Numenera

What makes man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

I have ordered the Numenera sourcebook online, with the intent of running a campaign with my old group when I move back to Washington next year. Anyone have any setting-specific suggestions? I've GM'd plenty of D&D and White Wolf games^note Aberrant and Adventure!, not World Of Darkness stuff.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Hmm? What you mean with setting specific suggestions? Like locations for campaigns and such from published material that your group might like?

If you want more recognizably medieval-esque science fantasy, stick to the Steadfast. The Aeon Priests/Order of Truth/Amber Papacy are probably the easiest way to ease players who are used to standard fantasy into the setting. They say they're not a religion, but rather scientists who organize themselves into a religious hierarchy. Nevertheless they've declared a crusade against the Gaians to the north, who believe that the numenera is magic, inhabited by spirits. The more things change, right?

If you're in this for the weirdness factor, you can skip further inland to the Beyond, and Beyond the Beyond (where Torment: Tides of Numenera takes place). That's where you start finding old space elevators and lots of scattered portals to other dimensions, in between the big blank spots on the map which you're free to fill in. Not that the Steadfast doesn't have its own oddities, but it's still organized into certain D&D-esque patterns, and there are clear borders between the various countries.

Shout out to Hidden Naresh (in the Black Riage; a nasty little burg infested with thieves, plagues, and parasites that reminds me of Fighting Fantasy), Nihliesh (in Matheunis, the Cold Desert; a city of mutants who've taken over a citadel whose giant clockwork legs that haven't functioned for thousands of years), the Weal of Baz (on the Divided Seas; a Hidden Elf Village of machine lifeforms, androids, and A.I.s), and Qi (the biggest city in the known world and the headquarters of the Order of Truth). Read up on the abkyos, jiraskar, margr, philethis, and seskii for some of the more iconic creatures/monsters in the setting, along with the varjellen for one of the more common visitant (alien) races, and the hideous, transfiguring nanite cloud known as the Iron Wind for a specifically Numenera-ish environmental hazard.

Those are the ones that stuck with me— YMMV, and all that. Hope it helps!

edited 15th Feb '18 8:53:09 PM by Unsung

I do have the all setting books(corebook, Ninth World Guide, Into the Deep/Outside/Night and Torment's explorer guide too) if you want to know about some of them specifically.

I don't have the book yet (damn you, Amazon shipping!) so I meant more along the lines of which parts of the rules should I read closer, pitfalls to warn players about, etc.

Thanks; I have played Tides^note and the campaign idea I have is based on a thought I had post-ending so I think I had a good handle on the areas covered there. It does sounds like there's a setting for every group; some of my gaming buddies would probably fit right in to Naresh.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Ah, if you want to run the game in Beyond or Beyond the beyond, getting Torment's explorers guide(which is setting guide on areas covered by the Tides of Numenera) and Ninth's world guide book, those are helpful.

Rules wise, Cypher system is uber simple. Like, its basically just "say what you want to do, gm decides how difficult it is and you roll d20 to see if you succeed". There aren't really rule pitfalls that I can think of you should know to enjoy the game. Thing to be aware about Numenera the setting is that its normal state is that everything is weird

edited 20th Jan '18 2:36:24 AM by SpookyMask

Finally got my book today. Now, to read!

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Internet on the boat prevents me from checking the main Numenera site for errata, so I toss out this question in hopes of an answer.

Can multiple skills be used on a single roll? The book is rather vague on this point. As an example, you can be Specialized in Onslaught and Trained in Esotaries; if these stack for a nano making an Onslaught attack, that's three levels of difficulty reduced, and IIRC is how Tides does it; but the book says you can only have two levels from skills, which would render useless one of those skill points.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Players can combine trained skills (subject to DM fiat), but you can't reduce difficulty by more than two steps using skills (so if a player has a specialized skill that applies, there's no benefit to adding another one). Don't forget that they can also apply assets (tools and situational bonuses) to reduce the difficulty by up to two steps further, and on top of that they can spent Effort, and higher-tier characters with a high Edge in a given stat (and characters using certain numenera) will effectively be spending levels of Effort for free. Task difficulties are set by the DM, and most things a normal person would even think of trying will start at, say, 5 or lower. And when even a single step modifies a given roll by +/-3, specialization (lowering the target number by 6) is nothing to sneeze at.

