About Numenera

+Monte Cook asked me and a few other former members of the Council of Magisters to chip in with promoting Numenera. The time difference and, uhm, life made it impossible for me to do much, but I did offer to run some games at +Søren Staun Biangslev and +Christina Staun Biangslev 's amazing Ba-Con.

So +Shanna Germain helped out tremendously by sending me preliminary chapters - including some real-life updates during the rehearsal game, thanks, Shanna!

Afterwards, I made a short video with some impressions. Note the champagne glasses - we celebrated being the first people outside the US to play the game.

These are my own remarks, 7 weeks later.

Even from the simple, printed reams of paper I used instead of the real rulebook, and even from the sparse descriptions of the characters, this game is all about allowing GMs to say yes. Not in a over-powered way, but the system is so loose yet coherent that it is one huge enabler for the GM. 

Case in point: The adventure I ran includes a beast with a natural attack of a certain, non-damaging nature. By looking at similar items, it is extremely easy to allow the right character to harvest some of the beast's attack and let him jury-rig a single-use item that replicates the beast's attack.

When I ran Arcana Evolved adventures some years ago, I enjoyed the tokens and detonations (single-use magic items on par with potions) because they let me describe physical manifestations of spells. This does the same, but within the reality of Numenera.

Also, underlying the whole gameplay, there is a vague sense of loss because, well, this is the NINTH world. You sense that so much is gone, and it creates a resonating depth to every encounter that I have never experienced in my 29 years of gaming. It's a really, really good game.