IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

HARVESTTIME – PART 3: TEE AND THE GREETING OF OLD FRIENDS

PBeM – November 12th through December 1st, 2007
Harvesttime in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

When Tee said her farewells to Tor and asked him to pick up her dress from the Jade Woman her intention was to return to her room and recuperate the injuries she had suffered. Instead she found herself pacing endlessly, lost in eddying currents of hopeless thought.

She knew that only a scant distance away, the Harvesttime Festival in Narred was getting ready to begin. There would be song and dancing on the green. The community hall would be opened for food and drink. All her kin and friends would be there.

It was more than she could bear – to be so close to her old life and yet unable to touch it.

Unable to stay where she was, but unwilling to lead any danger to her community, she decided to seek counsel from Doraedian. She headed towards Iridithil’s Home. But when she arrived, Doraedian wasn’t there. He had been summoned away to a meeting of the Twelve Commanders and would likely go straight from there to the festival at Narred.

Intensely frustrated, Tee returned to the Ghostly Minstrel. By the time she got there, she’d made her decision: She sat down and quickly wrote out notes for her childhood friends – Aradan, Rissien, and Santiel – saying that they should meet at her house as soon as they could. She paid a messenger to deliver the letters and then hurried over to her house.

By this time she knew that the crowds of the Harvesttime Festival would have already gathered around the communal hall and Moon Lily Pond. So, being as discrete as possible, she circled south around the Herbalists’ Guildhall. Approaching her house from behind, she came up Vadarast Street. The familiar, if somewhat disturbing, scents of Bueles’ potion shop just a few buildings down Iron Street brought back sharp memories as she slipped around the corner of her house and, with a cautious glance, unlocked the door.

She was fairly certain she wasn’t noticed, although she could see the crowd gathering across the Narred green. Her thoughts were naturally distracted as she quickly gathered up the drop-cloths and tried to make the house look a little less deserted – not so much lived in, but at least a little more familiar… a little more welcoming.

Then she sat down to wait. Read more »

For our second scenario structure challenge we’ll be returning to the Star Wars universe, but to a decidedly more obscure example: Star Wars: Underworld – The Yavin Vassilika was a 5-issue mini-series produced by Dark Horse Comics in 2000-01.

Star Wars: Underworld is not a great comic book, being primarily hamstrung by an artist with a delightfully detailed and stylized vision of the Star Wars universe, but whose panel layouts too often topple over the ledge of “creative” and go hurtling into the vast void of “incoherent”. But what the series does have is a really interesting premise that sets up an action-packed narrative.

The basic hook is that three Hutts learn that a long-lost and extremely valuable artifact known as the Yavin Vassilika is rumored to have been found (or, more accurately, located).

The Hutts decide to make a “friendly” wager to see which of them can obtain the Yavin Vassilika first, with each hiring a team of operatives to track it down. A number of familiar faces from the Star Wars movies and Extended Universe are split up across the teams (Han Solo, Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian, Greedo, Bossk, IG-88, etc.), and each team needs to track down Webble, the raving madman who claims to have seen the Yavin Vassilika; backtrack his recent movements to figure out exactly where the Yavin Vassilika is; and then secure the Yavin Vassilika.

Most of the action, of course, is driven from the teams interacting with each other: Spying on other teams, sabotaging their efforts, baiting them into following false leads, openly trying to kill them, and so forth.

The story also utilizes an interesting cluster of sub-agendas. Some of these take the form of specific vendettas between the characters, but also in the more generic form of registered bounties that have been taken out on various characters. It’s under these auspices that Boba Fett enters the fray as an independent party seemingly uninterested in the Yavin Vassilika itself, but intensely interested in the people seeking it. The participants in the “race” are also able to take out (and buy-off) bounties on each other as the opportunities present themselves, creating an ever-shifting tangle of incentives.

