Today Dan Rabarts (story in vol 1) is sharing the fascinating Maori background behind his And Then contribution.

Dan Rabarts and Tipana Tapu

Tipuna Tapu is a post-apocalyptic adventure story, set in a dieselpunk world where every conceivable monster of myth and legend walks the earth, and where humanity struggles to exist in the shadow of dragons, giants, and kaiju. In a far corner of this world, misty Aotearoa, people crowd into places made tapu, sacred, by events of the deep past, or by the sacredness of bones that protect them and keep the hungering taniwha at bay. Our heroes, or perhaps anti-heroes, search for forgotten bones to sell to those who can afford them, and want to keep themselves safe from the taniwha. Which is all good and well, until things turn against them. Suddenly, the bones are more than just profit and loss. They’re a map to a past that just might save Aotearoa from the hell it has fallen into, but can our heroes change their ways in time?

My iwi is Ngati Porou, and my father maintains our histories, our whakapapa, going back many generations. Over the years, he has been sharing these stories with me, among them the narratives that connect our family to our ancestral lands in the Coromandel. This has included discussions of how the remains of our ancestors were handled and stored, of the tapu, or respect, associated with the bones of the dead, and the sacredness of those places, and those remains. So this story has been brewing for a while, and it was only a matter of time before it came out, mashed up with taniwha and motorbikes and nailguns.