So let's have a decko at some of the stuff I've picked up in recent weeks in the game line.
Numenera, the new Monte Cook RPG.
Set in the Ninth Age, with eight previous world-spanning civilizations dead and buried, nanotech loose in the world and the people living in the period when civilization is just getting restarted. Sounded like a great idea (I'm a sucker for Dying Earth settings and this screams Dying Earth from the description, no?).
The rulebook is lavish. Full color, with lots of maps. Two major geographical areas are fairly well described, the Steadfast, where civilization has a toehold again and The Beyond which is a tad less organized.
Sadly, it all starts to get a bit mundane on further reading.
Firstly, the game system uses three stats to describe characters (which allows for a rather nice damage scheme) and has an inherently un-griddable tactical description model. The GM gets no dice at all, the players are the only people who roll. So they attack, then they defend against fixed values using a D20.
The GM sets a difficulty for any task (including combat) between 1 and 10. Various factors lower or raise this number but it is essentially arbitrary in that the original value is GM selected. The final number is multiplied by three to give the score that the players must equal or beat to succeed.
So not that radical really.
XP get earned the usual way but also for allowing GM intrusions into the story. The GM suggests an intrusion and everybody affected gets to decide if they want to have it. If so, two XP are handed out, one of which must be given to someone else. This whole process makes me cringe to be honest. If I wanted to play FATE I'd play FATE, which does not encumber itself with XP and leveling.
For yes, Numenera is a leveling game.
There are only three (as yet) character classes. This does not worry me because this what what we had in White Box D&D and EPT in the old days. We have Glaives (fighters), Nanos (Magic Users) and Jacks (Rogues). Why this was necessary as opposed to (say) a completely class-free advancement scheme is beyond me.
Perhaps the most disappointing part of the whole thing is that when all is said and done, this is really just another Bronze Age fantasy adventuring game with little of substance to separate it from Tekumel (which has a richer background) or Pathfinder (which has a mature game system and very few misprints).
The background has a lot of potential but there is so little meat on the bones when it comes to the state of Ninth Age civilisation that you could take the setting in almost any direction. Except that there are suppositions built into the published material - and these will also be in any expansions - that hint that the writers have a very definite idea on how it all fits together, they just aren't telling.
The character backgrounds offer three different ways that each character type could become the super post-humans they so obviously are and progress through the tiers (Numeneraspeak for levels). The issue is the overall Bronze Age level of the setting compared to the extremely sophisticated bionics suggested in the character progression.
Now I can get this to work, and do it in a satisfying way for me and,, I think, anyone playing a game. Like I said, I love Dying Earth settings and Empire of the Petal Throne had the same centuries lost tech-as-magic mcguffin and that is my all-time favorite world to adventure in). But when I play in someone else's Numenera game that structure won't be there and that will be a pain in everyone's ass.
Maybe I just take this sort of thing too seriously.
The game was crowdsourced, and it kind of shows because there are some really nifty misprints. One of my favorites is the missing special term in the Glaive and Nano character sections. Each section wants to talk about feats, but also needs to change the name so we aren't playing D&D or Pathfinder, right? Only thing is, the author obviously hadn't decided on a term yet and so just left it blank. The result is a sentence that paraphrases as "as you progress you gain inherent abilities called ." It can all be figured out, but it shows that the proofreading was probably limited to people familiar with the material which is the worst way to approach the task.
And, surprisingly for such a mature worker in the field, the writing is not great. The color story at the start of the book is execrably bad, toothache-inducing. For the second edition this should be erased and a replacement farmed out to an established fantasy author.
I'm actually keen to try this out and will be doing so in a couple of weeks. The setting has lots and lots of potential and the game system could be a winner despite everyone's fear of the unknown (many reviewers of the game were obviously expecting a D&D clone).
I'll post more on this later when I have time and am more read in the material.
Resources:
Numenera Web Site