The final wrinkle in all this is that, in addition to the Hutts, there’s another major player interested in the Yavin Vassilika: A mysterious figure known only as the “Collector”, but who also has an agent in the field. This agent primarily operates by trying to suborn the agents of the Hutts so that they’ll deliver the artifact to them instead of to their employer.

RACE TO THE PRIZE

The basic structure of Star Wars: Underworld is fairly easy to emulate:

1. Create X number of competing teams/agents. Star Wars: Underworld has, in addition to the PCs, two additional teams directly pursuing the McGuffin and two independent agents pursuing their own agendas (one trying to convince the teams to sell her the McGuffin; the other hired to secretly protect one of the hunters).

This is really the meat of the scenario. Create interesting foes and big personalities for the PCs to compete with and you should have a winner. You can also follow the lead of Star Wars: Underworld here and have the agents in the field working for a variety of employers who have competing agendas for the ultimate use of the prize.

2. Finding the McGuffin is a linear Three Clue Rule scenario, which is super easy to design.

You’ll probably want to make this chain at least four or five links long, giving the PCs plenty of time to jostle for position, conspire with, and be ambushed by the other factions. Making some or all of these links somewhat involved mini-scenarios will make it easier to intensify the stakes by bringing multiple teams into play. (You could also use a node-based structure instead of a linear one to add complexity to the investigation.)

Where this can get a little more interesting is that if you’re not the first group to find a particular clue, you can also just track the team(s) ahead of you and follow them to the next clue. In addition to the PCs investigating other teams, this also provides a motivation for other teams to be investigating them (thus prompting interaction between the teams).

In its most basic form, this is really all you need to run this type of scenario. Run the investigation scenario straight, but then throw in an appearance from a competing team whenever it seems appropriate to make things interesting. Don’t forget that the other factions are also in competition with each other and will have interactions that don’t directly affect the PCs, but may spill out onto them.

ADVANCED OPTIONS

But let’s look at a few advanced options we might use to enhance the experience.

BOUNTIES: As mentioned above, the original Star Wars: Underworld narrative includes a substrate of competition based around various members of the competing teams having bounties on their heads. This provides secondary motivations that can complicate the simple rivalry between the teams and also allows for factions motivated by something completely different from the other factions.

(You might think about other secondary objectives that can bring additional factions into play. Not just because that’s useful for creating additional factions, but because having factions pointed at different things – instead of all being pointed at the same thing – can make it easier for those factions to collide with each other.)

To set up a similar bounty system:

• Set initial bounties on some (but not all) of the participants in the race. (I’d suggest generally including at least one PC on this list.)
• Ideally, have a mechanism which allows PCs and other characters to quickly keep up to date on which characters have active bounties on their heads.
• Figure out how characters (particularly PCs) can place a bounty on another character’s head.
• It can also be useful for there to be a mechanism by which a PC (or other character) can remove the bounty placed on their head. In the Star Wars universe, bonded bounties can literally just be bought out. Another option might be that the death of the person who put the bounty on your head will result in the bounty being removed.

You’ll probably want to make sure that the PCs become aware of the bounty system fairly early in the scenario (or even before the scenario begins).

TIMELINE: Purely improvising the activities of a half dozen other factions in simultaneous operation with the PCs can be a tad difficult and may have unsatisfying results. One way you can prep the progress of the race is by laying out a simple timeline of how quickly the other factions reach various milestones in the scenario.

Like any timeline, of course, you’ll want to:

• Make sure you don’t spend a lot of effort prepping past the point at which the PCs will almost certainly have meaningfully altered the outcome of events. (I’d guess probably no further than the first two or possibly three milestones.)
• Alter and update the timeline as necessary in order to reflect the actions taken by the PCs (and the impact they have on other participants).

For factions that are pursuing goals tangential to the McGuffin search, their timelines might instead feature sequences of escalating interactions with the PCs (and also the other teams).

