Creating Your Tribe

Part of a series about the Tribes of Outlook.

• Tribes
• Creating Your Tribe
• Current Tribes
  • The Mutati
  • The Diamond Tribe
  • The Cartographer Tribe
  • The Seil
  • The Teddybear's Listeners

When you make your character, we’d like you to define the Tribe you come from. We’ve provided some examples here, and if people contact us with ideas for their Tribe which they don’t mind other PCs coming from, we’ll make them available to choose from there as well.

When designing your own Tribe, bear in mind two things; the flavour of the overall setting, and the limits of the system.

Your Tribe will not have access to anything unique, except an advanced AI, a natural feature, or both.

Questions for Defining your Tribe

You can find a wiki framework page for a new tribe here

The following seven question types are what we would like answered for the defining of tribes.

1. Quick Summary: At its core, in 3 short phrases, how would I describe this Tribe?
2. Formation: Who makes up the Tribe? Is it large, or small? Are both strains represented in it?
3. Leadership: How is the Tribe governed? Is there a single leader, or is it rule by democracy? Does one strain prevail? Is an AI involved in leadership decisions?
4. Reputation: How is your Tribe perceived? Are they thought of as warring, or peaceful, extroverted or introverted? This links to everything else, but is very important.
5. Religion: What do members of your Tribe believe in, and how do they worship it? Is there something about the nature of their belief which is different from all the other Tribes?
6. Defining Trait: What makes this group special? This can be quite small (the Mutati) or make a big change to playing from these groups (the Cartographers and the Diamond). Please bear in mind the aforementioned limits when defining this.
7. Aesthetic: Although the idea of “uniform” is long dead, what accessory, or colour, links members of your Tribe?

Limits to Defining Your Tribe

• THE E&D POLICY.
  • Your Tribe cannot show prejudice based on sex, gender, transgender status, sexual or romantic orientation, race, or disability.
  • As a rule of thumb, your Tribe should not discriminate on the grounds of any characteristic which is also the basis of OOC discrimination, but if you are in any doubt as to whether your ideas will violate this policy, feel free to chat to a ref about this.
• As mentioned on the Religion and Spirituality page, no religion is allowed to parody real-world religion, or to mimic it closely enough to be recognisable at a glance.
• They aren’t slavers. They can be rowdy, and have a defined feud, but slavery does not happen in the outlook.
• They can have a feud, and they might be quite willing to raid, but remember that a Tribe that is consistently aggressive will find itself in trouble quickly.
• No mimicking of characteristics from real world ethnically defined Tribes.
• No cannibalism; this is a system decision that cannibalism is not going to be one of the narrative devices we will be playing with.
• They can’t have actual actionable contact with any deity they choose to worship. Religion and spirituality in Outlook is intimate and personal. People are unlikely to believe your claims that you can speak with the Shaper. Obvious exceptions are worshipping natural phenomenons, Advanced AIs and similar tangible features of the world. Please speak with refs if this is confusing and you are unsure.
• Although you may define an Advanced AI, with ref approval, and say whether it partially houses or is unhoused, you may not declare that your PC is going to get an Advanced AI housed in their Ka. That’s the type of thing we want your character arc to centre on.

OOC Inspiration and References

Ex nihilo nihil fit

The question of how much OOC culture inspiration you can have in your tribe is best answered with Proceed with caution. It's understandable and inevitable that we inspire ourselves with real world examples. However, you should aim to minimise the potential to break immersion for other players and you should avoid cultural appropriation or denigration.

Thusly, if you do include real world inspirations in your tribe design, you should aim to make them unobtrusive and generic rather than obvious and specific. If you have traits borrowed from real world cultures, aim for them to be incidental rather than defining. For example, it's not okay for the defining unique feature of your tribe to be that all members use Hebrew names. It's arguably permissible that your honour-bound mercenary warrior tribe that venerate Yeekoms as the model of living in the moment to also incidentally use biblical names.

As with everything else, if you are in doubt, please chat to the refs about your ideas, we are there to help.