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Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny

Created by Monte Cook Games

Numenera is a game in which player characters explore the ruins of aeons past to gather amazing treasures and help build a new future for a world struggling in darkness. Since the launch of Numenera in 2013, we have delivered well on the first part, but we’ve always wanted to do a more thorough job exploring that second part. That desire has led us to Numenera Discovery and Numenera Destiny. Numenera Discovery will be a book that covers familiar territory; it is basically a revision of the original Numenera corebook. Next summer, we will allow the original corebook to go out of print, and Numenera Discovery will take its place. In Numenera Discovery, you’ll get some revisions to make things clearer and more fun, and to increase the options available to players. Nanos, Jacks, and Glaives will get an overhaul. Many foci and some of the descriptors might see some reworking. You’ll have more options, clearer rules, and perhaps a bit of expansion to the regions of the Steadfast and the Beyond that are covered in the existing corebook. As excited as we are about Numenera Discovery, we may be even more excited about Numenera Destiny. This title will enable characters to truly become a part of the setting—to help shape the future of the Ninth World. The people of the Ninth World are locked in a medieval-like state, a world of struggle and danger and often suffering in the shadow of the prior worlds’ wonders. Numenera Destiny allows you to build adventures and campaigns in which players don’t just explore the wonders of the past—they utilize them to help lift the Ninth World out of darkness. You can make the world a better place. Help a community defend itself from abhumans or the iron wind. Create centers of learning or trade. Innovate, build, and protect. Manage an entire community and help it prosper and grow—or simply create a cool base or vehicle for your adventuring group. Numenera Destiny will allow you to take what you discover and make your mark on history as someone who elevated the Ninth World into the future. Adventuring—exploring the weird and wondrous remnants of the prior worlds—remains, of course, at the core of Numenera play. Numenera Destiny will give you new things to do with your discoveries, along with entirely new and epic ways to structure your campaigns. You’ll discover materials, power sources, and treasures that you can utilize in an entirely new, robust crafting and building system. And perhaps best of all, Numenera Destiny will offer three new character types and a number of new descriptors and foci geared toward this innovative style of play.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Salvaging and Crafting the Numenera
over 8 years ago – Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 11:48:53 PM

Defenders of Ellomyr, we were hoping and expecting that the party we sent to the Valley of Sins to return no later than today. There has been no sign of them. Perhaps we will know more in the days to come.

The Valley of Sins has always been a perilous destination, long shunned by the inhabitants of Ellomyr. Among its many dangers are the strange and vicious beasts that wander the region, and the wilds between Ellomyr and the Valley. There is no end to the astonishing variety of creatures that wander the Ninth World. Perhaps someone should compile a book—or three—on the subject?

That’s the mock up of the Ninth World Bestiary 3. Like the existing Ninth World Bestiary and its sequel, this would be a hardcover chock full of the weird, wondrous, and mostly dangerous creatures of Numenera. What terrors lurk between its covers? There’s only one way to find out—make it a reality. We’re closing in on unlocking the Ruin Deck. Let’s do the Ninth World Bestiary 3 as our next stretch goal!


And in the meantime, let’s have a peek into Numenera Destiny, with an overview by Bruce on what the members of our Valley of Sins expedition—if they’re still alive—might be after.

Salvaging and Crafting in Numenera Destiny

Ruins are everywhere in the Ninth World. That cliff over there? Its wide expanse is the edge of a million-year-old complex. The bald hill where camp was set? That weathered curve traces an ancient domed city. Even the soil under your feet isn’t natural; it’s the eroded remnants of a billions years of accumulated artificial structures ground back down into dust. Characters don’t have to go far to find ruins. And in such ruins, PCs can find amazing salvage such as cyphers, artifacts, and—for those who know to look—building blocks of the future.

Iotum

As part of a regular game of exploration and discovery, characters already explore ruins looking for oddities, cyphers, artifacts, and other useful items left behind by previous inscrutable civilizations. However, they could do even more. They could look for essential crafting ingredients called “iotum.”

