If you have somehow missed Numenera, the insanely successful RPG Kickstarter from designer Monte Cook, you can check it out here.Monte Cook is probably best known for his work on Dungeons and Dragons. Let’s amend that: Monte Cook was previously best known for his work on Dungeons and Dragons, he is now probably best known for his insanely successful Kickstarter Numenera. In case you have missed in, Numenera is the new RPG from Cook that, on the Kickstarter it suggest you might be interested if you enjoy Planescape. Why, yes. Yes I do. (And if you don’t I might be inclined to suggest you are a person of lacking taste.) Numenera is set a billion years in the future, which I always think of as an interesting set up just because you could probably just set it on another world altogether. I digress. The setting itself looks pretty sweet. It’s got medieval level technology, but includes a bunch of other stuff like “genetically altered monstrosities, flesh-warping radiation, creatures transplanted from distant stars, and clouds of out-of-control nanobots”, which are examples given by Cook on the Kickstarter.
Cook says that the system for Numenera will be light, trying to get out of the way of the players and GM as they tell the sort of stories that the setting encourages. The basis for Numenera‘s system will be familiar with anyone that has played a roleplaying game over the past 15 years: the good ol’ d20. Instead of modifying the roll itself, however, skills and other factors lower the difficulty, letting you know if you succeeded or failed immediately (math isn’t a big deal for me, but I know a bunch of people that revile it in RPGs). My favorite part of what I know about Numenera? Players get experience for making new discoveries, for the GM inserting complications into the game and players can award other players for a variety of things. Really, the coolest of these for me is the idea of primarily giving experience for discoveries. Once I heard that, it really got me thinking about how that would change the tone of both how players would play and how GMs would run the game, and how that plays into Numenera‘s world full of big, over-the-top ideas. If you want more about Numenera, Cook has put up a bunch of information on the official web site. The Numenera Kickstarter is only live for a couple of days (it ends on September 17 at 5 p.m.), so you should go do that if you want in. A PDF of each of the core book and players’ handbook is $20.
So, now that you’re done checking out Numenera, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Have you backed it, or are you going to look at it once it is available? Talk about it in the comments! If you’re finished checking out Numenera, why don’t you take a look at the Related Posts below, the Recent Posts in the sidebar, or go to a random post on Futile Position!
This is one of those projects that I wish like hell I could jump on board with. Money is too tight right now to shell out even the twenty bucks for the PDFs, even though I want them so much. Been reading about this game for a while, and have great respect for the ideas he’s bringing into the hobby.
The good news is that, given its success, it shouldn’t be hard to come across and should be well supported once the game actually comes out. I’m pretty excited about the whole thing. I have a deep-seated affection for Planescape, which Cook worked on pretty extensively – I believe – and this certainly uses a lot of the same concepts from what I’ve seen. I’m really interested to see the system in play, but I’m pretty comfortable with the ‘GM doesn’t roll thing’, personally, although I can understand why it might throw other people off.
Monte piqued my interest the minute he left the D&D Next team and stated he was working on something of his own. After Ptolus, I’d basically be into anything he has a hand in setting wise and the Numenera stuff is completely blowing my mind. I already have a decent sized text file of ideas that I keep adding to each day (especially since reading Vance’s Dying Earth stuff again recently).
However, I’m still not completely sold on the system. His examples are helping me understand the mechanics a bit more, but being an engineer, I’m struggling at the inherent subjectiveness and fluidity of difficulty measurements across isolated games and GMs. Maybe it’s time I put down the d20 books…
I knew as soon as Monte said that he was working on an RPG Kickstarter that I would be throwing money at him. I fear I didn’t know just how much. o_O
@Jeremy I always have to be careful with these Kickstarters. I want to help everyone out if I dig what they’re doing, which is part of why I write about so much of the stuff here, but trying to spread limited funds around as much as possible often means fighting my completionist urge to get the level that comes with the most stuff or whatever awesome thing the higher levels offer.