# Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera [UPDATED]



## Morrus (Aug 8, 2012)

Monte Cook has announced his new - upcoming - roleplaying game:_ Numenera_. He's been hinting at it on his blog ever since he left the D&D Next team earlier this year, describing it as a "science fantasy" post-apolocalytpic far future setting. Numenera will be funded via a Kickstarter project to be announced next week.
"I’m very proud to announce that next summer, I will be releasing a brand new roleplaying game called Numenera. The game system behind Numenera, called the Cypher System, is designed to be very simple to play and in particular to run as a GM, allowing the focus to be on role-playing, action, stories, and ideas. Numenera will be released under the Monte Cook Games banner.

Numenera’s setting is Earth, a billion years in the future, after eight great civilizations have risen and fallen. Thus, the setting is also called the Ninth World. The PCs are part of a new civilization rising in the Ninth World, hoping to forge its own destiny. But they must do so amid the remnants of a remarkable and in many ways unknowable past. The ancient peoples of prior eras mastered nanotechnology, interstellar travel, cosmic engineering, genetic engineering, and far stranger things. If the people of the Ninth World think of such things as magic, who are we to blame them?

To learn more, please check out the new Numenera site we’ve created. Also, come to my panel at GenCon, Thursday the 16th from 2 PM to 4 PM. I’ll be talking all about Numenera (and other things) and probably divulging all too much info. I’ll be doing similar panels at FanExpo Canada in Toronto and at DragonCon in Atlanta.

Numenera will be released as a full-color rulebook/setting book as well as an ebook. There will also be a very short ebook of just the rules. Numenera will be supported with a character generator tool as an app for phones and tablets, and an app that will contain all of the rules for easy reference.

To raise money needed for art, development, editing, and printing, I will be launching a Kickstarter in the next week or so. Contributors will get access to some very special rewards that won’t be available elsewhere. If the Kickstarter goes well, it will hopefully allow me to not only create Numenera, but to follow it up with a line of support products.

This is an exciting new journey for me. I hope you’ll come along for the ride."​The website for the new game is here.

UPDATE - Monte has launched his Kickstarter.


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## OnlineDM (Aug 8, 2012)

*Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera*

Monte Cook has finally announced some details about the RPG he's been working on. It's called Numenera, and it will be coming out in the summer of 2013.

Read Monte's announcement here.

The Numenera home page can be found here.


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## I'm A Banana (Aug 8, 2012)

Shore is purdy.

Can't say much about the system yet. Setting seems possibly interesting, but certainly done before. It'll be interesting to see if Monte can make this seem more than a pretty book with an also-ran setting!


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## Altamont Ravenard (Aug 8, 2012)

Looks interesting, even though I'm usually not a fan of science-fiction.

I nevertheless predict that this game will be one of the most mispronounced games in history (numerena / numerana / nuremena / etc.)

Good luck to Monte!

AR


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## Klaus (Aug 8, 2012)

Altamont Ravenard said:


> Looks interesting, even though I'm usually not a fan of science-fiction.
> 
> I nevertheless predict that this game will be one of the most mispronounced games in history (numerena / numerana / nuremena / etc.)
> 
> ...



You don't have to be into sci-fi. For the characters, it's indistinguishable from magic (to the point where the nano's "spells" are called "esoteries").

I look forward to seeing this progress!


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## amerigoV (Aug 8, 2012)

Altamont Ravenard said:


> I nevertheless predict that this game will be one of the most mispronounced games in history (numerena / numerana / nuremena / etc.)




How did Monte get the Muppets to do a theme song already?

Mana Mana "doot doo to do do"

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z79jnz9v60]Manana By the muppets - YouTube[/ame]

But then again, it might be the only thing that survived the 8 apocalypses..


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## Psion (Aug 8, 2012)

Morrus said:


> Numenera’s setting is Earth, a billion years in the future, after eight great civilizations have risen and fallen.




Shades of Zothique! Of course, this is a good thing.

Intrigued.


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## FATDRAGONGAMES (Aug 8, 2012)

I am *REALLY* looking forward to this!


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## GX.Sigma (Aug 8, 2012)

I guess now we know why he left WotC.


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## Evenglare (Aug 8, 2012)

Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. I don't know if he understands how long or not long that is considering what he's said about it. 8 great ages have past on earth... Now it took around 5 billion years for life to advance on earth as it has. Humans go to where we are in what... ~12,000 years? Around 65 million years is when the dinosaurs had their heyday. Now im no anthropologist but A billion years is...  I ... ugh.. I Dont even know it just seems like he picked a large number and said Eh...... there's also several other things to think about, considering the moon is going to be much farther away from us then ( if it isnt gone altogether from some rogue comet or something), Saturn wont have rings, the sun wont quite be red giant yet, but it will be past mid age... I can't imagine the earth being anything other than a desolate wasteland ( of course you can say SCIENCE-MAGIC and take care of that) . I dont know, im definitely curious just to see how much thought was put into it.


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## trancejeremy (Aug 8, 2012)

Definitely shades of Zothique. Which is a good thing.

I'm not an Astrophysicist, but I did study to be one, and I seem to recall that the Sun is middle aged right now. A billion years in the future it's going to be noticeably brighter, like 10%. But the Earth should still be livable, if not as nice as it is now.

Also interesting is what the world will look like. 250 million years from now it's supposed to (maybe) basically be one big continent again.

That's actually when my D&D campaign setting is set (since I liked the map I found of the proposed supercontinent). But taking a page out of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, the whole solar system has been rearranged somewhat. Since he mentions "Cosmic Engineering" sounds like that might be a possibly here as well.


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## Li Shenron (Aug 8, 2012)

I also thought 1b years is silly... 10.000 years might have been enough for 8 great civilizations, and 100.000 years definitely more than enough.