The benefit of objectively tracking the progress of the other factions is that it creates a hard deadline for the PCs; the resulting pressure will ratchet up the intensity of the scenario for the players. The advantage of prepping a timeline to accomplish this is that it’s relatively simple and straightforward, and also allows you to put some thought into the types of clues their off-screen activities might generate. The disadvantage is that it’s comparatively likely to result in a lot of wasted prep.

PROGRESSIONS: Alternatively, for some factions you may find that prepping a progression has more utility. Progressions are similar to timelines, but rather than pegging events to a specific time, each progression represents a sequence of actions that a particular faction might attempt.

For example, in Star Wars: Underworld the character of Jozzel could be given this progression:

• Offer Faction #1 300,000 to deliver the Vassilika to her in exchange for a fake that can be given to their Hutt patron.
• Attempt to seduce a PC in order to keep tabs on their progress.
• Plant a homing beacon on the ship belonging to Faction #2.
• If she gets the McGuffin, steal the PCs’ ship (or a ship belonging to another faction) and lead them to her secretive patron for the final exchange.

Progressions aren’t locked in stone, of course. In the case of Jozzel, during the “actual play” of our hypothetical gaming session, she ends up getting basically kidnapped by the PCs and dragged along by them for a good long while. Maybe the next time you run the scenario, she ends up getting killed by one of the factions and they leave her body in a location where it will frame the PCs for her murder.

In other words, just like timelines, progressions can easily get disrupted by PCs. But they can also be a little more flexible in practice, since their additional elements can often be brought back into play (often from an unexpected angle) even after the disruption (whereas the events on a timeline tend to be dependent on the previous events of the timeline).

On a similar note, you can also use weak progressions. These are really just a menu of “things this faction will do” without necessarily putting them in a specific sequence. Weak progressions are more difficult to use in practice because it means that you have more “balls in the air” so to speak, but they give a bigger menu for options of “what happens next” during actual play.

CHASE MECHANICS: Another alternative would be to create some form of mechanical structure for resolving the progress of each team towards the goal. Exactly what this would look like would depend on the system you were using to run the scenario, obviously, but the advantage would lie in giving the players a more direct feeling of control over the outcome of the race by giving them something more tangible to interact with and manipulate. The GM, for their part, would similarly be able to actively play each faction’s interactions with the chase mechanics.

RUNNING THE RACE

Upon reflection, running the McGuffin Race is not that dissimilar from using an adversary roster when running a dungeon; the difference is that rather than managing the activities of the adversaries geographically, you’re managing them temporally (and probably, for most GMs, with a healthy dose of dramatic timing).

If you go with the relatively straightforward options, you’ll have:

• The investigation for finding the McGuffin.
• A set of progressions for each faction, detailing their activities.
• Possibly a timeline for when other factions “hit” each milestone on the investigation.

Note that each of these can really be thought of as a separate linear sequence running in parallel with each other. (Even the investigation is just the linear framework which will form the backbone of the actions which the PCs choose to take.) So when you’re running the race, you just need to look at the top item of each of those lists and decide what happens next.

It seems big and complicated and chaotic, but structurally it’s actually easy peasy.

If you’re still struggling with how to make it all work in practice, try imposing a slightly more formal procedure on yourself:

• Each time the PCs finish a scene, take a moment to provisionally frame the next scene. (As described in The Art of Pacing, that means identifying the PCs’ intention, choosing obstacles, and skipping to the next meaningful choice.)
• Before committing to that scene, however, look at your progressions and pick 1-2 things that the other factions do before that scene takes place. (You can even roll 1d3-1 and randomly determine which factions take their next progression actions if you really want to provoke yourself in unexpected directions.)

Some of these actions won’t actually affect the PCs or what the PCs are doing right now. That’s fine. Make a note (mental or otherwise) that they’ve happened and move on to the next scene. The PCs will likely discover the consequences of what’s happened in a later scene.

