Altering type abilities

 I don't expect characters to be set in stone for the first few sessions regarding type abilities. Given that we have PCs overlapping glaive, nano and jack, getting said tier 1 abilities from the character options book'll be allowed if players want to have their their pcs abilities overlap each other a little less.

(This option is in place mostly because of nano overlap: two of the nano abilities are pretty much de rigeur for PCs, so expanding the palate gives the players potential other decent options. It can be rped as we wish in game if players want to do that; if not, that's fine too.)

Campaign Glossary

Abhuman: Humans who have discarded humanity to embrace more bestial lives; some bands of mutants qualify.

Aeon Priests: An order of scientifically-minded individuals determined to understand the Numenera. They use the trapping of religion to strengthen their power and the Amber Pope is generally accepted to be the force that stops the Steadfast from descending into war.

Angulan Knights: An order of human knights dedicated to removing stains on humanity, such as mutants.

Gaians: humans living somewhere in the far North; the Amber Pope has declared war upon them.

Margr: abhumans who have some aspect of the goat about them but otherwise don’t look alike; the most common abhumans, they live lives of brutal violence and kill each other (and anything else) out of rage, lust, or for the sheer sport of it.

Milvane: the name of the town the PCs are based out of.

Mrrog: six-legged beasts of burden, boasting two tails, pale to dark ridged skin along with eyes on the front and sides of their head, Mrrog generally have one family of 4-6 adults living near a human settlement and offer themselves to adventuresome types as free mounts. They appear to understand some measure of the Truth, though their motives are largely unknown.

Mutant: Humans with obvious differences from the base human form; not all mutants are obvious and there are some who will see manifestations of foci as mutations.  

Palot: Small village of mutants two hours south of Milvane; many of the mutants never leave it owing to the nature of their mutations.

Scarwood: Forest east of the town where the trees grow quickly; when cut down, the wood of the trees is shaped by brute force into curved segments that harden under intense heat, so most of the homes have the same curved-square look to them.

Shin: Unit of currency. More impressive and intricate found objects are worth more than a single shin. Likewise, oddities, cyphers etc. can be traded as well as need be.

Truth: Common/Basic language for the Steadfast, also found in the Beyond to an extent.  

Economics of the Ninth World

The basic unit of currency is called a ‘shin’. Which means, essentially, ‘monies’. What constitutes a shin will vary greatly from nation to nation, and sometimes even from town to town. In most major cities, a ‘shin’ is a coin-like object that has been stamped as being legal tender by the agents of the crown. It, of course, costs a fee to get all ones shins stamped but this too will vary. Most nations will accept the currency of other nations (though at a reduced rate).

Smaller settlements rely mostly on a barter system among locals, with actual shins being reserved for trading with merchants and caravans that come through the town. As such, most businesses will accept a certain amount of shins before asking for other forms of payment, or shins of a specific colour or texture in some places. For example, you may enter one town that only accepts green shins and have to find a) either new shins or b) someone to paint your shins for you.

Unlike shins, oddities and cyphers have value everywhere. Attempts by kingdoms to mark them in the manner of shins have met with resistance and outright failure. To say nothing of trying to mark a cypher and then having it explode as a result. Trade in all these items is common and based on the uniqueness of the item and what the other party needs or desires. Adventurers based in an area can always trade potential items they might find later on if locals have reason to trust them. Artififact trading is common as well, though since no one knows when it is going to shut down it isn’t as brisk as that of cyphers or oddities.

GM Note: I don’t plan to be a stickler for such things in-game. PCs will likely run into towns and places where their shins are essentially worthless but it’s very unlikely to find a place where the locals won’t trade in oddities, cyphers or artifacts. Lastly, there is always the currency of favours and news of what is happening in the wider world.

        Regarding Equipment

Players going ‘hey, wait, I need X for my pc to make sense and can’t afford X’ can be worked out prior to the game with the GM. For example, instead of a compass one can find worldstones (black stones make by Aeon Priests that always point north: essentially lodestones) that are a) cheaper and b) not quite as good.

Numenera PCs: things to keep in mind

Creating a PC is pretty easy all told. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that no two PCs can have the same foci.