But besides that nitpick, it looks it has the potential to be a great setting!


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## Connorsrpg (Aug 8, 2012)

Another person that is not that into futuristic settings that is intrigued.

There is certainly enough fantasy to make this interesting, though unfortunately, I am very unlikely to ever get to play it.

I figured the 'billion years' was just an expression. As others have said, I imagine this is too many years. (When you compare to the billion years preceding all this).

Anyway, I am also interested to see what he does with the mechanics and I especially liked the part about it being very challenging and not easy. I have lied a lot of Monte's work for this reason.


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## mach1.9pants (Aug 8, 2012)

I can't say I am a fan of renaming coming RPG terms for the campaign, just call them spells cos we (as players) are going to. And no one I know will want to run a PC class called nano, unless they are full of very small bots! You can say spells are known as esoterique in the world, and leave it at that

EDIT: still interested in the premise tho, just things like that (even Gygax did it!) are annoying to me


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## variant (Aug 8, 2012)

Not really my thing. Never been a big fan of the 'future Earth, but not really' settings. Plus, honestly, I don't need another completely new RPG system to learn if it doesn't really do anything special.


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## Dice4Hire (Aug 8, 2012)

Well, a billion is probably just an error. The idea of different civilizations with different technologies is interesting, especially if one was genetic manipulation and that went ... badly.

One problem I have with futuristic settings is how to allow travel from one planet to another, without the full range of technology that would normally allow that. 

I think balancing stuff like this is very difficult, and overall I would have to say 8 empires is too much, and a billion years is way too much.

Sadly, it is not my cup of tea, but good luck to him!!


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## DaveMage (Aug 8, 2012)

Ugh.  Another Kickstarter.

If I hadn't just supporter Traveller, I might have looked at this, but as I don't play much Sci-Fi, I think I'm set.


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## Morrus (Aug 8, 2012)

I have to admit, I'm not really getting the folks who don't like "a billion".  Is there something special about the time period of a billion years hence that makes setting RPGs then particularly unattractive? 

There's a cool timeline of the far future here (which I'm sure Monte must be intimately familiar with by now).  Life will still be OK on Earth for another half billion years after that.

And 8 great civilizations seems reasonable.  If you consider ours for the last few thousand years one civilization, gaps of tens of millions of years between civilizations with nothing much happening seems perfectly reasonable to me.


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## Serendipity (Aug 8, 2012)

Sounds quite interesting, and a bit of a break from bog standard fantasy or space opera for that matter.   I'll be keeping an ear out for this one.


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## keterys (Aug 8, 2012)

Morrus said:


> Life will still be OK on Earth for another half billion years after that.



I dunno - I suspect he didn't use the two lines about lack of carbon dioxide killing off all plant life (and most life in general, albeit not all life)

Granted, I think CO2 generation is well within the realms of explainable with science.


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## Morrus (Aug 8, 2012)

keterys said:


> I dunno - I suspect he didn't use the two lines about lack of carbon dioxide killing off all plant life (and most life in general, albeit not all life)
> 
> Granted, I think CO2 generation is well within the realms of explainable with science.




Let alone science fantasy!


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## Gargoyle (Aug 8, 2012)

A billion years is ambitious, but I think the whole point of it is that by setting so far in the future he has created a setting where anything goes.  With that much time for civilizations to rise and fall and technologies to be developed and lost and species to evolve and go extinct, you can do anything you want.  

The only thing you can't do is set an adventure in post apocalyptic Manhattan or the ruined Vegas strip.  It stretches my suspension of disbelief too much to imagine that anything constructed today will last a billion years.  This raises the question of why bother saying it is Earth?  Call it something else and make that a Big Campaign Secret that the GM can let the players discover at some point.  

If he had left out that it was Earth after a billion years, I don't think there would be any criticism of a science fantasy setting that had existed for a billion years.  It's only when we had that tiny bit of reality to it that our suspension of disbelief is challenged.


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## Rune (Aug 8, 2012)

keterys said:


> I dunno - I suspect he didn't use the two lines about lack of carbon dioxide killing off all plant life (and most life in general, albeit not all life)
> 
> Granted, I think CO2 generation is well within the realms of explainable with science.




It also says that at 1 Billion years, the oceans will have evaporated, leaving water only at the poles.


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## RevTurkey (Aug 8, 2012)

Sounds good, don't care if it makes sense or not and none of us actually have any idea what might really happen in a billion years time. Monte's guess is as good as the next persons I reckon!

Can you do cool stuff and is it fun? I bet it will be and that is what counts.


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## Serendipity (Aug 8, 2012)

RevTurkey said:


> Can you do cool stuff and is it fun? I bet it will be and that is what counts.




Indeed.  Unless something is billed as specifically hard SF, I don't especially want or need scientific rigor from my role playing settings.


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## MatthewJHanson (Aug 8, 2012)

I do enjoy the discussion of what Earth will be like a billion years from now, but I don't think that's really the point. It's really just "some time far enough in the future that all kinds of crazy stuff has happened."

I think it sounds interesting. Reminds me of Thundarr the Barbarian. I'll wait to see more details before I decide if I want to support.


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## Shieldhaven (Aug 8, 2012)

Mostly I'm stuck on the list of bad ideas in the Game Play page.

1. Modifying DCs is not in any way easier than adding modifiers to a die roll, except that now one side of the exchange (the GM) does 100% of the math. Math is math, guys. A big pile of player-triggered modifiers are still going to slow down play, whether that math is done on the "front" (PC) end or the "back" (GM) end.

2. Spending experience points for short-term benefit is something I straight-out hate. The only variation of this I've ever been okay with is in Over the Edge, where they're "temporarily expended" (for the duration of that session) but never permanently lost until you spend them on actual advancement.