Other actions will affect the PCs. Those are essentially obstacles standing between them and the scene they wanted to have (or the obstacle you had already anticipated for them): Frame up the new scene and run it. When that scene is finished, let the PCs proceed to their next scene (which may or may not be where they were headed before they got interrupted by the other factions). When that scene is done, repeat the process of seeing what the other factions are doing.

Also: Your progressions aren’t written in stone. As things develop in play, feel free to add (or insert) additional actions into the progressions of the other factions. You might also discover that certain situations will prompt factions to take actions that you didn’t prep onto their progressions. That’s obviously totally fine. Do what feels right and play each faction actively throughout.

BEYOND THE UNDERWORLD

For an additional exercise, consider analyzing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as another example of this scenario type. The basic elements are a little more occluded here (particularly because so many of the factions are pretending to be allies when they’re really antagonists), but it can be a valuable example because the action is more strictly based around Indiana’s POV (which more closely emulates what the typical experience of PCs will be at the table).

Consider, also, Guardians of the Galaxy, which uses a micro-version of the structure to bring the PC party together.

It only lasts for a single scene, really, but you’ve got similar dynamics (including literal bounties as an alternative motivation for factions being involved). A scene like this obviously doesn’t need the full work-up described above, but within its tight confines it can be a useful object lesson in what makes these situations tick: Think about how much less interesting the scene would be if Rocket and Groot were also solely interested in the sphere, thus unifying everyone’s goals instead of having them work at cross-purposes.

Rare and magical artifacts are, obviously, not the only sort of McGuffin that can be targeted in the race which forms the backbone for this sort of scenario. Anything which must be searched for or obtained through a sequence of challenges can have a similar function.

A structure which at first glance seems the same, however, would be multiple teams competing at a single challenge simultaneously. An elaborated example of this would be multiple teams exploring the same dungeon at the same time. Although superficially similar, note how the lack of a series of shared chokepoints makes it much more difficult to bring the various factions into interesting interactions with each other. Despite their similarities, I think you’ll actually need a different structure to make this sort of scenario work smoothly and successfully at the table. (And that might be something we look at in the future.)

Go to Challenge #3

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Harvesttime – Part 2: Dominic and the Guidance of Vehthyl

When Dominic headed across the bridge into the Temple District, he made gentle inquiries into the worship of Vehthyl and discovered four options: First, the Order of the Silver God. Second, the Temple of the Clockwork God. Third, the Temple of the Ebon Hand. And, finally, an itinerant minotaur priest named Shibata.

What I’m going to talk about here isn’t really a preconceived or formal technique. It’s something that I’ve just kind of instinctively done in the past without even really thinking of it as being a distinct “thing” that I’ve been doing. But as I was re-reading the campaign journal and thinking about what I had done as a GM, it kind of jumped out and bit me. I’m not even sure I would have noticed at all if it wasn’t for the close proximity of what I did with Tor and Dominic here.

So this installment of Running the Campaign is probably going to be a little more rough around the edges as I kind of grope my way towards both understanding and articulating the technique here.

To start with, you have a PC who has an interest.

• Tor is interested in becoming a knight.
• Dominic is interested in learning more about Vehthyl.

Dominic’s interest has arisen out of play and is primarily player-driven, and so the response is being created on-the-fly. (Fairly literally in this case, as the bluebooking for this session allowed me to basically roll along with the player’s intentions and develop material in a very reactive way.) Tor’s interest was collaboratively built up in character creation, so I built a good chunk of this material up in parallel with that character creation process and have been waiting to incorporate it into the campaign for several sessions now.

(Although the specific impetus, it should be noted, was still ultimately player-driven even here: Tor’s player had seen the tourney fields on the map of the city and said, “I want to go to there.” I just needed to figure out how I could use the existing material I built in support of this impulse, and vice versa.)