Beyond that:

Your Description (Mystical, Strong, etc.) includes with it choices for the reason your PC joins the party.
Your foci includes one link to another PC (either new or ongoing if you've met before).
Your type (glaive, nano, jack) includes 3 basic background options and a roll for  your connection to the rest of the world.

This alone is a pretty solid basis for a PC: the rest, being how it all fits together, why your PC became an adventurer, what you've done beforehand and the like is entirely up to you. The setting outlined in a prior post is designed for short adventures, explorations around, under and sideways to the town of Milvane -- where the PCs go from there is up to everyone.

We'll play a few sessions and then figure out where the game will go: do the PCs thank the mayor and depart, do players make some mix of old/new PCs and set out following some quest or rumour? All this is up for grabs with nothing written down in stone; I plan to have a few intro. adventure hooks and seeds done up, and see where things go from that, with the 'mayor sends PCs on quest(s) hook existing for short adventures at the start.

One advantage of the game is that there is no need for a mix of Glaive, Jack, Nano in a 'party' and the like, so player absence isn't a huge deal. In game it will be explained by skedaddling back to town for supplies/cyphers/?, ditto with other players arriving on site. We'll figure stuff out and finagle things as needed. It should be fun, though gming and rarely rolling dice will take some getting used to.

(I bet he'll get used to it JUST FINE. - Sparkie)

Numenera: Campaign Info.

                     The village of Milvane

Milvane is a large village of some 500 people in the kingdom of Thaemor. The kingdom is not known for its wealth and the long-term goal of Milvane is to supply wealth and for the town to grow into a city. The mayoral family take this quite seriously, seeking to attract adventurers to the town in order to make surrounding areas safer as well as use it as a base of operations with resulting tax breaks and so forth. To the end of growing the town, Milvane is famous – infamous in some cases – for a marked tolerance of mutants and mutations.

The mayor’s office is a hereditary position that the -Oscan family take seriously, each mayor in general running things for 20-30 years barring accident or assassination, and having/adopting 3+ children who decide with the rest of the family which of them will succeed as the next mayor and so forth. -Oscans have been the mayors for well over 300 years and in that time only one has been removed from office via assassination for being unfit; they’ve no desire for that to ever happen again and tend to be quite competent diplomats. All members of the family are required to serve in the town guard in some capacity during their lives, if only in administration or record keeping if they are incapable of other work.

Town guard: The town have a ten-member guard who work to keep the mayor’s peace and the roads clear. As the town has grown, a distinction has been made between the town guard proper and the border patrol, the guards who deal with weird monsters, weird buildings found near the village and so forth. The patrol is purely volunteer and quite dangerous. Members of the mayor’s family cannot be in the border patrol unless the family allows it (owing to a surplus of mayoral candidates or the disposition of said heir).

The Table: Named for a red table tinted with blue in the centre of town that is used for meetings, the Table is a town council (of which the mayor is part) who deal with the general running of the town. Local merchants can be members along with other prominent citizens, amounting to between 5-7 citizens at any one time. There is always at least one guard and at least one mutant on it. In general, those whose professions are considered vital to the town don’t have time to be members, so other members of their family speak in their stead; others who wish to be members with too much zeal tend to be politely declined. The Table have no power to overrule the mayor or guard.

        The table proper is an artifact of unknown provenance and material which appears to be a 7’ round table balanced on a .5 mm base that gets smaller as it goes down into the earth. All attempts to harm or scan it have failed and no one is sure how deep into the earth it goes.

The Justice: An appointed position, the Justice can sometimes be a member of the mayors family and is always a citizen in good standing. Their job is to mete out justice in disputes between citizens, with the authority to use the town guard to enforce this. The Table can overrule the Justice if need be, but this is seldom necessary. Justices serve 3-5 year terms and just deal with civil infractions, the guard dealing with murder, theft and the like.

        Thieves are required to pay back what was stolen; if a life was taken, the thief’s life is often forfeit. Repeat offenders for crimes can stand to lose hands, arms and so forth or be banished from the town. Banishment is also the punishment for excessive disturbance of the peace and the like, naturally.

The current justice is a Glaive named Bozek who was promoted from the town guard two years ago. The mayor is one Zia-Oscan who is noted for her deal in expanding the town to that of a city, as her father did before her. Her plans are generally considered more radical and much may rely on the success of the people she has hired to help benefit the town.

