#numenera

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Their spaceships become crop dusters.

Teleporters are now UPS.

Lasers are now heating/sauna

Image © Monte Cook Games

[The Cypher System is Monte Cook's go at making a generic RPG ruleset, like GURPS or the d20 System, and Numenera is my favorite of the settings for it. The setting is the Ninth World, which is Earth. A billion years from now. It's the Ninth because eight previous globe spanning civilizations have come and gone, leaving the vaguely medieval era civilization that the PCs come from. And with a billion years of magitech (the titular Numenera), interactions with creatures from other planets and other dimensions, natural and artificial evolution, stuff's gotten weird.

And for the purposes of this blog and my interests, there are three full hardcover bestiaries and all of them rule. I currently have a table set up with no fewer than 240 monsters from the Numenera setting on it. And am going to be pulling from that, at least once a week, until I get bored. Get ready for an invasion from the Ninth World.

I started with the odlark for a couple reasons. For one thing, it's one of the cover monsters of the original Ninth World Bestiary. For another, it's delightfully strange. D&D is full of psychic aberrations, but almost all of them are imperialist slavers of one type or another. How about some giant caterpillar monsters that just want to talk and make stuff by 3D printing sourdough starter? Like Numenera in general, it's clearly taking inspiration from 50 years of tabletop RPG tropes and putting a New Weird spin on them.]

Odlark CR 8 LN Aberration This creature resembles a caterpillar the size of a horse, with two dozen small limbs along its length. Its is wearing a translucent organic cowl or helmet over its large pink head, but its large eyes with horizontal pupils and wide mouth are both visible. The smell of ale hangs over its gear.

Odlarks are strange alien creatures that are more interested in discussion and exploration than violence. Their technology is centered around “grup”, an organic material produced by specialized nanites. Each odlark has a prized grup vat, which it uses to produce food, gear and construction material. In order to “learn” how to make an item, a grup vat needs to be either fed multiple examples of an item, which are broken down and analyzed, or be injected with a small amount of grup from a vat that already can make that item. Anything produced from a grup vat is translucent, has a slightly melted appearance, and emits an aroma of ale. Odlarks are happy to trade their grup-made items with other creatures, especially in order to obtain magic items.

Most odlarks would rather talk than fight, but they are skilled at defending themselves. The strong jaws of an odlark can inflict a nasty bite, but odlarks consider biting other sapient life to be gauche. Instead, they use weapons, particularly those that double as tools such as axes and hammers. They wield these not with their parapods, which are better suited to climbing than fine manipulation, but with telekinesis. They can also hone their telekinetic fields into bolts of deadly force or assault the minds of their foes. An odlark will typically flee before fighting to the death, unless it is defending its home or its grup vat.

Odlarks know that their strange appearance causes alarm in many humanoid creatures, and tend towards caution around strangers for fear that they will react violently. That said, a friendship made with an odlark can be a friendship for life, and odlarks live a long time (two to three hundred years on average). Odlarks are philosophical in outlook and tend to aggregate with others who share their particular philosophy, odlark or not. Odlarks love a spirited debate, and most have strong opinions on history, myth and religion, politics and magical theory. They are inveterate explorers, and use their psychic powers to fly to out of the way places and survive hostile conditions.

Numenera is a far-future sci-fi/fantasy tabletop game published by Monte Cook Games about a medieval-esque society that regards the technological remnants of a past Age like magic. We figured our only real option for a player character who made any sense is a genetically-altered cat, or as we like to call it, Built Different.

By Monte Cook

In the distant, distant future (approx. 1 billion years), the Earth is littered with the ruins of ancient technology from fallen empires that might as well be magic.

I love that Numenera has two dozen wild explanations for why your character has superpowers and they range from "cybernetic implantation" to "alien abduction" to "nanotech" to "an alien virus rebuilt my body"

But then one of them is just "Drugs"