Some quick mechanical background for people unfamiliar with Numenera: In this system, you deal flat damage based on the type of weapon you use. (A light weapon does 2 points of damage; a medium weapon does 4 points of damage; and a heavy weapon does 6 points of damage.) You can increase the amount of damage you inflict by exerting effort or by rolling well on your attack roll. And, finally, you subtract the target’s armor value from the damage inflicted before applying it to their health pool.

This means that the key armor values in Numenera are 2, 4, and 6: At armor 2, you can’t hurt it with a light weapon unless you use effort. At armor 4, you can’t hurt it with a medium weapon unless you use effort. And so forth.

Now, let’s talk about items: Items are assigned a health pool and an armor value. The armor value for an item can be 1 (hard objects), 2 (very hard objects), or 3 (extremely hard objects).

This means that, mechanically speaking, the game is asking the GM to make an assessment: Can you hurt this with a dagger? Can you hurt this with a dagger if you use some effort?

Once you express it in those terms, it becomes pretty easy to see that, objectively speaking, the system is producing really unrealistic results. (If you’re wielding anything larger than a dagger, you’re going to be able to break literally anything in the game world. And you are probably going to be able to break it very quickly and with very little effort.) And from a mechanical standpoint, it would be much more interesting for the GM to have a richer panoply of assessments to trivially choose from.

My recommendation is to set the object armor values at the key armor values indicated above:

The Wandering Walk is a pilgrimage route through the Ninth World of Numenera. It is described, in part, on page 368 of the core rulebook:

No one knows the exact length of the Wander, nor can anyone point to its exact beginning or end. Many people speculate that the Wander is actually a closed circle that encloses the whole of the Ninth World and that some travelers, especially those with enhancements or otherworldly attributes, have been trekking its eternal loop since before recorded time. (…)

Those who follow the Wander for religious, spiritual, or other reasons are called Peregrines or just Birds (though the latter term is usually derogatory). Although their dress varies, true Peregrines bear some mark of the Wander. Typically, the mark is an elaborate and continually growing circular bloodscar along their palm; there is little else to do along the Wander when one is not wandering, and the intricate nature of the scar gives bragging rights to show how long a traveler has survived along the way. Experienced Peregrines carry the scar up the length of their arm or on both palms.

Of course, there are also many who trek the Wander for other kinds of growth — namely the growth of their pockets. These skulkers who come to borrow from the bodies of the fallen often become inadvertent pilgrims themselves, either getting lost along the route or walking it to find a home where they can settle with their newfound spoils. They don’t generally make it far before they fall to the elements or to the hand of another skulker.

And thus the Wander captures all within its eternal length.

As described there, however, I don’t fully grok the Wandering Walk:

1. A pilgrimage suggests a visitation of sacred sites. What are these sites? Who are they sacred to? Why are they sacred?

2. The “route” has neither a beginning nor an end. It would follow logically, therefore, that anyone actually following the route would never revisit the same territory (unless we’re talking about semi-mythological immortals who might have completed a full loop around the entire world). Despite this, the rulebook seems to speak of common peregrines who are familiar with the route and able to avoid pitfalls through experience.

3. The full length of the “route” is unknown. How do peregrines follow it, then? Is it marked in some way?

In order to grok the walk, I decided to both expand it and rewrite chunks of it.

BLOODSCARS

Those traveling the Wandering Walk slowly develop a bloodscar — an elaborate and continually growing circular pattern of crimson that begins on their palms. Experienced peregrines will find that the scar extends up the length of their arms. Every peregrine’s scar is unique and there are some tellers who say that they can read the story of a walker in their scar, although whether there’s any real truth to that is hard to say.

What is certain, however, is that peregrines traveling the Walk can often tell which direction to follow by touching and meditating upon their bloodscar. The path of the bloodscar is, in fact, what determines the route of the Wandering Walk.

LORE OF THE WANDERING WALK

The path of the bloodscar is not always reliable, but various markers have also been left along the various stretches of the Walk.

The true lore of the Wandering Walk, however, comes from the fact that it is walked in both directions along its length. Thus declining peregrines (whose count of stretches descends from one number to the next) often encounter ascending peregrines (whose count of stretches ascends from one number to the next). Rumors, tales, and truths are passed freely back and forth: Thus a descending might learn of a roving band of skullhunters a few days further up the Walk from an ascending peregrine who avoided them himself, but heard the warning from a descending peregrine a year ago who had barely escaped from them.

THE FIFTH STRETCH OF THE WANDERING WALK

As described in the Numenera rulebook (pg. 370), the Fifth Stretch of the Wandering Walk begins at the mouth of Tremble Pass where it passes through the Black Riage and extends east to the Great Slab.