3. Color me very dubious of spending XP to increase character abilities OR advance in level. What's going on here?

4. The last paragraph is what you might call "unintentionally too honest." The paragraph before it talks about how easy everything is, only to follow up with "you know I never like to make things easy." And yes, I do think that Monte's past work is a great example of never making things easy - good lord, but Arcana Evolved (especially with its splatbook) is a clunky monstrosity of bookkeeping at mid-to-high levels, even more so than core 3.5. Playing Arcana Unearthed/Evolved for the past, um, seven years or so has revealed a LOT of rough edges and oversights.

I will certainly be curious to see where this goes, but oy.

Haven


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## davethegame (Aug 8, 2012)

About the Earth in a billion years question:
https://twitter.com/MonteJCook/status/232981666891706368


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## seankreynolds (Aug 8, 2012)

Evenglare said:


> Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. I don't know if he understands how long or not long that is considering what he's said about it. 8 great ages have past on earth... Now it took around 5 billion years for life to advance on earth as it has. Humans go to where we are in what... ~12,000 years? Around 65 million years is when the dinosaurs had their heyday. Now im no anthropologist but A billion years is...  I ... ugh.. I Dont even know it just seems like he picked a large number and said Eh...... there's also several other things to think about, considering the moon is going to be much farther away from us then ( if it isnt gone altogether from some rogue comet or something), Saturn wont have rings, the sun wont quite be red giant yet, but it will be past mid age... I can't imagine the earth being anything other than a desolate wasteland ( of course you can say SCIENCE-MAGIC and take care of that) . I dont know, im definitely curious just to see how much thought was put into it.




I'm a playtester. I've seen the notes. The timeframe is perfectly reasonable once you accept the ideas of terraforming and transhumanism.


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## kitsune9 (Aug 8, 2012)

Pass on this one.


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## TreChriron (Aug 8, 2012)

This looks like a fun setting. I always enjoy Monte's creative ideas in his settings. Arcana Evolved/Diamond throne is one of my favorite!



Evenglare said:


> Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. ... .






Li Shenron said:


> I also thought 1b years is silly...




Who cares? It's just a game fiction. It's like all the awesome graphic novels, comics, and high styled movies adapted from such out there. Watched an anime? Heavy Metal anyone? There is a PILE of great creative settings and stories out that that have (bleep)-all to do with scientific accuracy.


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## tleilaxu (Aug 8, 2012)

one could think of "a billion years" in the same sense that chinese use "10,000 years" or "the 10,000 things" or the bible uses "40 days and 40 nights", which is to say "a long time" or "myriad"


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## GSHamster (Aug 8, 2012)

One thing about one billion years is that it is a long enough timescale for evolution to really kick in. Other timescales being bandied around, like a hundred thousand, or even one million years, are too short to really see major changes on an evolutionary scale.

A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.


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## Psion (Aug 8, 2012)

Evenglare said:


> Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. I don't know if he understands how long or not long that is considering what he's said about it. 8 great ages have past on earth... Now it took around 5 billion years for life to advance on earth as it has. Humans go to where we are in what... ~12,000 years? Around 65 million years is when the dinosaurs had their heyday. Now im no anthropologist but A billion years is...  I ... ugh.. I Dont even know it just seems like he picked a large number and said Eh...... there's also several other things to think about, considering the moon is going to be much farther away from us then ( if it isnt gone altogether from some rogue comet or something), Saturn wont have rings, the sun wont quite be red giant yet, but it will be past mid age... I can't imagine the earth being anything other than a desolate wasteland ( of course you can say SCIENCE-MAGIC and take care of that) . I dont know, im definitely curious just to see how much thought was put into it.




If he was going for a Zothique/Dying Earth sort of setting, then choosing astronomically significant timeframes might have been purposeful. These stories do picture Earth as a much changed (or dying) world.

Of course it's science *fantasy*, so it might not be worth dwelling on that overmuch.


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## Morrus (Aug 9, 2012)

GSHamster said:


> A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.




I dunno.  Our last mass-extinction event was, what, 60-million years ago? 

One every 60-million years gives potential for more than 8 civilizations.


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## Dice4Hire (Aug 9, 2012)

GSHamster said:


> One thing about one billion years is that it is a long enough timescale for evolution to really kick in. Other timescales being bandied around, like a hundred thousand, or even one million years, are too short to really see major changes on an evolutionary scale.
> 
> A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.




With the technology he mentions, who needs natural evolution?


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## Dice4Hire (Aug 9, 2012)

Morrus said:


> I dunno.  Our last mass-extinction event was, what, 60-million years ago?
> 
> One every 60-million years gives potential for more than 8 civilizations.




But how long does each of these civilizations last? A few million years strikes me as pretty ridiculous.

And with erosion and whatnot, how could anything be left a billion years later? Even with super-advanced technology?


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## Sir Robilar (Aug 9, 2012)

Jeffery427 said:


> Setting seems possibly interesting, but certainly done before.




Could anyone point me to an RPG where this has been done before? 

I'm just curious as I don't know of any Science Fantasy RPGs.


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## calprinicus (Aug 9, 2012)

Sounds interesting. Wish more was posted about the mechanics. Wonder how he plans to make it easy to run on the fly with little or no preperation. I'll Probably throw enough at the kick starter to buy a PDF version.

Forgot to quote but traveller and gurps both had good sci-fi themed RPGs.


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## Sir Brennen (Aug 9, 2012)

Sounds like someone's been reading their Book of the New Sun (though in that series, "only" a million years have passed). For better or worse, the Gene Wolfe books are probably going to color my thoughts on Monte's game.