Iotum are special components that can be used to fashion unique objects, repair broken items of the numenera, and craft installations, artifacts, vehicles, and more Iotum comes in a wide variety of forms, including slivers of scrap, tiny motes trapped in force, fist-sized silvery canisters filled with colorless goo, and as a chaotic soup of bubbling fluid contained within etched stronglass canisters the size of small houses. Regardless of form, iotum can be salvaged from oddities, cyphers, and artifacts, as well as from other ancient devices of the numenera that characters find. Working devices and installations are more likely to be good sources of salvage, but characters may also be able to salvage iotum from scrap that was once part of such machinery.

Finding Iotum

Any time characters are exploring ruins of the prior worlds and have a chance to find cyphers, artifacts, or oddities, they are also likely to find sources of potential iotum salvage. Potential sources include machine scrap, functioning or dead installations, integrated machines, crashed or working vehicles, automatons, creatures, and similar objects and structures. Essentially, the same kinds of things that could potentially be salvaged for shins or cyphers could also be salvaged for iotum. Even scrap and debris of the right kind could contain valuable components, though it might seem worthless at first glance. Iotum could also be salvaged from cyphers and artifacts. The actual quantity of the source could range in size from a small pile of random junk to the entire bulk of a crashed vehicle. Size doesn’t equate to the potential value in components that the scrap might yield up.

Crafting the Numenera

Crafting the numenera is different than crafting things like canoes or wooden palisades. To craft the numenera, one needs both iotum and specific directions on how to use them, called plans. Plans are blueprints for creating powerful installations, weird devices, inscrutable automatons, and amazing vehicles. Such plans were likely developed by now-vanished master-crafters of the prior worlds. Plans specify which and how much of a particular component can be used to create each specific object or structure. These plans of the numenera can sometimes be found when iotum and other types of numenera is salvaged for valuables, though some characters—including Wrights—gain access to plans through constant study and discipline.

For example, characters with a plan and the necessary iotum can build an installation. Installations are discrete, fixed in place artifacts that provide some kind of service or that serve a community need, such as illumination, warmth, water, defense, offense, and so on. When crafted by a PC, installations are often used to aid a base or community. They can be as simple as a tiny power source for a few lights in a community (at level 1) to a massive device that that connects the surface of the planet to the airless void at of space (at level 10). Other installations might create water for a certain number of people, throw up a defense screen of a particular size, shift the community’s phase once a year so it doesn’t get stomped by a massive automaton that moves through the area, and so on.


Of course, the higher the level of an object of the numenera is, the longer it takes to craft. Even when Wrights apply their skills to the task, it takes months to create mid-level objects and structures of the numenera, and years to fashion those at the higher end of the range.

So if the characters decide they want to build a craft that could transfer their entire community to some other world, they know they are embarking on a task that might take more than a single generation to complete. In which case, the legacy of the ship’s creation would fall to their children, or perhaps even their children’s children.

Crafting Contemporary Objects And Structures

Plans for mundane objects and structures are much different than those prized from the ruins of dead civilizations that came before. Instead of being found etched into a telepathic substrate, cycling in the memory of an integrated machine, embedded in an edited local universal constant, or stored in some other magical fashion, instructions for contemporary objects and structures are a result of the lore and practical knowledge developed by the people of the Ninth World.


Crafting something mundane is similar in some ways to crafting an item of the numenera, but far easier. So much easier, in fact, that many artisans, crafters, builders, and smiths don’t use plans at all, but instead rely on oral explanations, their own intuition and experience, or trial and error.

Iadace!
—Charles, Bruce and the MCG Team

Ellomyr Is Becoming a Hub of Trade
over 8 years ago – Sun, Oct 08, 2017 at 10:15:36 PM

Iadace, defenders of Ellomyr—

These are days of peace and prosperity in Ellomyr. The community continues to grow—and the Wrights continue to tinker with building a vehicle to further enhance trade, exploration, and defense. Remember, we want your votes on what we should be building!