I liked Tides for a lot of things, but I do wish they'd found a way to make it closer to the tabletop version mechanically.

edited 31st Jan '18 8:52:10 AM by Unsung

Thanks, that is how I was reading it, but some of the examples in the book are less than perfectly clear. I'm giving Tides a pass, because your char is a nigh-immortal demigod(dess), so them being able to be more skilled than your run-of-the-mill heroic mortal makes a kind of sense.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Alright, I got my copies of the Explorer's Guide and the first Character Options book.

The Explorer's Guide ... the parts on Sagus Cliffs and the Bloom were, to put it simply, whoppingly disappointing. I was looking for more info on the areas, not a straight regurgitation of the game (including all the "hearsay and weird" sideboxes being sidequests straight out of the game). The other areas of the book, however, were freaking awesome. Especially areas like the desert, the black box prison, and the Great Library.

Character Options was interesting, especially the added mutations.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Nice :D If ye get Ninth World Guidebook, I'd love to hear your opinions on that one

I probably will at some point (along with Into The Dark) but I can only spend so much on Amazon per month without utterly destroying my finances.

The most useful thing I think was the combined world map; I had thought, based upon descriptions, that Sagus was on the opposite coast from the Steadfast (east vs west), not along a saltwater inland sea. It's much closer than the game had implied. I had also assumed that the Dracogen in the game and the Dracogen in the Steadfast were two different agents, not the same one using portals to go back and forth.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Don't forget it's a supercontinent. The Sagus Protectorate is still on the other side of the Clock of Kala, and living in an approximation of medieval society, there are people who would might live their whole lives having only heard of a place which can be seen from the top of a nearby hill. A place within a few hours' walk might be in another kingdom or on the other side of a dark wood or mountain or ancient numenera trove (read:dungeon)— and thus about as remote to the average farmhand as the surface of the moon, for all practical purposes. Sagus looks close, but really, the journey on the ground would be more like following the Silk Road to China. Although of course the numenera complicates (and simplifies) everything.

One of the things I don't really like about the Steadfast is that it's supposed to be roughly the size of Europe, but given the fairly small number of countries and their relatively even sizes compared to one another, the region feels a lot smaller, which in turn makes the whole world feel smaller.

edited 17th Feb '18 1:44:17 PM by Unsung

Alright, I thought the measurement of the Steadfast was not that big so ...

• pulls out map and ruler*

Who the fuck made this map? 100 miles measures out to 1 3/8" or 15 mm?? That makes absolutely no sense! Measuring distances is incredibly gorram difficult when you put arbitrary numbers like that in there!

• grumbles*

Ok, roughly from the coast to the Black Riage is 900 miles, and from the southern border of Milave straight north through the Goldem Sanctum is 1200 miles. By that measurement, it's ~1800 miles from the Black Riage to Sagus. That does seem small to us modern people used to airplanes^note 1800 miles is less than the distance from San Diego to Vancouver, but most people in universe would be transiting on foot, riding aneen (or similar creatures), or possibly aboard a zepplin. Those are distances that would take months to travel.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I got my Ninth World Sourcebook yesterday! Pretty good stuff. Admittedly I was hoping for a little more character creation options, but the stuff about various parts of the world was really cool. I think I'm going to set my campaign on the southern-eastern coast, which would be close enough the P Cs may eventually end up near Sagus or Coalo regions, depending on what goes on.