I think people aren't grasping how mind boggling a billion years is. That's basically the time from multicellular organisms appearing to us dropping robots on Mars. That's enough time for a hundred - or even a thousand - civilizations to rise and fall. 

Over that span of time into the future, it's really unlikely that human descendants exist in a form even vaguely resembling us. Either technology has made them trans-trans-trans-to-the-Nth-power-humans, and/or during the periods after the fall of the various civilizations, natural evolutionary forces came back into play. It be entirely reasonable for them to be as different from us as we are from fish, _at least_. A billion years in the future, and Earth might as well be considered an alien planet.

I'm not sure what Monte's tweet is implying, but for a sci-fantasy setting like this, probably better just to say "in a future far, far away", and leave it at that.


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## gdmcbride (Aug 9, 2012)

I think the real problem with a 'billion years' is well illustrated on this board. A specific number allows speculation and comparisons to real science. 

Far better I think to say something akin to "Countless aeons in the future, during the ninth age of darkness..." and leave it at that.

Regardless, the game sounds cool, even though this is far too little information to yet form a definite opinion. Certainly, I can dig a good science fantasy game.

Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games


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## Connorsrpg (Aug 9, 2012)

Look, the setting is very interesting and that is the main thing. I guess some of us are having trouble picturing 1 billion years. AS stated that is the 'history' of life on earth to this point.

A lot of the interest of dying futuristic settings is finding things from our own time (and then laughing at how primitive they are). As someone else posted, I would find it odd that much of today's world will be existing in 1 billion years. I preseume several of these prior civilisations ended with a great disaster or war?

I certainly don't have a prob with 8 previous civilisations. I imagine MANY great civilisations to have come and gone in that time. 8 seems too few.

So in this thinking, the Ancient Egyptians and out current world would count as 1 of those?

Re the mechanics - I recall an old look ata skills on the Wizards boards that sounded very interesting. I believe Mike Mearls was writing them but spoke to Monte and presented his ideas of shifting the end result. It might sound weird and like 'modifiers in reverse', but that article struck a nerve with me and I would like to see how this approach works out. (I wonder if that is where this idea has blossomed from - it seemed Mike and Monte had put a lot of thought into skill systems well before DnDNext).


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## Azgulor (Aug 9, 2012)

Initial reactions include:

Intrigued by the setting.
Uninspired/unimpressed with the mechanics teasers.  Hoping for a PFRPG or M&M version.


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## Someone (Aug 9, 2012)

The setting reminded me of Futurama's pilot episode, when Fry gets frozen and time fasts forward. Scyscrapers get blasted by aliens, then civilization starts again, build castles, and those get blasted by aliens too. Two times is fun, 8 times might make the timeline an overly long joke.


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## seankreynolds (Aug 9, 2012)

I don't want to reveal too much, but perhaps your definition of "great civilization" differs from what Monte is using in the context of this setting. If your civilization didn't get to transhumanism and terraforming, perhaps it didn't count?


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## Frostmarrow (Aug 9, 2012)

To me the only thing that matters is if this is going to be a one-man-show or if Monte Cook will invite anyone to create for this new game (beyond GM:ing).
Nowadays I expect any RPG without an OGL to fail.


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## wedgeski (Aug 9, 2012)

Looks promising, I'll be very interested in this. I absolutely love the art.

Great web site, too. Clean, functional, informative.


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## Anselyn (Aug 9, 2012)

Sir Robilar said:


> Could anyone point me to an RPG where this has been done before?
> 
> I'm just curious as I don't know of any Science Fantasy RPGs.




Empire of the Petal Throne/ Tekumel

See: Tékumel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

"Tékumel has spawned four professionally-published roleplaying games over the course of the years:
Empire of the Petal Throne, published in 1975 as a boxed set by TSR, Inc. and reprinted later as a single book by Different Worlds Publications in 1987.[7]
Swords & Glory, published in 1983/4 in two volumes by Gamescience.[8]
Gardasiyal: Adventures in Tekumel, published in 1994 by Theater of the Mind Enterprises.[9]
Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne, published in 2005 by Guardians of Order.[10]"


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## Morrus (Aug 9, 2012)

Dice4Hire said:


> But how long does each of these civilizations last? A few million years strikes me as pretty ridiculous.




A few million years _between_ them.  They don't have to last a few million years each.


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## WiredNerve (Aug 9, 2012)

Hey , I would love to see a youtube video on an actual session or such...


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## Morrus (Aug 9, 2012)

Dice4Hire said:


> But how long does each of these civilizations last? A few million years strikes me as pretty ridiculous.




A few million years _between_ them.  They don't have to last a few million years each.


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## gideonpepys (Aug 9, 2012)

Anselyn said:


> Empire of the Petal Throne/ Tekumel
> 
> See: Tékumel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
> 
> ...




And also _Skyrealms of Jorune_.  One of the most imaginative RPGs ever.  (But also incredibly difficult to play.)


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## Kobold Avenger (Aug 9, 2012)

With 1 billion years we could be talking about 8 different civilizations where humanity moved on and settled other planets or even galaxies.  I'm pretty sure one of those former civilizations is a galactic federation of some sort.  Another former civilization could have "ascended" or gone to other dimensions.  And it's possible that something like rats could have evolved and become a great civilization themselves.


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## Mallus (Aug 9, 2012)

While I'm not in the market for a new system explicitly tied to a setting, Numenera sounds pretty cool. 

As for the 'billion years' thing... Gene Wolfe had the sun fat and red in his "Book of the New Sun" novels. They are, in short, masterpieces. If that was okay with Gene, it's okay with me. 

Scientific accuracy only matters in fiction that explicitly _makes_ it matter. Highly romanticized science fantasy full of science-wizards does not, as far I can tell, make any strong claims about accuracy. It does stake out a claim to the Dying Earth subgenre and can be judged accordingly.


