The design ethos of Numenera is focused on providing the GM with a strong mechanical structure for making rulings while keeping those mechanics minimal so that the GM is free to make those rulings. That, all by itself, pretty much lands the system right in the middle of my sweet spot. But what really elevates the game to the next level – the thing that really makes it shine – is the GM intrusion mechanic.

Which is why it’s unfortunate that I’ve seen so many GMs struggling to grok the mechanic.

I understand where they’re coming from: I was skeptical about intrusions, too, until I saw them in actual play. They’re an unusual tool and it may break some of the expectations you have as a result of how RPGs typically work, but based on my experience it will be well worth your time to embrace them.

BREAKING THE RULES

For those not already familiar with Numenera, here’s a brief overview of how the mechanic works: The GM announces that they are making an intrusion and hands the player whose PC is the primary target of that intrusion 2 XP. That player can either spend 1 XP they already have to cancel the intrusion (returning the 2 XP to the GM) or they can accept the intrusion, take 1 XP for themselves, and give 1 XP to another player.

The core functionality of the GM intrusion is that it allows you to make things worse than the mechanics of the game would normally suggest. An easy example is having a PC drop their weapon: If you’re playing a game that doesn’t have an explicit fumble mechanic for that, it would be really unusual for a GM to announce that this happens on a failed attack roll. It would be even more unusual for a GM to decide that it happens on a successful attack.

But that’s what the GM intrusion allows you to do: You thought it would be cool for the PC to hit the mammoth-saur with his axe so hard that the axe got stuck in the creature’s thick hide and wrenched out of his hands. In any other game, this would usually cause the players to disconnect from the game world and be wrenched into the metagame because the GM is “breaking the rules”. But the GM intrusion mechanic not only lubricates this interaction (allowing the player to stay focused on the game world), it also includes a feedback mechanic by which the player can say “no, you’ve gone too far, I reject the intrusion”.

A DIGRESSION ON DISSOCIATION

Some of you may now be pointing your finger in horror and crying out, “Dissociated mechanic!” And, yes, that’s true. The mechanics of XP spending in Numenera is very similar to the use of fate/luck points in other systems and they’re tied directly into the intrusion mechanic.

But as I’ve mentioned many times in the past (and, most notably, in the Brief Primer on Dissociated Mechanics), it’s not the end of the world for an RPG to include some dissociated mechanics as long as those mechanics are providing a valuable function.

In the case of GM intrusions, the function of liberating the GM to take huge creative risks while being “protected” by a safety net which allows the players to seamlessly rein them in if they go too far is absurdly valuable.

It should also be noted, for those who are particularly allergic to dissociated mechanics, that GM intrusions are incredibly flexible tools which are used entirely at the GM’s discretion: You can use them all the time, you can use them rarely, or you can use them never. More importantly, the nature of each intrusion is entirely up to you. That means you can make them as associated or dissociated as you want: It’s very trivial, for example, to only use intrusions which a PC could avoid or negate through the actions they take.

USING THE INTRUSION

This ties into something that’s really important to understand about GM intrusions:

The primary purpose of an intrusion is NOT to punish the players.

Intrusions are actually doing the exact opposite of that. In fact, if you’ve ever had the experience of having a really cool idea (like a character’s axe getting stuck in their opponent) and then rejecting it because it’s kind of a bullshit move and it feels unnecessarily punitive to your players… well, GM intrusion greases the wheel for it.

But intrusions aren’t just a method of injecting awesome into your campaign. Of equal importance is their other primary function:

Use GM intrusions to handle outright shortcomings in the rules.

Rather than provide laborious technical detail, Numenera trusts the GM to make specific rulings from generic guidelines. But it also realizes that useful abstractions can frequently give rise to illogical situations when applied to the details of specific situations: GM intrusions provide a useful omnitool for restoring logic.

An example given in the rulebook is a PC who decides to turn his back on an armed opponent in order to raise a ladder into position: According to a strict interpretation of the rules, there’s no reason that the PC can’t do that (he has initiative and so he takes and completes his action before the NPC). The GM, however, recognizes that this doesn’t make sense in the specific context of the action being proposed, so he uses a GM intrusion to give the NPC a free attack on the PC.

Couldn’t the game have included a full suite of mechanics for “attacks of opportunity” or something like that? Sure. But what do you do about the next corner case? And the next one after that? Just keep adding more rules? Pretty soon you end up with a rulebook that looks like Shadowrun 5^th Edition. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but Numenera is giving you a different way of dealing with the problem.

