Numenera Mini Campaign

Taking a short break from my Age of Worms D&D campaign to run Numenera, a game I’ve wanted to try out ever since I backed the Kickstarter 3 years ago, and I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts here while they are fresh from my latest game last night. 

I ran a short test game over a year ago, with two players, and I ran them through the adventure The Nightmare Switch with pregen characters that I whipped up.  Although the game went well, it really didn’t jazz any of us, so I put the game away for a while and focused on D&D.  Now, I have my D&D game on a brief hiatus and have decided to dust off Numenera and give it another go, this time devoting a few sessions to it rather than just one, allowing the players to build their characters themselves, and creating original adventures (my preferred method of GMing) instead of using a pre-published one, which, frankly, I’m not too crazy about any of the adventures that have been published for Numenera.

Now, before I get into my current mini-campaign, I did want to mention that I’m approaching Numenera a little differently than what Monte Cook Games (MCG) has recommended.  I’m not going to go into the whole background of Numenera, so if anyone reading this is interested in that information you should go to the MCG website, or the various other places you can get that kind of information.  I fell in love with the concept of Numenera back when the Kickstarter launched, but it wasn’t until I started thinking about running games in the setting that I started to develop issues with the concept.  The entire premise of the Numenera setting is that it is Earth one billion years in the future, having been home to eight highly advanced civilizations and now beginning a ninth.  The world is full of super technology left behind by these eight civilizations, and it’s so advanced that it seems like magic to the relatively primitive people of the Ninth World.  I’m good with all of that.  The part that has bugged me is that the coolness of that entire premise is completely lost on a Ninth Worlder.  Any character from the Ninth World would view all of those ancient artifacts as part of their natural world that they have grown up in and although they would be as wondrous to them as, say, the Pyramids of Giza or Macchu Picchu is to us, they would still be, for the most part, somewhat normal.  But that’s not the feeling that I wanted to convey in my campaign.  I wanted the players/characters to feel the same awe that I felt when I realized how far removed from us a billion years is, what changes have occurred to our planet in our time, how it shouldn’t even be able to support life due to the increasing brightness of the sun, etc.  All of that knowledge is only important to us, the people of the 21^st century; a Ninth Worlder couldn’t appreciate any of that, unless perhaps they were Aeon Priests, but I didn’t want to assume all of my players would want to be involved with that organization.  But 21^st century characters would appreciate it, which brings me to how I wanted to start my mini-campaign.

I struggled with how to introduce modern people into the Numenera setting, with everything from a time warp, alien abduction, generation ships returning to earth with people in cryosleep, etc., but none of those felt right to me.  I then started thinking about the current state of the Ninth World, and how there were people that we would recognize as human beings still existing on the planet.  I then recalled some things I’ve read about scientists today making dna “arks” to preserve the dna of people, plants, animals, etc., in the event of a mass extinction.  I took that idea and moved it into the realm of one of the eight highly advanced civilizations that existed in the billion years separating us from the Ninth World and postulated that at least one of those would also want to find a way to preserve life, just in case.  That gave me a connection from the past to the future, but it was still wasn’t right, as a person cloned from a dna bank would not have the life experiences of their dna donor (unless I did an experience download, ala The Matrix, but I didn’t want to do that), so I would basically have a 21^st century human starting their life experiences in the Ninth World and I was back to my original problem.  So I thought that a dna bank was probably too fragile to maintain over the course of the aeons, so how else would an advanced civilization be able to repopulate the planet from the species of the past?  I then latched on to the idea that one of these civilizations probably developed some form of time travel, so instead of preserving dna, why not just pull live specimens directly out of the past, make some upgrades to their biological make-up so that they can survive in the Ninth World, which also allows me to explain how they get their Focus?  This idea clicked for me and also gave me an idea for the first adventure I’d run in Numenera, which I simply called “The Ark.”  As you might imagine, it is about the characters waking up in this highly advanced technological facility, escaping and ending up in the Ninth World, which is exactly what the first adventure was all about.  I wanted to make sure the characters would discover what happened to them, because, again, I wanted the characters to fully appreciate the setting they’ve been dropped into, so at the end of the adventure, when they got to the final chamber of the Ark, the image of an advanced humanoid appears to them and gives some basic information so that the characters know that they are still on earth, that a billion years have passed, that their bodies have been altered to allow them to survive in the world.

After escaping the Ark, which is buried deep in the crust of the planet, or perhaps even in the core, the characters found themselves floating on the Sere Merica, just off the coast of Errid Kaloum.  They had to paddle to the shore, where they were greeted by an old man in robes who was apparently expecting them.  This man, an Aeon Priest, somehow senses when the Ark releases people, so he knew they were coming.  He took them in and gave them the lay of the land and basic information about the world and helped them get jobs as Drit Sifters.  In last night’s game, they had been doing scavenging with the Drit Sifters for a year, saving up enough shins so they could eventually leave Errid Kaloum, and went out to do one more scavenging run.  During their outing they encountered a caravan in the desert led by a member of the Convergence that seemed innocent, but was traveling with a horde of margr which they knew to be dangerous and hostile abhumans, and also a mechanical device that looked like a war machine of some sort.  The woman seemed pleasant enough, wanting to know how to reach a ruined city that housed a place called the Castle of Light.  Now the Aeon Priest that had befriended the PCs had warned them to stay away from the Castle of Light, as no one who had ever gone into those ruins had emerged, so they told her that they didn’t know how to get there and that it was rumored to be cursed.  She laughed that off, and asked them if they could point her to where the Aeon Priest that lives in this region could be found.  The group started to suspect this woman was up to no good, so they lied and said they didn’t know.  She seemed to accept this, made a veiled threat to them, but she led her caravan away without starting a fight.  The Drit Sifters resumed their journey to the nearest village so they could sell off some of their latest haul, when they encountered the Iron Wind, which proceeded to mutate one of their wagons before blowing off in a random direction away from them.  The group continues on to the village and find it burning, the target of a recent attack and when they go to help they learn that the attack was carried out by the Convergence caravan because they had refused to tell them where to find the Castle of Light or the Aeon Priest, which confirmed with the PCs that the woman they spoke with was up to no good.  They helped the survivors and then the following day decided to go to the Aeon Priest’s hut to warn him of the Convergence caravan that was looking for him.  But they arrived too late, as the Aeon Priest was gone any in his place was left a Steel Spider to deal with anyone that might think to look for him.  The PCs defeated that creature and that’s where the session ended.

So that is how I started my Numenera mini-campaign.  I know it goes against the grain, but I had to do this so that I felt comfortable running it.  I’ve had three sessions now, and though we are still trying to get comfortable with this system, it seems to be getting better with each game.  I think I have one game left in this mini-campaign before going back to D&D, but by the end of the next session I will have enough game play to decide if I and my players like the system and campaign enough to return to it once my D&D campaign is over.  I’ll draft another entry here when we’re done to give my final thoughts on things.