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## Underman (Aug 9, 2012)

Never mind


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## fled (Aug 9, 2012)

WiredNerve said:


> Hey , I would love to see a youtube video on an actual session or such...




Check out his kickstarter page posted today, has a cool informative vid

Numenera: A new roleplaying game from Monte Cook by Monte Cook — Kickstarter

He also blogged about the "Billion" today

http://www.montecookgames.com/a-billion-years/


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## Janx (Aug 9, 2012)

Altamont Ravenard said:


> Looks interesting, even though I'm usually not a fan of science-fiction.
> 
> I nevertheless predict that this game will be one of the most mispronounced games in history (numerena / numerana / nuremena / etc.)
> 
> ...




I just clued into Monte's subtle hint in the title for pronunciation.

New Men Era.

As in the Era of the New Men.


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## Underman (Aug 9, 2012)

seankreynolds said:


> I don't want to reveal too much, but perhaps your definition of "great civilization" differs from what Monte is using in the context of this setting. If your civilization didn't get to transhumanism and terraforming, perhaps it didn't count?



Hi! Thanks for being here.

Is there an overall theme of humanity evolving, transforming and self-destructing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and potentially for the 9th time?


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## seankreynolds (Aug 9, 2012)

This is Monte's thing and I'm sure he knows what he'd like to talk about and when. I don't know if what you're talking about is an "overall theme," but (like the Dying Earth books) there's definitely an element of "great civilizations have risen and fallen in the past, leaving behind sites and artifacts."

I probably should stop talking now, I don't want to post spoilers for anything Monte plans to talk about later.


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## TwoSix (Aug 9, 2012)

Altamont Ravenard said:


> Looks interesting, even though I'm usually not a fan of science-fiction.
> 
> I nevertheless predict that this game will be one of the most mispronounced games in history (numerena / numerana / nuremena / etc.)
> 
> ...



It's actually pronounced more like this:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60og9gwKh1o"]Numa Numa[/ame]


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## malcolm_n (Aug 9, 2012)

Morrus said:


> And 8 great civilizations seems reasonable. If you consider ours for the last few thousand years one civilization, gaps of tens of millions of years between civilizations with nothing much happening seems perfectly reasonable to me.



Such an amount of time would mean a complete reset of everything. Each civilization would have to basically start fresh.

In any case, it's not a deal breaker for me. Even with a full reset between each civilization, that's 111 million years between each. Plenty of time to have us do all these things and lose them again to start over.


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## Ulrick (Aug 9, 2012)

1 billion years? 

_In the Grim Darkness of the Far Far Far Far Far Future there is only_ WHAT?


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## The_King_in_Yellow (Aug 9, 2012)

Ulrick said:


> 1 billion years?
> 
> _In the Grim Darkness of the Far Far Far Far Far Future there is only_ WHAT?




No grim dark presumably, let us not go there for it is a silly place.


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## HeinorNY (Aug 9, 2012)

How far in the future did Jack Vance Dying Earth stories take place? The sun was dim and almost gone. 

Preventing the Sun from growing into a red giant and destroying Earth is something that, even if we don't have the technology to do now, at least we can imagine it theorically, which is already some feat. If we can imagine it, people from the futue can do it. 
And teleportation is a lot more unfeasible than saving the sun, but widely more accepted among sci-fi fans.


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## mach1.9pants (Aug 9, 2012)

Yeah that is another far far future RPG, Pelgrane's Dying Earth. The far far future is a common science fantasy trope, and certainly not a bad one! I can't beleive the amount of discussion over the billion years thing, to me it is who cares? Is the game and/or setting good?
Interesting side discussion, but not something that would in anyway effect my decision to support the game or not. I always want to get an accurate map of the earth with the seas water level raised or lowered by 10-30metres and make a game world from that. See how long it took the player's to figure it!


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## Minigiant (Aug 9, 2012)

Although I like the idea...

I am disappointed he bothered to make a class based game and went with warrior/mage/mage-warrior.


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## amerigoV (Aug 9, 2012)

Sir Brennen said:


> I think people aren't grasping how mind boggling a billion years is.




If its anything like dollars, it's really not that big of a deal.


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## Dice4Hire (Aug 10, 2012)

Morrus said:


> A few million years _between_ them.  They don't have to last a few million years each.




That makes less sense, though. A billion years is ridiculous, and hopefully it will be changed.

I would say that 50,000 year civilizations separated by long periods, like maybe up to 150,000 years of barbarism, so maybe 1.5 million years total for 9 ages would be the longest that would really work for me.


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## Morrus (Aug 10, 2012)

Dice4Hire said:


> That makes less sense, though. A billion years is ridiculous, and hopefully it will be changed.
> 
> I would say that 50,000 year civilizations separated by long periods, like maybe up to 150,000 years of barbarism, so maybe 1.5 million years total for 9 ages would be the longest that would really work for me.




Here's a timeline of the development of life on Earth. Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and it took 0.8 billion just to develop simple cells. It took 4 billion years to get to simple animals. 

Nine complete civilizations in a billion years might be - if anything - a little rapid - depending on how wiped out each civilization is. And we might eb talking ancient, glaxy-spanning civilizations here far older than our relatively short-lived one.  As sean said, above, we probably don't even qualify as one yet.