He cantered Blue over to the Board of Ranks, on display just outside of the lists. Each name was noted with heraldry, and he noted that most of the names were accompanied by the three prominent heraldries on display (along with a smattering of others): The cross upon a field of a crimson of the Knights of the Golden Cross; the sword-and-vortex of the Knights of the Pale; and the dawning sun above the martial field of the Order of the Dawn.

The key technique here is that, in response to these PC interests, I haven’t built one thing which would satisfy that interest: There’s not one Church of Vehthyl for Dominic to go ask his questions at. There’s not a single order of knighthood in Ptolus for Tor to pursue.

Instead, I’ve created – or pulled forward – a nest of factions surrounding their area of interest. In the case of this particular session, the factions are actually quite explicitly spelled out (although that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case; there are a lot of different ways to introduce these factions into play), as you can see in the quotes above.

These factions all inherently have overlapping interests and competing agendas regarding those interests because they’re all specifically related to the PCs interests. (Which means that the PC – and presumably their player – will also be inherently vested in those interests.) At this point, I don’t really have a firm idea of how the interactions between these factions are going to play out, but if you’ve got enough people pointing guns at each other (either literally or figuratively) something interesting is probably going to fall out as a result of the PCs bouncing around like ping-pong balls.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

First, it gives the player a meaningful choice in how their character is going to pursue their interest.

What you want to avoid here, of course, is reverting this back to a meaningless choice where, for example, there are eight different Churches of Vehthyl, but it doesn’t matter which one the player chooses. The factions Dominic has to choose between can, on a certain level, be boiled down to:

• The Imperial Church
• A well-established Reformist Church
• A Reformist cult
• A lone, unaffiliated religious teacher

Ignoring all of the other details about those factions, this essential choice about where Dominic will turn first in his desperate need for guidance is going to speak volumes about his faith and about who he is as a person.

Tor, by contrast, isn’t really in need during this session. He’s really just checking out the buffet and seeing what’s available, so you can see that the distinctions between the different orders of knighthood are not as sharply drawn here. That’s partly because the player wasn’t motivated to dig deeper: Tor could’ve taken the opportunity of the tourney to meet more of the knights and learn more about their different missions and ideologies. The fact he didn’t at this particular time is actually a meaningful choice in itself. But even if it wasn’t, that’s fine: The meaningful choices are going to come later for Tor and they are going to have a ton of weight.

Second, the inter-relationships between the factions turns the PC into a billiard ball. The player’s initial choice is their first shot, and the effect they’ll have on the table full of balls is impossible to predict. As a result, the outcome of that choice (and their subsequent choices) will be completely surprising to everyone at the table, including the GM. The campaign will be forever different as a result, and it’s quite likely the campaign world will be, too.

As a result, it’s not just a meaningful choice, it’s a momentous choice.

Players can sense that. They know when their choices have completely and irrevocably shaped what the experience of the campaign is. And they love it. They eat it up.

OTHER THOUGHTS

As you’ll see, Tor’s and Dominic’s factions actually end up overlapping and interacting with each other as the campaign continues. This increases the chaotic unpredictability of your campaign once you set these forces in motion; it also helps to draw the PCs closer together.

This overlap is something that you can specifically design into the factions when you set them up, but you’ll also find it arising organically through play: After all, these factions will all end up having a common connection through the PCs. Eventually, that will bring them into orbit with each other… and send them crashing into each other.

What about wasted prep? I’ve been talking about smart prep lately, and here I seem to have deliberately set up wasted prep: Dominic chooses one of the Vehthyl-related factions to seek advice from and then nothing happens with the others.

Well, first, this stuff usually doesn’t require a heavy initial prep load. Most of the time you can probably get away with one or two paragraphs, and then you can develop more in response to the direction the PC chooses to leap. Prep will also overlap. For example, knowing how the orders of knighthood operate in the Five Empires is going to be meaningful to Tor’s character goals regardless of which order of knighthood he chooses to pursue.

