Secrets of the Weave: Character Listing

PCs

Ankita, the Mechanical glaive who Fuses Flesh and Steel [Out2lunch]
Kishan, the Learned nano who Rides the Lightning [Tass]
Molly Skips, the  Impulsive Nano  who Exists in Two Places at Once [Thistle]
Rel, the Jack who ?   [Chaos]

NPCs

Bastom: ruler of Jortul, the City of Children

Oburrr: aeon priest who is apparently the entire clave in the town

Phey: Moss-covered 'youth' a shade shorter than Molly. 

Campaign: Secrets of the Weave

Everyone knows of the Wandering Walk, the road that some say crosses the entire world, the road that is littered with pilgrims and travellers. But the Winding Way is something else, a path few know about and fewer approach an understanding of. The way isn't a road, in any strict sense. it is narrow and winding, connecting the claves and aldeia [villages] of the Beyond together, slowly, into a more cohesive whole. Who, or what, is doing this is unknown but the roads formed by the Way are all marked by dead stones, glass like a mirror made of darkness. The paths are too narrow and winding for use by merchants, and few travel between the aledia of the Beyond for reasons of safety or sanity -- but adventurers are slowly finding the Winding Way and making use of it, as are those people brave enough to try and visit their neighbours in a world where every village can be world unto itself, with only the claves of the aeon priests providing a common tongue of nothing else.

Your wanderings have taken you to the edges of Jortul, known as the City of Children for only children can easily traverse the inner city of small buildings and ramps designed long ago for inhabitants smaller than human adults and perhaps devoid of legs. The local ruler is seeking people to take goods to the north, for Jortul trades with most towns -- for free -- in exchange that no one tries to destroy the city and plunder the gardens said to be hidden under it that crate it's bounty of fresh produce. And since no one knows how far the war in the north extents, they've had little luck getting anyone to venture into the deep north along the mountains known as the Black Riage.

Until, perhaps, now ...


For Tass and Lunchie [a reference]

things learned in the last 3-4 years:

• most towns do not have the same wealth of numenera that Milvane had. (Or, if they do, it has been more thoroughly plundered.)
• there are very few stories about Earthlings, or people looking like them. Clearly their other cities are far better at non-involvement. That, or they are spread out further than it is comfortable to think about.
• flashes of genius are common: most places have at least 1-2 working items from the past, and sometimes even someone who knows roughly how to use it still. (The exceptions tend to be places where things went rather south and a lot of people died and/or mutated so the community avoids such things like a plague.)
• the Truth is definitely alive in a way that other languages aren’t. If you speak it to someone in a town, within hours to days everyone in the town knows the language. Sometimes they realize how strange that is, but not that often.
• Clife is known just about everywhere that there are a lot of mutants (if only by the mutants); knowing of him generally affords one a wary respect.
• the long-dead(?) nano known as Iksobar isn’t common knowledge; most aeon priests refuse to admit he/she/it ever existed; Milvane either had a superior library or there was more to Miralb than meets the eye. Or both.  
• Ralc Orfta is active and infamous as a treasure-hunter of numenera as much as for armour that it said to be the highest achievement of some prior world.
• automatons tend to know a little more about the ‘broken weave’ than most, and it seems to be tied into the datasphere somehow. Beyond that, most think it just a term without any real meaning if they think of it in depth at all. 
• If Jisell or her clones are active, you’ve heard nothing at all. The odds are very good they are somewhere in the Beyond but it is a very large expanse of space.
• From time to time you get rumours out of Milvane that have turned the group of you into very strange stories.*

* none about Victa, thankfully.

For the most part, it’s been quiet for the both of you since that time. You’ve acquired a foundling, stayed in some towns for a season at times (depending on travel and needs) but the urge to Do Things is growing, and the world is full of secrets and mysteries you’ve barely plundered, and knowledge and power you can use to become more, or change who you are... and Zia, for all her canny madness, thought far too small indeed.

The world is full of opportunities. So what ones does your PC look for, and to what end? Becoming ‘normal’ again? Wealth? Immortality? Knowing secrets that no one else knows? Protecting people from harm and terrible things beyond understanding? There are answers to be found, and questions to learn and things to discover that could shake the foundations of the world.

Between-Campaign Info

Things you have learned in four years:

The Aeon Priesthood is headquartered in Qi, a vast city of mind-boggling size, it’s population perhaps dwarfing the entirety of Thaemor. But the larger countries that make up the Steadfast are far richer affairs, and with that wealth comes politics and posturing and a war far too the north with an enemy some darkly suspect doesn’t even exist. The Amber Pope is powerful, perhaps even a just man, and there is no denying that the papacy learned many terrible secrets and lore from the amber monolith – Jisell alone was proof of that. But knowledge is a far different thing to wisdom, and the aeon priests found further from the capital, scattered about the beyond and seeking to understand the numenera for its own sake, tend to be true seekers and teachers both.