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## fled (Aug 10, 2012)

since no one is bothering to read the author's comments on "a Billion years"



> Of course, it’s not precisely one billion years in the future. The date isn’t 1,000,000,2013 AD. (No actual date, according to our system, is mentioned, because it’s irrelevant.) When you’re using numbers that big, you can round up or down a few million and not notice. More importantly, the people of the Ninth World don’t know the age of the planet, and they certainly don’t care how far separated they are from us. But we care. So let’s talk about a billion years for a moment–because it’s fun.
> 
> A billion years in the future puts the people of the Ninth World farther from us than we are from the dinosaurs, temporally speaking. By a lot of years. In this time frame, continental drift has brought the continents all back together again, and probably also seen them break apart again (in the Ninth World, this has happened and actually they’ve come back together again, but we don’t know if that’s natural or the product of some past technological workings). The sun’s luminosity should increase about 10 percent, drying up the oceans and making photosynthesis impossible. But in the Ninth World, there are oceans–actually there’s only one–and plants. So again, some kind of major engineering, even megascale engineering, has gone on here.
> 
> But here’s my favorite bit. Even by conservative estimates, assuming sub-light speeds, it would take a civilization about 50 million years to colonize the entire galaxy. In a billion years, this could have happened many times over. A billion years is enough time for a civilization to raise to a position of vast power (perhaps even being the seat of a galactic or even intergalactic empire), collapse entirely, and for the Earth to lie fallow for a long time to give rise to yet another civilization. And another. And another. Maybe some of these civilizations aren’t even human.



 - Monte Cook


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## Minigiant (Aug 10, 2012)

So Numerera is when Shepard loses, the Reapers win over and over, and a planet restarts?


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## Otakkun (Aug 10, 2012)

Well, Monte has reached his Kickstarter goal already, and that's great news.

I just hope he adds some stretch goals in there, like improved art (I love what he has right now, but so far wotc & paizo lead the way, I'd love to add Monte to that short list).

He could also fit in there additional electronic support, things like a compendium for example.

Anyway, I'm really exited about this.

I'm probably going to pledge to the 30 bucks stage anyway wherver he adds stretch goals or not xD


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## FATDRAGONGAMES (Aug 10, 2012)

Otakkun said:


> I just hope he adds some stretch goals in there





Yep, Monte just announced some stretch goals.


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## Jupp (Aug 10, 2012)

The thing is that after 1 billion years humanity will have de/evolved so much that I am not sure how recogniseable they would be to us. That is if humanity is even destined to survive a billion years from now on if you believe some of the scientific papers regarding human evolution and the changes our planet will go through in the far future. For starters there is also an interesting wikipedia entry about the future of our planet ( Future of the Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ). It is all speculation but a lot of the speculation is backed by our scientific knowledge we have gathered so far. 

Personally I do not see humanity in its current "configuration" existing on this planet in a few thousand years.


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## Jupp (Aug 10, 2012)

gdmcbride said:


> I think the real problem with a 'billion years' is well illustrated on this board. A specific number allows speculation and comparisons to real science.




I think this is something that every sci-fantasy or sci-fi setting has to accept. As soon as you include science into the mix people will start to relate and compare to the real world; even more so if Earth is the main place of the setting. 

Most of the best sci-fi settings or novels are based on scientific background because that is what makes them believable to the reader; like fantasy settings are "believable" because alot of them are based on the lore and myths from the past civilisations.


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## vagabundo (Aug 10, 2012)

Ahh so the new civilisation aren't human. At least that's believable. Having evolution reset nine times is a cool idea.

Although the website has humans on it. mmm.

Probably better to scrap the billion. It's silly if they want to include human like species in it.


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## Jupp (Aug 10, 2012)

vagabundo said:


> Ahh so the new civilisation aren't human. At least that's believable. Having evolution reset nine times is a cool idea.




There is a sci-fi series of books written around an alien race that is getting "reset" every x thousand of years. A nice read by the way:

The Mote in God's Eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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## vagabundo (Aug 10, 2012)

Jupp said:


> There is a sci-fi series of books written around an alien race that is getting "reset" every x thousand of years. A nice read by the way:
> 
> The Mote in God's Eye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




That's one of my favourite books ever. The Moties . Good catch on the similarities.


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## Mallus (Aug 10, 2012)

Jupp said:


> Most of the best sci-fi settings or novels are based on scientific background because that is what makes them believable to the reader; like fantasy settings are "believable" because alot of them are based on the lore and myths from the past civilisations.



You mean like Dune, a novel where the artificial Messiah, bred by a coven of cynical, telepathic, ninja-witches, comes of age in a quasi-feudal space empire that runs on a hallucinogenic, life-extending, magic drug that's also a rather transparent stand-in for petroleum? 

(mind you, I love Dune, even the Lynch film version)

Or Star Wars?

Or Star Trek, for that matter.


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## mudbunny (Aug 10, 2012)

Wow. This thread is proof of why RPG players get stereotyped the way that we are. This sounds like an awesome RPG, and instead of talking about how awesome it is, most of this thread is arguing over whether 1 billion years is accurate or not.

_sigh_

Personally, this looks pretty cool, and I look forward to reading more about this and spending a lot of time going through the website.


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## Mallus (Aug 10, 2012)

mudbunny said:


> Wow. This thread is proof of why RPG players get stereotyped the way that we are. This sounds like an awesome RPG, and instead of talking about how awesome it is, most of this thread is arguing over whether 1 billion years is accurate or not.
> 
> _sigh_



Think of it as an opportunity to laugh at ourselves! And others!


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## Bedrockgames (Aug 10, 2012)

This setting looks better and better. I like the idea of going a billion years in the future. Its science fantasy so frankly not too worried about the actual science, but it sounds to me like he has a handle on that part of the project as well.


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## HeinorNY (Aug 10, 2012)

It's Science fantasy. The weirder the better.


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## Lord Mhoram (Aug 10, 2012)

ainatan said:


> It's Science fantasy. The weirder the better.




I agree.

