NUNA Update - Advancing to Bronze AND The Origin of Shaman Whisperers

Atelihai!

Labrador Inuit, 1880, Rigolet (McCord collection)

NUNA is officially LIVE today, but with the timezone difference it was open for purchase or download a few hours yesterday. In that short time we are already 20% of the way to Bronze in the DriveThruRPG ranking!

Thanks to all who bought a copy and pushed us further toward the goal! Keep spreading the good word.

Here are the links:

PC Preview

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575125/NUNA-Rpg-Player-Characters-Free-Preview

$1.99 Quickstart

https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/575172/NUNA-Rpg-Quickstart

Origin of the Shaman Whisperer

During the playtests for Nuna, people were very curious about the Shaman Whisperers. Why not just have a powerful Shaman, some asked.

Three reasons.

First, the shaman (angakkuq) of Labrador were essentially wiped out by the arrival of the Moravian missionaries in the late 1700's. In my childhood, everyone around me was either United Church or RC. But at night my lovely nan, the Inuit painter Phyllis Pritchard, would tell me spine-tingling stories of the shaman, who would help you, but at a terrible price. Like Inuit kids all across Canada, my nan told us not to whistle at night, and certainly not when the Northern Lights were visible. Fastforward 30 years and when I began researching the shamanism of Inuit in Purvirnituq (Povungnituk), I encountered many stories of shamans cutting off their own limbs and reattaching them, and other horrific magics. Purvirnituq created the first Inuit artistic collective in Canada, and kept the old stories alive in their soapstone paintings. In the interviews I read from people there, some felt it was better off the shaman were gone, and that they were also angry at being cast aside. This was my inspiration for the NUNA conception of shaman as angry dead trying to control the chosen people they whispered to, and thereby find their way back into the land of the living.

Second, Nuna is a gritty game base but with gonzo powers added on through the presence of New Scientists and Shaman Whisperers. Those powers come with a terrible price - unpredictability and alien source for the New Scientists, and the rancor of the dead Shamans and loss of control to them for the Shaman whisperers. This is a feature of NUNA, and I don't want to replicate the old fantasy game trope of quadratically scaling magic users with (boring) fire & forget magic. I want something horrific yet entrancing, and that is what I have created with NUNA magics.

Last, the RPG image of a power fulshaman using nature magic is a colonial trope that is often used as a foil against the heroic western wizard and his magical tomes. I didn't want to replicate that dynamic, but instead lean into the depiction of power, whether scientific or magical, as also risky and fraught with danger, much like the US army colonial outposts in Labrador, which left DDT polluted dumps and radioactive material that affected Labradorians' health for generations.