More importantly, the prep you don’t immediately use will almost certainly end up getting reincorporated in other ways down the line. These are, after all, significant factions. The whole point is that they’re deeply involved in your campaign world. And they are, after all, related to each other, so no matter which one the PC chooses, the others are likely not too far away.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

HARVESTTIME – PART 2: DOMINIC AND THE GUIDANCE OF VEHTHYL

PBeM – November 12th through December 1st, 2007
Harvesttime in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

Although he didn’t speak of it to the others, the loss of his memory worried at Dominic’s soul. Given a day in which to pursue his own goals with a freedom of conscience, Dominic quickly ate his own breakfast and then headed towards the Temple District – intent on seeking out the guidance of Vehthyl, the god of mysteries whose strange holy symbol he had found upon awaking at the Ghostly Minstrel. Read more »

A couple days ago, in response to Numenera: The Aldeia Approach, Tomas mentioned that he was “still trying to find the right way to describe Numenera” to new and prospective players. This can be tricky, particularly if your players aren’t familiar with the source material Monte Cook is drawing inspiration from. (If you can only read one thing to grok Numenera, I recommend The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.)

My approach is to try to let the players appreciate how utterly incomprehensible the gulf between our world and the Ninth World is. That fundamental, existential mystery – that the history of the world is beyond human understanding, and yet that history inexorably shapes every facet of the world in which their characters live – is, in my opinion, the heart of what makes Numenera special.

So I structure my introduction to the Ninth World around five bullet points.

FIRST

The Ninth World exists one billion years in the future. Between now and then there have been eight mega-civilizations. These mega-civilizations are literally beyond our understanding. Our life here in the 21^st century isn’t a mega-civilization; it’s barely a precursor to one of them. And the people of the Ninth World know very little about them as well. We know that one of them mastered time travel; another ruled over a galactic empire; another explored a multiverse of different dimensions. We also know that at least one of them wasn’t human and that, in fact, for a time there were no humans on Earth at all. (We also don’t know how or why humans came back.)

SECOND

To get some sense of what the mega-civilizations were like, look at the Clock of Kala. (At this point I’ll point at the map: I printed out a large, poster-size version of the map on vinyl. I either hang it on the wall or roll it out on the table, depending on the venue. But you can just as easily open the book and point.) It’s a massive, perfectly circular plateau several thousand miles across. Vast features of the landscape (on a scale larger than the tallest mountain) are utterly artificial extrusions from the dim recesses of a forgotten prehistory.

THIRD

But the Clock of Kala is nothing but a toy to these mega-civilizations. To give some sense of what they were capable of, consider that the planet Mercury is gone. The people of the Ninth World don’t miss it because they never knew it existed, but at some point in the past the entire planet was plucked from its orbit and they did something with it. What? We don’t know.

FOURTH

But the touch of the mega-civilizations can also be seen at the other end of the scale: Even the dirt beneath our feet is, in fact, artificial – particles of plastic and metal and biotechnical growths which have been eroded by incomprehensible aeons; each bucket of soil filled not with stone arrowheads, but with compact power supplies and the cracked crystals of ancient data storage devices.

FIFTH

Our game begins in the Steadfast. You can think of the Steadfast as a Renaissance civilization. But instead of rediscovering the technology of Ancient Greece and Rome, the Steadfast is rediscovering the technology of these mega-civilizations. This technology is known as numenera, which mechanically take the form of cyphers (items which can generally be used once) and artifacts (items which can be used repeatedly before breaking down). It should be understood that most of the time it can be assumed that people are NOT using these items the way they were originally intended; their original purposes are often completely enigmatical. But we can do the equivalent of finding a CD and using it as a mirror; or finding a cellphone and using its screen as a flashlight.

From here you should be able to pivot to a pertinent discussion of whatever location or other campaign frame you’re planning to use, whether that’s the Wandering Walk or an aldeia or something even more esoteric.

HOW MUCH WEIRD TO PUT IN THE GAME?