NARRATIVE CONTROL

Because GM intrusions are such a flexible tool, they can also be used as a narrative control mechanic. What’s interesting about their use in this context is that the GM is still the ultimate arbiter of when the intrusions will be used, which means that the GM can run a very traditional game while opening up specific arenas within the game world for negotiation.

An example frequently used in the Numenera rulebook is the appearance of unexpected reinforcements: The GM uses an intrusion and two more chirogs drop out of the leafy canopy above you!

Let’s break down the options here:

1. The GM could decide NOT to have any reinforcements up.
2. The GM could decide that the two chirogs are DEFINITELY there and the players have no say about it.
3. The GM could decide that the two chirogs MIGHT be there and use a GM intrusion to negotiate their arrival with the players.

A purely traditional RPG only offers the first two options (and those options still exist in Numenera); but the intrusion mechanic offers the third.

And this third option – the narrative control option – can really be pushed even further than the rulebook takes it: Any element of the game world that you’re willing to open up to negotiation with your players can be slickly handled through the simple interface of the intrusion. Is their best friend secretly betraying them? Has the king been replaced by a technological doppelganger? Are the rat things actually friendly and misunderstood (instead of vile and evil)?

As these examples also demonstrate, it’s not necessary to think of an intrusion as a singular point in time, either: They can have wide-ranging and irrevocable implications for the future. Or, alternatively, seamlessly retcon the past with terrible revelations.

INTRUSIONS AS UBER-FUMBLES

Perhaps the most common use of the GM intrusion at my table is the “uber-fumble”: Wow, it sucks that you failed that check. Here, lemme make it a little bit worse for you.

Notable examples from my last few sessions include:

• You try to dodge out of the way of the club, but you duck the wrong way. It slams into your chest, lifts your from your feet, and sends you hurtling backwards… directly through the dimensional rift.
• The psychic assault emanating from the cranial slugs burrowing into your skull suddenly forms a horrific neural net that short circuits through your synapses. Take 3 Intellect damage… and the creature has taken spastic control of your limbs. You’ll attack Sheera next round.
• Your razor wing hurtles towards his face, but his hand snaps up with lightning speed, snatches it from the air, and whips it back towards you. Give me a Speed defense check.

I find that these moments provide spikes of intensity and interest that can break up the normal cycle of a combat: Whenever the pace of an encounter seems to be lagging or has settled into a predictable cycle, the use of an intrusion immediately shakes things up. (Using unusual actions and events during a combat encounter is just good advice in general, of course, but intrusions really let you dial the intensity up to 11.)

One of the unique ways you can leverage intrusions to accomplish this, however, is by merely threatening the intrusion before the dice are rolled. This technique is particularly effective if you’re using the Numenera XP cards: As the player prepares for the roll, simply grab two XP cards and hold them up for the table to see. The message is clear: If Heather fails her roll, something extra horrible is going to happen.

This is a form of metagame special effect: By raising the stakes of the roll, you focus the table’s attention and passion on the die roll. This works particularly well in Numenera because the modifiers to a task are all applied to the difficulty: By the time you roll the dice, you know exactly what number needs to appear on the face of the die for success. When the die lands, there is an immediate and explosive release of all the tension built into that roll (one way or the other).

FREQUENCY OF INTRUSIONS

The Numenera core rulebook recommends one GM intrusion per player per session.

If that works for you, great. In practice, though, I’ve found that I’m using them about three times more frequently than that. I don’t really have a specific goal of using X number of intrusions per session, of course. I just use them when it feels right (which usually means whenever I’ve got a good idea).

By the same token, you don’t want to overuse your intrusions, either. Only use an intrusion if you’ve got a really awesome (or really horrible) idea. You want your intrusions to mean something.

The other thing you should be cautious of if you find yourself using lots of intrusions is the accumulation of XP: If your players are frequently spending XP to reroll dice, purchase short-term benefits, and the like you probably won’t run into any problems. If you end up with a table which is consciously hoarding their XP and refuse to spend it on anything except character advancement then plenteous intrusions can make the problem worse.

(In general, though, hoarding XP in Numenera produces a sub-optimal experience in any case. So you should try to figure out how to get your players to use XP in the way the game intends: That might mean that you should be doing a better job of offering awesome short-term benefits to encourage XP expenditures. Or it might just mean talking to your players and making sure they understand the opportunities they’re passing up. Or, as the rulebook suggests as an alternative solution, you could also just impose a ratio of short-to-long-term XP expenditures.)

DON’T NEGATE SUCCESS

The final word of caution I would give about the use of intrusions is this: Don’t negate success.