For me "a billion years" is just flavorful handwavium for "a really long time"


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## Jupp (Aug 10, 2012)

Mallus said:


> You mean like Dune, a novel where the artificial Messiah, bred by a coven of cynical, telepathic, ninja-witches, comes of age in a quasi-feudal space empire that runs on a hallucinogenic, life-extending, magic drug that's also a rather transparent stand-in for petroleum?
> 
> (mind you, I love Dune, even the Lynch film version)
> 
> ...




Mentioning Herbert's Dune in the same post as Star Wars/Trek seems like blasphemy  But yes, it's in line of what I meant. Things like Aasimov's Foundation, Burrough's Barsoom, or Heinlein's Future History.


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## fled (Aug 10, 2012)

Cook did let drop that the 9th world inhabitants are at the "medieval" stages of development so im going to hypothesize its going to have a "Battle Chasers" theme for those familiar with that comic. The art really sets the tone. I like the direction of the entire project thus far.


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## Otakkun (Aug 11, 2012)

Curse you Monte, now I'll have to drop $60 (actually $70 for int shipping) instead of the $30 I had originally thought.

That's what you get for asking for stretch goals


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## jreyst (Aug 11, 2012)

Without going back and reading through almost 10 pages of posts, does anyone know if he has discussed ANYWHERE (i.e. Facebook, or his blog, or elsewhere) what sort of licensing he may be considering (i.e. OGL/something else/nothing else?)


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## fled (Aug 11, 2012)

jreyst said:


> Without going back and reading through almost 10 pages of posts, does anyone know if he has discussed ANYWHERE (i.e. Facebook, or his blog, or elsewhere) what sort of licensing he may be considering (i.e. OGL/something else/nothing else?)




From his blog, all I could find...



> The game system behind Numenera, called the Cypher System, is designed to be very simple to play and in particular to run as a GM, allowing the focus to be on role-playing, action, stories, and ideas. Numenera will be released under the Monte Cook Games banner.




He briefly mentions that he is in talks with "Tom Tullis at Fat Dragon Games to do some Numenera-licensed fold-up terrain.".... Otherwise I'm not too sure bud.


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## Cergorach (Aug 11, 2012)

On one hand, I'm not all that interested in another 'new' RPG, on the other hand Monte talks about some interesting setting concepts. I'll take a look when it's released...

As for what the future holds. 50 Years ago the future looked like flying cars, jetpacks, intelligent computers, humanoid robots, etc. being in common use. We're not there yet and some of that stuff might be awfully far away. On the other hand, the scifi future of 66 years ago we've surpassed the communicator by a mile and the computer power is far beyond what was imagined. But there's still no one on Mars and we don't have a moonbase...

We humans are an odd lot, we want to create humans that look like us and hate everyone that isn't the ideal human form. What is there to say that no matter how advanced humans get, they always keep the human form because everyone who doesn't doesn't evolve for long...


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## ColonelHardisson (Aug 12, 2012)

Morrus said:


> I have to admit, I'm not really getting the folks who don't like "a billion".




Same here. As some of those same people point out, we've come this far in only a few tens of thousands. Who knows what will happen in an even greater, geometrically greater, amount of time? Maybe the human race will branch off and each branch develop or regress independently. Maybe some will evolve beyond the need for physical bodies, maybe some will choose to return to human form. I could see us engineering on a planetary scale in a century or two; a billion years may see galactic-scale engineering like in Carl Sagan's book, _Contact_. Maybe some branch of mankind's descendants preserved the home system for nostalgia's sake. It seems strange to me that people can see us go from animal power to nuclear fission in less then a century, but think it's too optimistic that humans or their descendants could be moving planets and rejuvenating stars in a billion years. Sure, the Sun may burn out or the Earth die or Saturn lose its rings in a billion years...if we let them. Maybe some Vorlon-like descendant of ours will make it his pet project to bring the old homestead back to life.


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## Evenglare (Aug 12, 2012)

Upon further thinking , a billion or not, if you are setting it on "earth" in a billion years. You have thrown out a REAL place, and a REAL time frame. I understand there is fantasy in here, and he's going to use soft science/magic. The fact about it though is that I can't imagine any perceivable way that anything could even be remotely familiar to us. In a billion years, society would be so ridiculously advanced that there's no way we could even remotely understand how to play whatever "race" is there. Certainly there shouldn't be ANY kind of humans, we would have either evolved or been wiped out completely. Any sentient races would be completely alien to us in every way possible and therefore just about impossible to roleplay (and before anyone says it, elves and dwarves and such are probably not being roleplayed correctly AT ALL in fantasy games simply because we just can't understand them, so we define them by human standards)  Just think how different we are from people who lived 2000 years ago! Now a BILLION years?? 

I think the thing that gets me is that he's throwing out huge time scales AND references to things that actually exist. This is a tricky subject because now you are getting into real life type of things. Just thinking about Warhammer 40k ,Dune, and Star Trek that reference earth it's completely changed or forgotten. I mean, if everything is going to be completely different anyway why set it on earth? Why not in a completely different universe ?

What exactly about earth is it that makes him want to center the game there? This is what I'm wary of. He's said continents will be completely different, which is true. There will be nothing of our day left at all. Completely wiped out, no ruins or anything.This is especially true since what... 7 or 8 civilizations have risen and fallen? Nothing that we will recognize as earth from our era will exist, so why earth? Why make that specification unless part of the earth's past will be included in some way.  The only way this could happen is if we start time travelling. Which is fine if he's going soft science/magic...

Like I said, im interested, i'm just skeptical about the setup.


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## fled (Aug 12, 2012)

Evenglare said:


> I can't imagine any perceivable way that anything could even be remotely familiar to us.




Ok. So please tell me what about an Orc is more "familiar" to you than a fictional civilization set a billion years in the future?