The ineffable mystery of the Ninth World’s history, unfortunately, seems to create some barriers in itself. The minute you quantify something or define its precise outline, the mystery ends and that which was engagingly enigmatic instead becomes pedestrian. The rulebook thus frequently emphasizes how important it is that the GM never allow the players to box the setting in like that.

Some have interpreted this advice to mean that the GM should just make everything random and inexplicable (which they naturally find frustrating). But that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how much you figure out, there will remain more that you don’t. This doesn’t render exploration or investigation pointless or without reward, any more than the fact that real world scientists haven’t completely solved the Grand Unified Theory makes the work of Newton or Galileo or Einstein pointless or without value.

There’s a Lovecraftian aspect here: The world (and the past epochs of the mega-civilizations) are fundamentally not comprehensible by mere humanity; and if we were to do what was necessary for us to truly understand them, we would no longer truly be human.

So how much weirdness should you, as the GM, put in the game? Too much and the game turns into random ramblings. Too little, though, and you end up with something pedestrian; something lack the essential spark that makes Numenera special.

The first thing to understand, perhaps, is that the amount of weird will vary by circumstance. There’ll be places with very little weird. And there will be places which are through the looking glass. That internal contrast is essential, actually, because it allows the “weird” to define itself.

With that being said, if you find yourself creating something for Numenera that feels a little too normal – something that you could just as easily find in a game of D&D or Star Wars or vanilla Traveller – take a moment to step back and figure out how to add at least a little dash of the weird. Take at least one aspect of it and think about how you can twist it; how the influence of the numenera could transform it.

The Aldeia Approach is actually a specific example of how you can do this: Basically you take a typical Renaissance village, add one piece of numenera, and ask yourself, “How does that change everything?” As you’re getting up to speed with the Ninth World, that kind of showcasing of a single weird aspect of the setting will take you a long way.

RUNNING WITH NUMENERA

I’m also asked with a surprising frequency why I spend so much time talking about Numenera here on the Alexandrian. As with most of the RPG-related stuff you’ll find posted here, it’s a reflection of what I’m actually running and playing at the table. I’m at 40+ sessions of Numenera and, honestly, my players just keep screaming for more. I literally can’t run it often enough to keep up with the demand.

So as long as we’re discussing how to introduce the game to new players, let me also talk about why, once you start, Numenera is a game you’re going to keep playing for a long time to come:

Simple Prep. Everything in the game basically boils down to assigning it a level. It literally can’t get any easier than that. But the great thing is that the system allows you to selectively do more detailed prep whenever you feel it’s necessary by assigning things additional levels specific to certain tasks or abilities. This sort of fractal complexity, where the game only becomes more mechanically complicated when you think the cost is worth the reward, is incredibly effective. You never feel unnecessarily bogged down by the rules; you also never feel limited by them.

Creative Lubricant. The entire system is designed around some simple mechanisms which encourage the GM and players to take creative chances. GM intrusions for example provide a safety net that allows the GM to take really big chances because the players have a streamlined mechanism for telling the GM that they’ve gone too far. Major and Minor Effects also get the players thinking creatively outside of the box.

Tremendous Support. The Numenera product line is phenomenal. There’s fantastic setting material, a multitude of scenarios, fabulous bestiaries, and even more amazing stuff on the way. (My prep for Numenera often consists of just flipping through one of the bestiaries and saying, “I wonder what will happen when they see one of those things?”)

The game also features a large dynamic range when it comes to PC abilities, which allows the game to shift its focus and content over the course of a campaign (which helps to keep things fresh). And I’m very much expecting this to become even more true with the greater emphasis being placed on PCs getting involved in managing communities, building organizations, and the like in the upcoming second edition of the game.

FURTHER READING
Numenera – System Cheat Sheet
Numenera: Calibrating Your Expectations
The Art of GM Intrusions
The Aldeia Approach
Fractal NPCs