The length of the Fifth Stretch is marked by the Mouth Cairns: Hulking metallic structures which form shallow, circular hollows. These hollows are surrounded by short, round walls built from jaws of dead peregrines and are considered among the few safe places along the Fifth Stretch. Those who enter a bone circle must give some promise of their good intent to the slain lest the dead mouths awake and cast their retribution. Even those who don’t believe in the so-called Slaytongue may find themselves at the end of a weapon if they try to break the cairn-peace.

THE FOURTH STRETCH OF THE WANDERING WALK

The Fourth Stretch of the Walk is not described in the core rulebook and I do not know its ultimate origin (although I have heard both that it leads into the Sea of Secrets and that it passes through the Cloudcrystal Skyfields and into the lands of the Gaians beyond; perhaps there is truth in both).

What I do know is the ending of the Fourth Stretch: It leaves the kingdom of Thaemor and crosses the Wyr River at Goldguard’s Chalice.

Goldguard’s Chalice is named for Goldguard Langdon, who founded the nation of Thaemor, although it clearly predates Goldguard’s reign by untold aeons. The city at the base of the Chalice is often a place of respite for peregrines, who will rest and resupply there before plunging onward into the long, bleak leagues of the Fifth Stretch.

Beyond the Wyr River, the Wandering Walk turns north toward Tremble Pass and enters what is currently known as the “Wyr Delta”.

Unlike the straight and singular path which defines the rest of the Wandering Walk, this section of the Fourth Stretch splits apart into many different paths. Some of these paths follow rivers as they currently exist. Others follow dry riverbeds. Others simply pass through a harsh wilderness, but the hypothesis is that rivers used to run here; it was simply so long ago that any trace of them has been overgrown by the pine forests.

USING THE WANDERING WALK

The reason I, personally, decided to spend time etching into the lore of the Wandering Walk is that it provides a rather nice structure to hang scenario seeds off of. Specifically, I’m using it to launch the “playtesting” sessions of Numenera at my table.

First, establish that the PCs are ascending peregrines nearing the end of the Fourth Stretch of the Wandering Walk. The oddities of the Walk provide a nice dose of weirdness for introducing players to the setting; it also provides a loose bonding mechanism between the PCs that the players can improvise within while creating stories about when and how their characters met and why they’re traveling together. (The loose formality of the Walk also provides a nice mechanism for having players drop in and out of the sessions: If somebody can’t make it this week, it’s because they stayed behind or rushed ahead on their pilgrimage. And, of course, it’s just as easy for them to rejoin the group at a later date.)

Second, I placed the Vortex adventure in the Wyr Delta. Thus the game begins with the PCs leaving Goldguard’s Chalice and, shortly thereafter, they encounter the scenario hook. The village of Jutte is located along one of the small tributaries leading down to the Wyr River. I placed the reappearance of the Narthex at a position 2 days ride north of Tremble Pass.

Third, once Vortex has been completed you can run “The Beale of Boregal” from the core rulebook (pg. 367). This adventure is already designed to lie along the Wandering Walk and takes place immediately on the other side of the Tremble Pass in the first reaches of the Fifth Stretch.

If you want to run additional adventures using this structure, it’s easy enough to seed the scenario hooks along the length of the Fifth Stretch. (And drop pertinent lore into the gathering of descending peregrines the PCs encounter in the Mouth Cairn at the beginning of “Beale”.)

Last year I posted a thought of the day concerning “Disarming Magical Traps”. Although this particular thought of the day was most specifically and immediately prompted by Numenera, it’s also something of a sequel to that earlier thought and equally applicable to magic items in a typical fantasy campaign.

As I mentioned in that earlier thought, I think it’s important that a GM not allow any interaction at the table to become purely mechanical. Partly this is just an aesthetic preference on my part (it keeps things interesting), partly it’s ideological (rules are associated for a reason), and partly it’s because specificity and detail usually leads to creative gameplay.

In Numenera, as the title suggests, a great emphasis is put upon the leftovers of the older (and almost incomprehensible) civilizations that predated the Ninth World: “The devices, the vast machine complexes, the altered landscapes, the changes wrought upon living creatures by ancient energies, the invisible nano-spirits hovering in then air in clouds called the Iron Wind, the information transmitted into the so-called datasphere, and the remnants of visitors from other dimensions and alien planets—they call these things the numenera.”

Particular significance is given to the cyphers: Single use items that function according to forgotten sciences, proliferate throughout the Ninth World, and (from a purely mechanical perspective) serve to constantly vary and refresh the abilities available to PCs.

Before cyphers can be used, however, they have to be identified. Mechanically speaking this is straightforward: The character attempting to identify the cypher attempts an Intellect task with a low difficulty. If they succeed, they now know what the device does and how it can be used.

It can be difficult, however, to visualize or describe how this process of identification takes place: Consider the example of a pill you can swallow which will then allow you to teleport to any location you can clearly visualize with your mind. There’s no self-evident way to “experiment” with the pill short of swallowing it; and if you do that, it would be consumed and gone. So what does the mechanical resolution of the identification task look like in the game world?