It is not as if the Steadfast is a terrible place. Far from it, but it is a place of merchants and armies, not one for wanderers who call none of their kingdoms home. The vastness of what the inhabitants of the Steadfast call the Beyond is many things – it is far more dangerous, but there are few kingdoms, many villages that seldom even see brave merchants, let alone seekers such as yourselves. There are caravans to guard, merchants to protect and wars to be had, but they are small things with small goals, the spectacle of the ninth world playing out like children with toys they barely dip into a sandbox.

Zia is, perhaps, mad. But she turned Milvane into far more than town. And the world is awash in information, in secrets, even in power if one has the will and wherewithal to claim it. Few people do. Most towns are small affairs, the inhabitants hungry to choose safety over freedom, but there are always other options, always new routes. And the further you go from the Steadfast, the less worry you have about local rulers claiming prizes or the local clave of aeon priests declaring that all numenera must be brought before them.

Even the Wandering Walk that some claim circles the world is crowded with hungry pilgrims and envying eyes. But further, east of the ocean, are lasts no one in the Steadfast as mapped. Towns, villages, entire kingdoms who may not even know the rest of the world exists. And you are strange, but not too strange for most places. The world is full of knowledge; the question is, what do you desire to use it for?

Numenera Campaign 2

Yonder GM is waiting on the world guide before running the second campaign. Plans thus far:

Travel! The first campaign was a test-run of the system for everyone, hence being based in one area with everything radiating out from that. This campaign will be more a case of travelling along various roads, pathways and exploring parts of the Beyond and even further. Players shall be poked beforehand about what they want in terms of awesome things to find/character growth/skills/learning and the campaign that develops will weave itself around that. Some characters from the first campaign may return, possibly not.


Characters

Some players are playing characters from the last game, others new ones. This campaign is going to allow the foci and descriptors from the main rule book along with the character options book. (Players playing characters they already made who want to rejig them and the like are welcome to chat with me on that; have no problem with it.)

So far the concept is to make the characters all one family (adopted or otherwise). As the ninth world doesn't conform to modern earth players are free to ignore the structures -- for power and otherwise -- in our understanding of families and go nuts making up some other structure, formal or otherwise. Figure out something neat everyone can agree on -- which, ideally, doesn't involve the PCs being slaves to the hive mind of a dicebot patriarch. Because there are limits.


Fallout from the first campaign:

The village of Milvane has become a power unto itself in Thaemor , using technology from long-dead civilizations and alliances with nearby communities to hold off both the kings armies and perhaps fracture the entire kingdom. In less than a year the town went from a nothing town in a minor kingdom to a force to be reckoned with, said to have access to armies all its own and an army of machine-men and mutants at its disposal.

No one agrees on what happened or even why, just that the town showed people how much could be gained if they were willing to take the risks necessary for growth. Since there at least a dozen small towns in the Steadfast have ceased to exist, become craters, or far worse with the Aeon Priests scrambling to put out fires.

It does mean that the Steadfast is a little less safe to travel in and is shaking up some aldeia even in the Beyond as places try and replicate the success of Milvane. Luckily, most people attribute all of that to Zia -- whose PR has been very, very good -- and almost no one is aware of the hired help who did more than the villagers themselves to bring about those changes.


Rules Changes:

PCs will get to pick the cyphers they begin the game with.  I am going to assume that they have done trades, made plans etc. before the first session so their initial complement of one-shot tricks is at least decent. You'll be able to find traders selling some in aldeia, various oddities and cyphers as you explore places and we'll explore the PCs making the cyphers from found things a lot more than the last campaign did. Ideally.


If there are critters in the book you want to show, or certain weird shit you'd like to see happen, poke me about it. The plan is for a longer campaign with plots growing at a slow build over time.


Sessions:

Given schedules, hoping for at least twice a week.

Ze New Year!

So. Plans. Currently Fennec and Kentari are running games.

I (aka Alcar) am just doing one side game at the moment.

The plan, at least for me, is as follows:

The numenera world guide comes out late this month; I'll snag it, read it it and etc. and sometime during February there shall be a new Numenera game offered up. I've hashed out the idea in the channel, but the basic premise will be the game is set a few years after the first one and the game will be about the pcs travelling/exploring rather than being based out of any one location.

As players know the system/setting well now, the character options book shall be free to use for the game, which shall let everyone go nuts with options for new PCs.

The PCs of the previous campaign won't show up, but they will be stories/legends in this game that players get to make and have fun with it. For reference, the town of Milvane has become a city-state within the kingdom of Thaemor ruled by itself, due to alliances with underground-dwelling 'humans', robot allies, energy sources akin to perpetual power for the settlement and so forth. That one town managed to become such a thing is making other towns consider options and shaking the status quo of the Steadfast, sending reverberations out into the Beyond of what can be accomplished with the old world if one comes at it with a vision of the future.


Alternatively, if players aren't up for numenera gain so soon, we can always figure out some other game to run instead. Sparkie just insists the game can't use Amber, of course.