NOTABLE PEOPLE/PLACES

Lady Suskind’s Sanctuary: Lady Suskind is long since dead, but her Sanctuary lives on as the local apothecary and place of healing and rest. The Sanctuary accepts the grievously wounded and seeks to replace lost or ruined limbs with numenera and find ways to help people with crippling mutations. It is currently run by Abed and Odelar, conjoined twins who take quiet pride in helping anyone they can.

The Drill: a drill-shaped triangle, the drill extends up three stories from a base in the ground, is pale green and was clearly once part of some other machine. It has been in the middle of of Milvane as long as the town has stood and is used by the local Aeon Priests as their clave. The clave consists of 1 priest and two apprentices, the latter of which can often be found down the road at the Sanctuary helping the twins. The current priest is a dour woman named Jisell who sees this posting as a waste of her vaunted talents and gifts for deciphering numenera.

The Storehouse: the local store, a large single-room pale blue building whose interior is at least six times as large as the exterior. Exactly what causes this is unknown but the Storehouse consists of six rooms all at different temperatures and is used for storing many goods in the town.- The Aeon Priests have been refused permission to examine it in depth.

The Keep: the headquarters of the Guard/Border Patrol, this is a pale stone building that according to legend simply grew up out of the ground when the last Keep was burned down by a raiding party of abhumans over 200 years ago. The Keep is cool and solid, with cells and storage for all the Guard need. The rumours of alien whispers and laughter in it are mostly just stories to frighten new guards with.

The Dome: A single-room vast dome of a building, the dome has one entrance (which is always open), transparent walls in some places that serve as windows, remains at spring temperatures at all times and is the same colour as the Table, leading some to believe the two are connected. The interior is divided by flexible walls that were once called up out of the floor, though no one living now knows how. The Justice has their office in the hall along with the mayor, the mayor’s family living in the back end of the Hall proper.

The Smithy: Milvane is home to a famous shapesmith named Wohl who can shape armour and weapons from almost any substaine; the shapesmiths are famous for blue glowing metallic arms that they can shape into tools in order to cut, slice and shape various numenera into useful items. His daughter is currently in training to take over when he dies; one of his two sons also inherited the ability, but hasn’t the patience to be a shapesmith and is currently serving in the border patrol.

The Wailing Wall: the current primary defense of the town (after the Guard and the Patrol, naturally), the wall is a spell known to some of the town that, when uttered, calls up the spirits of the dead to defend the town against attack. It is known to only work if truly needed and was a recent discovery some 50-odd years ago. How often it can be used – and if the dead are willing to be used – is a closely guarded secret.

The Chamber: somewhere under the Keep lies a chamber full of active cyphers. The Chamber was found a few years ago and believed to be able to store cyphers without adverse affects: this belief turned out to be wrong as the cyphers in the chamber attained an alien consciousness that has forbidden entrance to their home ever since.

        Weird around Milvane

Thaemor is a poor contry and has no resources to keep more than major roads clear, and certainly none to clear out off ruins and explore the things that lie buried under the Ninth World. As such, Milvane has its share of strangeness to it.

Palot: A small ruin of a settlement consisting of 30-40 people a couple of hours south of Milvane, Palot is home to mutants, many of whom end up in Milvane. No one is sure why the rate of mutation is so high in Palot but those born in the area cannot conceive or produce progeny in any other area for the most part, which is one reason for the relatively steady population. Those with non-viable mutants or ones that are flat-out repulsive are generally not welcomed to Milvane, and some choose to remain in Palot believing it to be their destiny.

The Flowing Field: A farmers field south of the town; the farmer was tilling the earth when he struck some device that had been pushed up near the surface in heavy rains recently. The end result was that the field has turned into a flowing golden liquid that is unbearably hot but has done nothing to leave the bounds of the field. Attempts to harvest of communicate with it have proved futile.

The Glass Lord: a humanoid figure standing some 8’ tall, the Glass Lord is made of green translucent glass and claims these lands are his by right of blood and conquest. He is able to produce weapons of glass and even create servants from his own body but, being glass, they are easy to destroy. Every time he is destroyed, a new glass lord shows up some time later to make the same claim all over again. Destroying the glass lord has become a rite of passage in the Guard and the day after is as a local holiday.