The rulebook talks about using intrusions in order to force a task check even when the character would normally succeed automatically. In my opinion, such intrusions should be used very sparingly. And what you should never do is take a successful die roll and turn it into a failure. It’s cheap and it’s frustrating.

To be clear: It’s okay to complicate success. Just don’t negate it.

If their sword gets stuck in the mammoth-saur, the mammoth-saur still gets hurt. If they shoot the rope holding up the numenera device creating an interdimensional portal, the device still falls (even if the intrusion reveals that it’s going to fall on top of them). If they succeeded in following the bad guy’s tracks, they still succeed in finding the bad guy (it just turns out he’s laid an ambush for them). And so forth.

I suppose this can probably be broadened into a general principle:

Your players should hate your intrusions, but they should love to hate them.

I mentioned a couple days ago that I’d just returned from Gencon and a few people asked me to talk a little bit about my experiences there. As I mentioned, I ran 5 games and played in 4:

• Numenera: Into the Violet Vale (ran 3 sessions)
• The Strange: Eschatology Code (ran 2 sessions)
• Cthulhu Masters Tournament (played in 2 rounds)
• Eclipse Phase: Detente
• Eclipse Phase: Overrun

This was more intense but considerably less varied than last year, when I played in 6 games (including Call of Cthulhu, Lady Blackbird, Eclipse Phase, Shab–al-Hiri Roach, and Numenera).

The sessions of Numenera and The Strange I ran were actually the very first con games I’ve ever run. And I made a very conscious decision to jump in with both feet by signing up to run two sessions of each. What I wasn’t anticipating was that this would, in turn, lead to a very intense pre-con experience, too: I didn’t receive the scenarios I was running from Monte Cook Games until August 2nd, which meant I had less than two weeks to read them, prep them, and playtest them. (I ended up running two playtest sessions of The Strange: Eschatology Code and one session of Numenera: Into the Violet Vale with various assortments of my local players.) The core rulebook for The Strange was also just released and so I found myself having to run the game without actually having read the core rulebook yet. (I actually still haven’t finished the core rulebook.)

THURSDAY MORNING SURPRISE: I was supposed to launch my Gencon experience by playing in an 8 AM game of Numenera run by an independent GM unassociated with the official MCG events. I haven’t had much of a chance to actually play the game since last Gencon and I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, the GM was a no-show. That meant that I was sitting at a table in the Marriott with four players who were all desperate to try out this awesome game. Meanwhile, right next door at the JW Marriott, I had all my supplies for running Into the Violet Vale.

Well… you can guess what happened next. We headed over to the JW Marriott’s bar, sat in comfy chairs, and I inaugurated my experience of GMing at con twelve hours earlier than I was anticipating. The session, albeit somewhat abbreviated on time, proceeded fabulously. (This was followed by a desperate scramble to print out new character sheets for the scenario so that I would have enough for my official games. Fortunately, the JW Marriott has a FedEx store on the second floor.)

THE STRANGE: Since Gencon last year, Numenera has rapidly dominated my roleplaying, displacing D&D 3.5 as my most played game. I am just as excited about The Strange. I talked more about it over here, but the short version is this: If you’ve dismissed this as just a simple “dimension hopping” game, take the time to give it a second look. It’s doing some really interesting and unqiue stuff within the genre.

I will also say that Eschatology Code, the scenario Bruce Cordell wrote for Gencon, is simply fantastic. It has certain limitations as a scenario for home play (although it would be a strong way to kick off a campaign), but it’s one of the tightest and most effective convention scenarios I’ve had the pleasure to see. No spoilers, but if you get a chance to play it, I recommend seizing the opportunity.

ECLIPSE PHASE: I’m a huge fan of Eclipse Phase and my experiences with their games this year were great. I had some confusion with my schedule (Google Calendars shifted the times of all my events when I switched time zones heading into Indianapolis) and I ended up being an hour late for the first scenario. After apologizing profusely for being an unintentional jackass, however, I settled into a really nifty scenario involving multiple factions fighting over control of one of the Pandora Gates. Midway through the scenario I had a Crowning Moment of Awesome(TM) and actually got a round of applause at the end of the session for it. Woot!

(During the convention I also got two rounds of applause while GMing, one after pulling a back-to-back doubleheader of Numenera and The Strange that lasted until midnight on Friday.

CTHULHU MASTERS TOURNAMENT: This was my second year participating in the Cthulhu Masters Tournament and this year (after fleeing a Hound of Tindalos during the Fall of Saigon in a very memorable scenario where they actually built a helicopter for use to roleplay in) I advanced to the second round. This tournament is really fabulous and the caliber of players it attracts is simply marvelous.