Yoil’s skin tingled as she walked past one of the many orbs that maintained Ellomyr’s forcefield. How quickly things had changed. She still thought of Ellomyr as a village. For her entire life, it had numbered fewer than 200 people—small enough that she could name every single one of them. Now it was truly a town, with new residents outnumbering those who had lived here for generations, more people than she could easily count. Word had gotten out that Ellomyr was growing and strong enough to defend itself, becoming a place where knowledge of the numenera was respected. Strangers had come to farm, build, and—if they were brave enough—volunteer for the salvaging expeditions to nearby ruins.

But Yoil’s favorite visitors were the traders from other settlements and far-off lands beyond the Golden Sliver. They came from places she had only heard of in stories told by Gurner when she was a child. These people walked, rode, or wheeled their way into Ellomyr, bringing wondrous oddities, strange animals, and foreign goods. The traffic to and from the town had grown so frequent that Jird insisted on having workers widen the nearby paths and hard-pack the drit into durable roads. As these earthen fingers grew toward the horizon, each day meant another new face and new goods to barter. Yoil was saving her shins to buy a furred honey-making laak sold by Khol, the trapper from Bodrov. Her sibling Eem wanted a knife from Thaemor. Her parents bragged every day about their leather shoes made in Shallamas.

She was still cautious about the magic of the numenera, but the small, “real” things brought to the town by traders were little miracles that she could savor every day. Life was getting easier and better. She and the other hard-working people of Ellomyr carried a spark of joy in their hearts, looking forward to the surprises the next day at the market would bring.

Iadace!
—Sean and the MCG Team

Ellomyr: Into Danger
over 8 years ago – Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 09:31:01 PM

Iadace, defenders of Ellomyr—

In Numenera Destiny, in addition to building cyphers, artifacts, and even larger installations that can aid a whole community, PCs will be able to design and build vehicles. The Wrights in Ellomyr want to build a vehicle, but realize they don’t have many of the right parts. The expedition to the Valley of Sins was sent off a while ago but they haven’t heard from them since. Perhaps there are parts and iotum elsewhere nearby?

In the meantime, you can give input for what kind of vehicle you think the wrights should build by voting in the poll found here. We’ll fit the results of this poll into Ellomyr’s story at some point after Oct. 12th, so get your vote in by then.

The others wanted to leave. Even his mercenaries wanted to go back. Jun Nir spat in disgust.

What had they thought they’d find when they’d begun looking for a brand new ruin to salvage? A safe hole in the ground filled with fabulous treasures of the prior worlds, unguarded and waiting for plunder? Things didn’t work that way. They knew that, of course. Anyone who’d heard stories about the Valley of Sins knew that.

Oh sure, they’d follow Jun when he decided it was time. It wasn’t enough. He had resist his urge to smash something every time he saw how spooked they were by the glowing structure hovering only an arm's length over their heads. He’d learned that people in Ellomyr didn’t react well to his angry outbursts, however satisfying they might seem in the moment.

What were they so afraid of? The floating sphere probably wasn’t even half as wide as Ellomyr. Sure, magic kept it aloft, and magic was something to watch out for. When Lether had reached up to touch the wide curve, green lightning flowed through him to the ground, and well, now Lether was gone, except for the stain.

But Lether’s sacrifice had opened the wide curved doors in the structure, as if the whole thing were an eye looking down at them. Looking up to meet that gaze, they could see inside . . .

The nano said it was a portal to a place other than their own world. Weird clouds and gold light everywhere, off to infinity. Slowly tumbling through that immensity of space beyond the portal mouth was a colossal, beautiful ruin of metal, synth, and things that Jun had no name for.

There, he knew, they’d find the special components that the wrights had sent them to recover. Components that could build what everyone agreed was needed: a roving vehicle that would allow the people of Ellomyr to range far and wide.

It was time. No one else would try the portal mouth, after what happened to Lether. Cowards, the lot of them. He wouldn’t be numbered among them.

Jun Nir stood. “Follow me. But only if I survive.”

