddle with spirit magic in such a way?

The medicine woman, Tora of the Shadow (F, 44), believes she can find a way to enchant a weapon so that it can strike and kill a moon tiger, but again, this bears great risk.

What the people want to know is how they decide which spirit is which, and do they risk random chance? Also, do they try to fight the moon tigers? If they could do so, they could take over the plains to the southeast where none now dare hunt.

 What The Players Decided  

Let me explain at the beginning that I wasn't particularly interested in which spirit ended up which body.  That problem was a problem of limited scope in the grand world view; four people, more or less, wouldn't cripple the Teyo Nami tribe.  What interested me more was how the Players attempted to solve the problem, and what their solution taught the Teyo Nami about the afterlife, about the soul, and — considering they were already well along the path toward either gender equality or female-dominated society — about the battle of the sexes.  The Players would have been well within their rights as holy immortal spirits to simply say, "Those people have passed on, and cannot be saved."  But they didn't.

Dave envisioned some pretty horrific scenarios for getting the spirits back into the correct bodies.  In particular, as this culture seemed to find women more important than men, he felt by implanting spirits randomly into the male bodies first, they could learn whether it was a valuable (female) spirit or an expendable (male) one.  If the male spirit went into a male body, no problem.  If it were a female spirit, they could just kill the body, freeing the spirit.  After all, Dave reasoned, the female ones were the spirits the Teyo Nami would want to save first.

The other Players, quite naturally, were appalled at this.  Rather than flesh out (ha!) Dave's plan to restore the spirits into the bodies, they turned to the immediate problem:  the moon tiger itself.

Armed with the arrowhead created by Tora, Joe the Leader slew the moon tiger, and they commenced to examine the spirits in the vicinity.  As Pasht had indicated, nothing could serve to determine which spirit was which.

At this point, the Players punted.  They had slain the moon tiger.  Putting the spirits back into the bodies, they essentially said, wasn't important enough to worry about.

Results  

The Teyo Nami now had the means to encroach into the moon tiger's hunting grounds.  More importantly, the Players had imparted a sense among their people that even if reduced to a disembodied spirit, once a Councilwoman, always a Councilwoman.  She didn't need to have a body to be revered by the tribe.

The Tale of the Tiger and the Toolmaker

Once the sea was a swamp, and once the swamp was a river, and once the river was a plain.  What the plain was before, no woman can say.  But the People of the Plain, who lived in the company of tigers, fled from the sun and came south.  And as they came, the plains became a river, and the river became a swamp, and the swamp became a sea.

The People of the Plain came to an island, where fish were plentiful, and where water was cold and swift.

One day, Voles the toolmaker, who was only a man, was killed by the biggest tiger in the world.  And his son, Volen, cried out, “How are we to slay this tiger so that it may never slay another?”  And he set to work making a weapon, just as his father before him had done.

But there was another toolmaker in the village, a cunning woman named Feya, and she said, “We have no need to slay tigers.  What we need are weapons to hunt food.”  And she set about making a weapon for catching food.

And the weapons made by Volen were used to hunt the large animals, and the weapons used by Feya were used to hunt small animals.  But Voles said, “Which of our two weapons is best?  For there can be only one toolmaker.”

They could not decide.  So they called upon the Four Wanderers, who visited the village in the course of time, and the Four Wanderers said, “Let she whose is best become the new toolmaker,” and they led the People of the Plain to the river.

And Feya was there, and she slew many fish with her spear.  And Volen was there, and he could catch nothing.  And the Four Wanderers said, “Feya’s weapon is better for catching fish, so she is to make all such weapons from now on.”

But sometimes, Volen’s weapon was used, when tigers came to attack the people.  And that is how it came to pass that the First Challenge happened.

The Kufu Clans

A Timeline of Events in the History of the Kufu Clans

For a full rendering of the game's timeline, start here with the Stone Age, or here for the Bronze Age.

Rounds 1 and 2: The Paleolithic Era
Year Zero:  The Earth Gathering.  The Kufu are encouraged to add a medicine man to their tribe, and take on Tor the Sage of the Pagh.  They return to their ancestral lands with a renewed appreciation for the value of strong medicine.

Year 30,000:  The Ayuté Have Two Toolmakers.  When Noves, toolmaker of the Ayuté, is killed by a tiger, the tribe looks to his son Novan to fill the role of craftsman, though he has not the skill of his father.  There is a challenge from Faya, even younger than he but no less adept at making weapons in her own particular style.  When the two types of weapons are put to the test, the women of the tribe are far more successful catching fish than are the men, and the balance of power in the tribe begins to shift.

The Teyo Nami And The Moon Tiger.  When the moon tiger confronts the people of Teyo Nami, separating their souls and frightening the people, the players are called in to destroy it.  The question of placing the souls back into their rightful bodies, however, they leave up to the tribe.

Note:  the intervening years will be filled in as I have time.  Watch this space!

Round 6:  The Iron Age

Year 105,748:  The Haesonian Dialogue.  As the Conqueror invades Zefar, society is beginning to splinter.  General Drurich is sent to recruit the Haesonian soldiers to the imperial cause — or destroy them if they refuse.