Ultimately, it’s a combination of lore and/or limited experimentation. In the case of the teleporter pill, for example, options might include:

• There’s a sigil on the side of the pill. You recognize that as a sign associated with teleportation in other artifacts that you’ve used.
• Or you cross-reference the sigil using a lore book and discover that the armies of Salla Izirul once discovered a cache containing millions of these pills and used them to teleport entire legions behind defensive lines before his supply ran out.
• You scrape a little bit off the side of the pill and feed it to a mouse. The mouse vanishes and reappears next to a piece of cheese on the far side of the room. Guess it’s a teleporter.
• Yes, it’s a pill. But there’s a small metallic nodule attached to one end of it. And, yup, that’s definitely a transdimensional regulator. The only reason you’d be swallowing one of those is if this thing was going to teleport you.
• You’re a nano and you’re using a low-powered Scan to determine the energy signatures locked inside the physical matrix of the “pill”.
• The pill is actually encoded with a psychic memetic mesh. If you can just manipulate the articulated junctures of the pill correctly, it will basically download an instruction manual into your brain.

And so forth. My point is that there’s not a single or precise method that the character can use to identify the object, so you should feel free to get creative.

FAILURE

 Conversely, a failure on the roll might indicate that:

• There is no way to identify this featureless pill: All they can do is swallow it and see what happens.
• They’ve misidentified what the pill does.
• They’ve misidentified how powerful it is.

 PARTIAL SUCCESS

A partial success (perhaps succeeding at a difficulty one-half the required difficulty to fully identify the object) might yield some useful information:

• How to activate the device, but not necessarily what the device will do. (This would obviously be more applicable to cyphers that aren’t self-evidently pills. Although maybe this “pill” only works if it’s a suppository or stuck up your nose or surgically placed under the skin or ground up into the user’s eye.)
• A general sense of what the item does, but not its specific function. (“It has something to do with non-Euclidean travel” instead of specifically indicating that “it will teleport you X distance”.

My point with all this is that you shouldn’t be afraid to discover (or define) features of the world as the world is being explored.

 ARTIFACTS

More powerful technologies of the old world in Numenera are referred to as artifacts. These devices can be used multiple times (although there’s a risk that any given usage will be the object’s last) and it’s far more likely that the PCs are just using one of the many possible utilities the original device had. (The other functions may be inexplicable, irrelevant in this dimensional space, broken, only intermittently available, more likely to deplete the device, or dangerous to the user.)

On page 299 of Numenera you’ll find a really fantastic random chart for determining random quirks for an artifact: I recommend taking it to heart.

The Ninth World of Numenera exists a billion years in the future: Eight civilizations of galactic prowess, capable of restructuring the laws of physics and engaging in mega-construction projects of staggering scope, have risen and fell. The modern inhabitants of Earth live in the shattered ruins of the masterpieces: Vast features of the landscape (on a scale larger than the tallest mountains) are utterly artificial extrusions from the dim recesses of a forgotten prehistory. 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.

One thing the Numenera rulebook doesn’t talk much about, however, is the moon. Mercury is missing (some prior civilization stole it away or pounded it apart), but we know the moon is still up there: Slightly smaller than we’re accustomed to (because it’s a little farther away), but still possessed of its familiar phases. But does it look the same? Earth has been utterly transformed. What do the men and women of the Ninth World see when they look up into the night sky?

The answer I came up with is a little different.

MOON OF GREEN

First, it should be noted that the moon is no longer tidally locked. It rotates.The idea of the “dark side of the moon” is, literally, a thing of the past.

One side of the moon is green and verdant: It has apparently been terraformed and is now covered by vast forests. A huge, silver-blue ocean formed from two overlying circles (possibly ancient craters) lies in the middle of the northern hemisphere. (This ocean is known by a number of names: The Mare Sea, the Spider’s Eyes, the Infinity Brow, the Babe in the Moon, and so forth.) Those possessed with the proper telescopic tools or numenera have observed citadels poking up through the canopy here and there, although it’s unclear if there are any signs of life.

And then, from time to time and on no regular schedule that anyone has been able to ascertain, this happens:

No one truly knows what it means, although scholars have noted that many of the fractal mandala circles have been fading over time. Some mandala constellations appear to have gone out completely.

SHEEN OF SILVER

The other side of the moon is a desert of pale, silver sand.

In other words, it looks much like the moon does today: Was it restored to a “pristine” condition? Never touched by the terraforming? Is the terraforming nothing more than an illusion? Or is the “untouched” side of the moon the true illusion?

The key point is that the light you see the Ninth World by depends on the turning of the moon: There are nights of green and there are nights of silver.