THE LOOT: The two Gencon acquisitions I’m most excited about are Run, Fight, or Die and Level 7: Invasion. (The Strange would also be on the list, but I kickstarted it and received the rulebook a couple weeks earlier.)

Run, Fight, or Die was designed by Richard Launius (of Arkham Horror fame). I first glanced at it many moons ago when it was being kickstarted, but the pitch for the game was basically “King of Tokyo with zombies” and my response to that was, “Meh.” (As it is with pretty much all “it’s X plus zombies!” pitches.) But I slid into a demo game on the con floor and really, really enjoyed the game: The central keep-and-roll mechanic is similar to King of Tokyo, but that’s where the similarity ends: Run, Fight, or Die features immediate punishment for pushing your luck, which adds an extra dynamic of risk to the standard procedure or looking for the most favorable combination. The combinations themselves are actually progressive in interestingly discontinuous ways, which means that you can actually end up shooting past your desired result. Finally, the central conflict of the game — in which hordes of zombies move closer and closer towards you — creates a rich tactical environment in which you have to balance and choose between short-term and long-term consequences.

The whole package is just fabulous. I’ve played it a dozen times since getting home from Gencon and I’m pretty firmly convinced that it’s going to be a huge hit at my Game Night parties.

I haven’t actually had a chance to play Level 7: Invasion yet, so I really can’t pass any kind of judgment or provide any kind of insight about it. But I’m a huge fan of Level 7: Escape and Level 7: Omega Protocol. The progressive storytelling in the series evolving through radically different types of games (Level 7: Escape is a co-op ‘crawler, Level 7: Omega Protocol is a players-vs-masters tactical combat game, and Level 7: Invasion is a geopolitical wargame) is really fascinating to me.

(click for PDF)

The Strange is the new RPG from Monte Cook Games. The basic concept of the game looks something like this:

You may be familiar with the Fermi Paradox, the mysterious paradox which exists between the fact that conditions for intelligent life appear to be plentiful while intelligent life itself appears to be extremely rare. What we’ve discovered is that another scientific mystery — the existence and source of dark energy — is not so much a mystery as it is a smoking gun. We now know several key things about dark energy:

• It forms a vast network which exists as a fractal substrate beneath the surface of reality as we understand it.
• This network is, in fact, artificial. We don’t actually know why it was built, but we can tell that it’s the result of alien technology we can’t even begin to understand. This network is commonly referred to as the Strange.
• The dark energy within this network is drawn to sentient life. When large populations of sentient life are present (like, say, a world with 7 billion people living on it) the concentration of dark energy rises precipitously.
• Large concentrations of dark energy within the network cause the spontaneous creation of alternate realities based on the collective subconscious of the population. These realities are recursive instantiations of the “prime world” and have become referred to as “recursions”.
• Unfortunately, large concentrations of dark energy also attract the attention of beings we refer to as “planetovores”. We refer to them by that name because the first time we encountered one, it attempted to eat the planet.

Other threats to humanity also exist in the Strange or emanate from recursions. For example, one of the many recursions in the shoals of Earth is the world of Ruk. It turns out, however, that Ruk is not a recursion of Earth: It was actually spawned from an alien world and then cast adrift through the Strange. Many people on Ruk, however, don’t like being stuck in Earth’s “gravitational pull” within the Strange and want to escape. Unfortunately, the only way they know of accomplishing that is to blow up the planet.

I’m still processing all the awesome material that’s been coming out for The Strange since the beginning of August, but I’ve also been running demo scenarios for Monte Cook Games. (I’ve run those scenarios for 20+ people now.) As a result, I’ve prepped one of my system cheat sheets for the game. This actually proved relatively simply, since the mechanics of The Strange are virtually identical to the mechanics in Numenera. (Somewhere on the order of 99.99% identical.) Where the system differentiates itself are the character creation mechanics (which use the same structure, but with a completely different set of content) and the incredibly clever mechanics by which you “translate” from one recursion to another. (The short version is that all characters in the system are summarized by their type, descriptor, and focus. For example, you might be a graceful paradox who solves mysteries. When you translate from one recursion to another, the core of your character — your type and your descriptor — remains the same. But as you are translated into the symbolic reality of the recursion, your focus changes. So the graceful paradox who solves mysteries on Earth becomes a graceful paradox who embraces Qephilim ancestry on Ardeyn and a graceful paradox who metamorphosizes on Ruk. It looks simple, but in actual play this simple mechanic — and the clever character sheet that makes implementing it a breeze — is addictively awesome.)