Iadace!
—Bruce and the MCG Team

Ellomyr Sends Messages into the Datasphere
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 06, 2017 at 10:09:55 PM

Iadace, defenders of Ellomyr—

Have you been catching the snippets for datasphere video sent from Ellomyr via the Trilling Shard?

Iona was a self-proclaimed acolyte of the datasphere and master of the numenera. During the battle for Ellomyr, she sacrificed her life to tap into the Trilling Shard and broadcast a message for aid across the datasphere. Her message was received, and Ellomyr survived.

Months passed before Iona’s mission was brought to light. Agatei, an Arkus, discovered that the device still functions—Ellomyr can send messages to others via the datasphere!

We’d love to see you post video or audio monologues from your characters—link them in the Kickstarter comments! Think of the Trilling Shard’s transmission system more like an answering machine, letter, or Blair Witch shakycam, and less like a conversation over phone or Skype.

What messages might your characters send? Would they call out to lost loved ones? Would they warn neighboring communities of oncoming danger? Might they broadcast a prayer to some machine god? Send a spiteful message to an old rival? We can't wait to see what you come up with!

Telen of Othmar looked over the town and smiled. His flesh-knee ached from the climb to the top of Ellomyr’s tower, but his reward was a spectacular view. He was thankful for the younger people who encouraged him to come up here. From this, the highest point in town—save the Trilling Shard itself—he could see the town spread out before him like a map. The hard-packed earth of its streets bustled with people, the farmers were readying for harvest, and new construction was everywhere.

In the span of a few months, life had changed in Ellomyr. Even his beloved Othmar lacked the wonders people were building here. The water purifier, its synth and metal arms extending into the river like a child reaching for sweets, was already pumping clean, drinkable water to the whole town and its outlying farms. The faintly glowing orbs of the forcefield generator stationed around the town—including one humming next to him on the tower—shielded Ellomyr from storms, margr arrows, and other threats from the air. The squat house-shaped device the Wrights called a “sustenance synthesizer” could process crop husks, offal, and even garbage into bland but nutritious food bars, enough to keep the town fed while the farms spread to accommodate all the new hungry mouths.

And there was always more to build. Ellomyr had run out of the iotum needed to finish creating the lightning generator on this tower, or the therapeutic sauna that was currently being used as meeting hall, or whatever the nanos needed to repair the Trilling Shard so it could “hear” from afar like it could see and speak. But the next expedition to the Valley of Sins might provide what they needed. Telen of Othmar sighed. The gentle ticking of his synth-leg sped up in anticipation of him standing. It was time to climb down and join the other people of his adoptive home for another day of work.

Iadace!
—Sean and the MCG Team

A Couple of Cool Things to Show Off
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 06, 2017 at 05:34:59 PM

Iadace, travellers—

I have a couple of cool things to show you. First, take a look at this handsome fellow:

OK, that’s not a handsome fellow—it’s me. But look at what I’m wearing! That, my friends, is an actual, wearable prototype of the new Numenera T-shirt we’re going to make—and that we’re now offering as an add-on. The design you see is lovingly silk-screened on a high-quality tee-shirt, and we’re offering it in sizes from S to 4XL.

This isn’t a stretch goal or anything. As we did with the deluxe corebook set, we’ve reached a point where we think this campaign deserves this neat accessory. So we’re going to make it! I’ve just updated the Add-Ons section of the Kickstarter page to include it.

Perhaps the best part: We’ll fulfill this tee very shortly after the campaign ends. So you can start stylin’, like that handsome fellow above, without having to wait until the corebooks come out.

And now here’s something even cooler!

This piece of art just came in, and we couldn’t wait to show it to you. What is it? Weeeell, I can’t really tell you just yet. Suffice it to say we’re sure looking forward to unlocking the Ruin Deck, and talking about the stretch goals that might come after. So remember to tell your friends and share, share, share on social media. We’ve had a great week so far, and let’s keep it rolling!

Iadace!
—Charles and the MCG Team