So, if people are willing to give me a little feedback, here's what I envision for the central portion of my campaign: there's a city-state settlement on the coast, called the Synthadel. A sprawling collection of structures surrounded by a wall about 5 miles in diameter, it's ruled by a reclusive varjellan from the central building on a seaside cliff; his Seneschal, a triplet (possibly hive-minded) of mutants who organize the mechanoid guards called "pickers" and enforce the laws. Only two gates actually allow entrance to the Synthadel, but inside the walls are farms^note both open areas, as well as most buildings having rooftop garden-orchards; the farm workers are almost all slaves, various settlements surrounding other buildings^note there's the main merchant hub known as the Stacks, occupying a building that resembles library shelves for giants; the slave pens called the Stables that might have been a livestock building in the previous era, anyone convicted of crimes is sentenced to a fixed time of slavery (months/years up to a decade) enforced by the pickers, who apply and remove control collars; the Floating Docks, which hover at a fixed height of three feet above high tide waves, reachable by pipes/tunnels down through the inside of the cliffs, or slave-powered pulley elevators along the cliff face; and various small villages of researchers and Aeon Priests inside the walls and other buildings. I plan to have my players awaken in some kind of buried facility with no memory of how they got there or who each other are^note rather than the "Connections" in character building, I'm going to ask each one to describe "how you almost died yesterday" and they awake in a set of stasis-pods in a buried underground facility, which they then must escape before it re-floods; given who my expected players are, the shared "what the hell happened to us" will keep a fairly stable party for a while.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Sounds like it has great potential :D For extra weirdness, consider what sort of food they farm in the farm

Also love that "How you almost died?" and then starting in same room with no recollection beginning

edited 9th Mar '18 11:49:46 AM by SpookyMask

Sorry, kind of lost track of the forums in general these past few weeks. I like the concept— kind of reminds me of Dark Sun, apart from being on a coastline. Always a good thing.

I like the idea of garden-orchards on the rooftops, that's something you could really play up. Like, what if there are slave quarters in the upper arches above the city? Maybe a hidden or cloaked area for slaves who've broken their collars, or people on the run from the pickers who've yet to be caught?

The way you describe the rest of the city in terms of villages is kind of interesting. How tall are some of these buildings? It would be interesting to have a medieval city which was divided less by horizontal distance and more by height, which floors of the various towers they occupy. Shades of Gormenghast, or Iain M Banks' Feersum Endjinn.

The collective Waking Up at the Morgue/Stasis Chamber is great as well. The pickers and the circular wall/Closed Circle quality of the setting do give me sort of a dabus/Sigil vibe. I like it.

edited 26th Mar '18 11:37:55 AM by Unsung

I'm thinking that the "main" crop of the rooftop gardens is "barkbread" - basically every couple of days worth, each tree grows about 1" thick of bark that tastes like shortbread. This combined with various fruits and vegetables that of course don't look quite like what we're used to. I'm debating having the fishermen bring in loads of sea kittens.^note Not tuna, but something acquatic that looks feline. Well, it's more of a big plain inside a large wall, so there's a scattered selection of large buildings, and then there's smaller collections of farming huts surrounded by fields. But along with the Stacks, and the Stables, and of course the main building, I was thinking of the Seawall^note various buildings attached to the inside edge of the wall where it extends out over the edge of the cliff, because the cliff has gradually eroded away over the centuries while the wall remains, Guard Tower^note central repository of the pickers and home to the Seneschal, a tower about 100' wide at the base that goes up ~30 stories, gradually narrowing to only about 20' wide at the top floor. The Synthadel isn't the only civilization in the area, but it is the safest, so that'll give my players a chance to explore further out in the world. I'm honestly thinking only about 20k people live inside the walls, and maybe a quarter of those are doing their sentence at hard labor.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

How'd that campaign work out (Sorry for the major Necro!) - I ask as I've just taken part in the humble sale and gotten a TONNE of Numenera books. The new two core books are included in it (Discovery and Destiny, which both contribute to character creation and the core rules)

I'm looking at maybe setting up a small campaign for my other half to play through, maybe a couple of other friends I'm trying to tempt into it.

Love the world but the whole game is quite intimidating (if actually quite simple rules wise)

Well I just got moved in, so still unpacking. Once I find my books, then I have to figure out when and who is available to play, to organize sessions.

Moving sucks, but at least now I'm near so many old gaming buddies.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

One day left on that Humble sale, by the by.

I'm not too familiar with what they might have changed for the new edition, even though I've had the books kicking around for a while now. As good a time as any to get caught up, though.

With luck, first game session will be two weekends from now. Don't expect to do much more than character creation.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I hope I will be able to find more players for Numenera the setting once arcana of the ancients is released :P Because it seems its much easier to find 5e players than people willing to try out cypher system...