And there are also nights of red.

NIGHT OF RED

Between the green side of the moon and the silver side of the moon, there is a desert of red. Telescopic examination of this portion of the moon reveals vast, ruined cities which are constantly being buried, revealed, and buried again by the shifting lunar winds. This red desert often provides no more than a lurid, backlit glow to the green or silver moons. But upon occasion the lunar phases and rotation will turn right and a violent, crimson scar will hang above the Ninth World.

The red nights, when the world is viewed through a haze of blood, are times of ill luck and foul fortunes.

(click for PDF)

The final version of this sheet has been released! Grab it from over here!

I kickstarted Numenera because I’m fairly certain that Monte Cook’s RPG products have been directly responsible for more hours of high-quality gaming at my table over the past decade and a half than any author. (Or possibly all other authors combined.) But my interest in it was mild: I had a lot of other games I wanted to run and play. I had a lot of other books I needed to read.

But GenCon turned my mild interest in Numenera into a real passion: I saw the book for the first time and it was gorgeous. Then I got lucky and was able to use generic tickets to get into the tiny tournament. In the tournament I got even luckier and my table was both filled with fantastic players and GMed by the talented Shanna Germain (who is also a supporting author for the book). The combination of gorgeous books and amazing gaming experience got me to drop another $120 on the special edition of the game (despite the fact that I had the $60 version of the book that I had kickstarted in the mail). When I got home, I ordered the XP Deck and Cypher Cards. (The former might seem like a gimmick, but it’s so goddamn slick in actual play that they were basically destined to get my money once I saw it in action.)

Long story short, I’m planning to be running Numenera sooner rather than later. And that meant that I needed to prep one of my system cheat sheets for it. Like the other cheat sheets, these are designed to summarize all the rules for the game — from basic action resolution to advanced combat options. I’ve found that it’s a great way to get a grip on a new system and, of course, it’s also a valuable resource at the game table for both the GM and the players. (For more information on the methods I use for prepping these sheets, click here.)

IT’S ALSO A GM SCREEN!

If you’re familiar with my other cheat sheets, you may notice that the Numenera sheets are formatted for landscape printing instead of portrait printing. This is because I’ve designed these sheets to be inserted into a modular, four-panel, landscape-oriented GM screen. (Just like the one backers of the Numenera kickstarter were able to buy as an add-on. And which you can buy here.) I’m not including graphics for the front of the screen, but if you buy the Numenera GM Screen PDF you’ll be totally golden.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). So you won’t find types, descriptors, or focuses here.

You also won’t find most of the optional rules for the game. I may add those later, but not yet. (The exception are the rules for modifying abilities; I suspect they’re going to be too useful not to have handy.)

HOW I USE THEM

I generally keep a copy of my system cheat sheets behind my GM screen for quick reference and I also place a half dozen copies in the center of the table for the players to grab as needed. The information included is meant to be as comprehensive as possible; although rulebooks are also available, my goal is to minimize the amount of time people spend referencing the rulebook: Finding something in 4 pages of cheat sheet is a much faster process than paging through a 400 page rulebook. And, once you’ve found it, processing the streamlined information on the cheat sheet will (hopefully) also be quicker.

THIS IS A FIRST DRAFT. And the sheets have not yet seen the heat of playtest. It’s likely that I’ve forgotten to include something vital, so please let me know if you find yourself constantly wanting a piece of information that the sheets aren’t giving you.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive. The actual sequencing of pages is mostly arbitrary.

Page 1: For Numenera, the difficulty terrible is the heart of everything. Once you understand that, the special rolls, GM intrusion, and the concept of advantage/disadvantage 90% of the rest of the system actually becomes irrelevant. This page is likely to become irrelevant quickly. You’ll note that I included both types of GM intrusion and examples of GM intrusion: This is unusual for my cheat sheets, but so much of Numenera is designed to empower strong, flexible rulings by the GM that providing this kind of idea fodder feels right to me.

Page 2: The core of the combat mechanics. If you’re teaching new players the game, you really only need to walk them through these first two pages.

Page 3: The rest of the game’s mechanics all fit snugly onto one page. The one thing I wish I’d been able to include here are the optional rules for trading damage to achieve specific special effects.

Page 4: This page is necessary to provide a truly comprehensive cheat sheet of the rules as found in the core rulebook, but I’ll admit I’m somewhat baffled by the combat modifiers. The core of the system boils down to: “If something helps you, apply advantage. If it hinders you, apply disadvantage.” In the rulebook, these modifiers are not presented in the form of a table, but instead chew up pages and pages of material which all boils down basically to, “This thing helps you, so it applies advantage.” repeated over and over again with slight variations.

PLAY NUMENERA

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Y’all should grab a copy of Numenera and start playing ASAP. It has the official “I Had a Ton of Fun Playing That” seal of approval.