Recent local news

There used to be a small moss-encrusted monolith floating in the air a couple of days south of Milvane. As monoliths go it wasn’t much to speak of: two people could barely fit on top and it was only 20’ tall though it did hover in the sky above the area. Someone, somehow, broke it and the pieces fell to the earth. The village of Dalmen that had been below it was simply gone -- replaced by a forest that grew up from the remains of the mossolith, as the locals had disparagingly dubbed it.

     The forest is full of old-growth trees and seems safe enough though not a single native species has moved into it in the three months it has existed. This is believed to have been behind the town council agreeing with the mayor that if anyone is going to explore Milvane in depth, it should be people with an interest in the town surviving the experience.

The armoured: a creature – 5’ tall, clad in a one-piece solid dark suit with no marks on it – has been seen north of Milvane, wandering about. The suit seems to be a weapon of some kind and defends the post, who appears to be searching for something though speaks in no known language and seems lost. Attempts to examine the armour or claim it have all failed thus far.

The Orgundith: No one has explored it yet (save for two guards who did not return); revealed by the recent rainfall, the Orgundith is a tunnel sloping down north of the town ending in a doorway made of alien material. Perhaps the oddest thing is that once it was revealed everyone in the area knew what it was called and roughly where it was; if this is an invitation or a warning remains to be seen.

On Running Numenera ...

There are a few things I plan to tweak about the setting, as follows:

The game presupposes (or at least strongly hints toward) a division between the 'common people' seeing numenera as magic and the Aeon Priests/PCs on the other side seeing it as science. I plan to make that distinction far less clear with a lot of room for heated debate among all parties. The Aeon Priests may have a good track record in some things, but they also have huge mistakes (as the people of Glavis know to their cost; having all inorganic material in the city destroyed tends to foster a lot of feelings, after all). Likewise, the nanosprites will not be a homogeneous explanation for numenera, nor the datasphere for other things: psychic characters will tap into other sources of energy than those and the notion that there is any one unified datasphere left behind is, at best, a flawed construct.

Further to this, cyphers won't be definitive. Your PC will have a good idea of what the cypher does (if they take the time to examine/test it and so forth) but will have no guarantee that is the items only, or even primary, function. EX: a nano could examine one item and, based on their lore and knowledge, figure out it probably does a certain function since other cyphers will the same symbols/form/shape do that, but until it is used it's difficult to be truly certain that it is going to do what you want; it is not always safe to call a spade a spade when it is really a shovel after all.

But facing down the unknown is what PCs are for. That, and rolling dice.

Stuff that never made it into The Game

Sara

Body: 6 Mind: 5 Soul: 10 HP: 55

ACV: 7 DCV: 7 Init: +4 EP: 75

Love (dynamic, 30) 3 beautiful 10

Unique bane: Apathy (-10): When exposed to the kind of people love cannot reach, her dynamic power is ⅓ as effective at best.

History: Sara’s history is a bit murky, even to her. She has been many places: she has seldom found a place she can’t go if she has to, and likewise few things she cannot do if she must. Love supplies a kind of power few things can stand against in the long run. She has raised up empires, brought down the same, united lovers and shown that (almost) anyone is worthy of loving and being loved. Her last memories are of a world where she was the god-head Itself, Love incarnate brought into the world to heal it.

And she did. She refuses hatred, taught people to understand one another -- because one cannot hate what one understands -- and offered love to any who needed it, without judgement or condition. She staged mass orgies to shatter the walls of shame and guilt that trapped people from being themselves. She saw into the core of people, and her judgement was kind except when it had to be otherwise. For there are always monsters who cannot love, whose existence perverts the very concept. These she destroyed, often with kindness when she could.

Her miracles were few, those many called her a messiah. She never brought back the dead, declaring that life was for the living and death was giving back to the world the breath one had been given, for both life and death are the province of the living and she helped the living move on, find other people to love, find new ways of living once their times of grieving were done. She never offered answers or truth, just a path she made it easy to see, and created a way for others to follow after.

Her enemies signed her up for The Game, in the end, because they had no other way of stopping her.