HOW I USE THE CHEAT SHEET

As with my other system cheat sheets, this one is designed to summarize all the rules of the game — from basic resolution to advanced combat options. I’ll make stapled copies of these sheets available to the players and also keep a copy behind my screen for quick reference: Serving as a comprehensive system reference, the sheets cut down on the amount of time required for rulebook references. The organization of information onto the cheat sheets should, hopefully, be intuitive. The actual sequencing of the pages is mostly arbitrary:

Page 1: For The Strange, the difficulty table 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 superfluous quickly. You’ll note that I included examples of GM intrusion: This is unusual for my cheat sheets, but so much of the Cypher System is designed to empower strong, flexible rulings by the GM that providing this kind of idea fodder feels right to me and has proven useful during play.

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. (I’ve been adding another column or so of additional material at the beginning of each subsequent section, slowly adding more tools to the players’ toolboxes.)

Page 3: The extended combat actions and options. The rules for “Trading Damage for Effect” are technically an optional rule, but I’ve found them too invaluable not to include here. (Compared to the draft version of the sheet, you may also notice that I’ve pulled out the guidelines for simplifying multiple enemies and the boss package you can use to buff NPCs. Very useful stuff for the GM that’s buried deep in the rulebook.)

Page 4: A collection of miscellanea. Optional rules are off on the right, but I haven’t used them yet in my own game. (You’ll also note a couple of house rules tucked down in the corner. These are still being playtested, but I think they’re useful.)

Page 5: Everything that you need to know about cyphers and the Strange. The big thing here are the translation mechanics, which you can use to really emphasize the important difference between translating through the recursions of the Strange and the kind of “teleportation” effect that players might be imagining from shows like Sliders or Stargate SG-1.

Page 6: Hazards & Combat modifiers. ‘Nuff said.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. For The Strange this is pretty straightforward. My screen looks like this:

• Page 1: Basic Mechanics (nothing behind it)
• Page 2: Combat (nothing behind it)
• Page 3: Combat Actions (nothing behind it)
• Page 4: Miscellaneous Rules, with The Strange printed on the opposite side and Hazards & Combat Modifiers behind it.

PLAY THE STRANGE

My only regret right now is that I’ve got enough gaming projects on my plate right now that I don’t know when I’ll be able to prep anything for The Strange beyond the introductory scenario and the demo scenario I’ve been running. But, like Numenera before it, this game already has my official “I Had a Ton of Fun Running That” seal of approval. So I recommend grabbing a copy ASAP and digging in.

FURTHER READING

The Art of GM Intrusions
The Strange: Fictional Linkage
The Strange: Violet Spiral Gambit
The Strange: Eschatology Code – Prep Notes
The Strange: Mastodon – Prep Notes

Monte Cook’s Numenera has recently been dominating my gaming table: I’ve run twelve sessions of it for three different groups in the last two months and it seems to be a hit with just about everybody. I’ve posted some cool stuff about it recently, so you may already be aware of this.

What you may not be aware of is that Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell have joined forces to create another game using the same engine: The Strange is a multi-dimensional romp in which your characters will change depending on which world they’re currently inhabiting. It’s generally conjuring up images of Torg, Planescape, The Matrix, and the best parts of Amazing Engine. But it also feels like it’s got its own unique little vibe.

They’re currently running a kickstarter for it and I’m mavening for it pretty hard: They’re currently at $351,130 as I write this, but they’ve got a stretch goal at $360k to release an additional 96-page adventure supplement. Since I’m generally a pretty big fan of adventure designed by Cook and Cordell, that’s something I’d really, really like to see happen.

If you’re interested in just taking a peek, you can drop $25 to get PDF copies of the core rulebook and the Player’s Guide. But the real juice starts at $80 (when you get a copy of the rulebook plus PDFs of all seven books that have become part of the kickstarter at this point). There are a bunch of other pledge levels and add-ons, but the next significant plateau for me is the $200 level (where you get printed copies of all seven books). But I’m also going to take a moment to pimp the Superfan packages, which currently look like this (but will continue to improve as more stretch goals are met):

I just recently upgraded my pledge to the $450 MCG Superfan level: It’s getting me 16-18 titles at an average price significantly lower than retail. But, on top of that, I’m also getting the $120 limited edition, the short story collection, decks of cards, and a plethora of pretty awesome goodies.

I’m very, very close to upgrading my pledge by another $200 to get both Superfan packages. I’m not saying it’s something everybody needs to do, but I’m really looking forward to receiving a steady stream of awesome RPG products for the next few years.