Evenglare said:


> In a billion years, society would be so ridiculously advanced that there's no way we could even remotely understand how to play whatever "race" is there.




And making it up as you go along isn't fun anymore because......... Please keep in mind there's a reason its called Fiction.




Evenglare said:


> Certainly there shouldn't be ANY kind of humans, we would have either evolved or been wiped out completely.




Cook addresses this, the 8 civilizations got "rebooted" several times, so there is no continuous, unbroken billion year evolution of technology and science. Each civilization achieved what it could in it's allotted time, then they were either wiped out/ taken over/ or just simply left....their artifacts are the Numenera.



Evenglare said:


> Any sentient races would be completely alien to us in every way possible and therefore just about impossible to roleplay (and before anyone says it, elves and dwarves and such are probably not being roleplayed correctly AT ALL in fantasy games simply because we just can't understand them, so we define them by human standards)  Just think how different we are from people who lived 2000 years ago! Now a BILLION years??




Again please explain to me how an elf, which is a completely fictional creation by the way, is in any way shape or form more "realistic" (lol) to role play than a human (assuming that some kind of Homo Sapiens is around in Numenara) a billion years from now? 

At least with the human, you can make some scientific assumptions about evolution taking into account what kind of atmosphere is predicted to exist in that future....excluding any creative intervention Cook would have used to justify certain assumptions he makes on his own.



Evenglare said:


> I mean, if everything is going to be completely different anyway why set it on earth? Why not in a completely different universe ?




Why not earth? Why not a familiar Galaxy? The man has free "real estate" to play with...one that we are familiar with. Why not use it? Aside from pragmatism, why are you so dead set against basing a campaign on the remotely familiar?

I personally like the fact that he intrudes upon my world. I would somehow feel more connected to it. When discussing the prehistoric era, i don't feel completely disconnected from that reality, its still my earth, and I still feel connected to it. So a billion years ahead, I'll still find some symbolic anchor to place familiarity to, even if its just the burning orb we used to call the Sun.



Evenglare said:


> What exactly about earth is it that makes him want to center the game there?




You got me there. Ask him.



Evenglare said:


> This is what I'm wary of. He's said continents will be completely different, which is true. There will be nothing of our day left at all. Completely wiped out, no ruins or anything.This is especially true since what... 7 or 8 civilizations have risen and fallen? Nothing that we will recognize as earth from our era will exist, so why earth?




Again why not? I am still trying to understand your skepticism as opposed to a completely fictional (dare I say cookie-cutter) setting.


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## Mallus (Aug 12, 2012)

Evenglare said:


> Upon further thinking , a billion or not, if you are setting it on "earth" in a billion years.



The solution to over-thinking something is not further over-thinking.



> You have thrown out a REAL place, and a REAL time frame.



Think of the time frame as metaphoric. "A long, long time from now in, well, here".



> I understand there is fantasy in here, and he's going to use soft science/magic. The fact about it though is that I can't imagine any perceivable way that anything could even be remotely familiar to us.



This is obviously not an attempt at rigorous, speculative science fiction. You said it yourself, "there's fantasy here". 



> (and before anyone says it, elves and dwarves and such are probably not being roleplayed correctly AT ALL in fantasy games simply because we just can't understand them, so we define them by human standards)



This statement is interesting. By what standards are elves and dwarves not being played 'correctly'? They are works of fiction, and as such, they're meant to say something about _us_, not some nonexistent reality where they're objectively real and not metaphor/allegory/flights of human fancy. 

We understand them fine, after all, we created them. 



> This is a tricky subject because now you are getting into real life type of things. Just thinking about Warhammer 40k ,Dune, and Star Trek that reference earth it's completely changed or forgotten.



Also interesting. The various forms of science fantasy (and in the case of WH40K and Dune, big time scales) in those settings don't bother you -- what's different about them? 



> I mean, if everything is going to be completely different anyway why set it on earth?



Because the prospective audience is from Earth. 



> Why not in a completely different universe ?



Because "Earth" resonates more than "some world in the Lesser Magellenic Cloud" or "that place where Mr. Mxyzptlk comes from". 



> What exactly about earth is it that makes him want to center the game there?



We live here. This one's not rocket science. 



> Nothing that we will recognize as earth from our era will exist, so why earth?



It still has sentimental value. 



> The only way this could happen is if we start time travelling. Which is fine if he's going soft science/magic...



If?

Could it be you simply don't like the Dying Earth subgenre? Though, even if you don't, I have to recommend Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Every SF/F fan should read it, IMNSHO.


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## Underman (Aug 12, 2012)

Mallus said:


> This statement is interesting. By what standards are elves and dwarves not being played 'correctly'? They are works of fiction, and as such, they're meant to say something about _us_, not some nonexistent reality where they're objectively real and not metaphor/allegory/flights of human fancy.



If elves say something about _us_, then there could be a theme about how a long lifespan affects society and other interesting elven questions.

D&D generally doesn't ask questions like this, and plays elves like humans with pointy ears. Asking why elves aren't higher level, more powerful, more knowledgeable, etc. because of the sheer amount of time they have results in us putting our fingers in our ears and saying 'la la la la la la lal'. Or if you determine that elves waste their time and accomplish nothing in a year that a human accomplishes in a week, then following that through and asking how an elf PC is differentiated from human PCs in play will ALSO elicit the familiar 'la la la la la la lal'.

Science fiction, at the least the really good science fiction, DOES ask pointed questions about how technology affects humans, what it means to be transhuman, etc.

One billion years is a long time. Anything can happen. I don't have a problem with it. But if numenera has elves, then asking hard interesting questions about what it means to be an elf is a perfectly compelling question in fantasy sci-fi. Maybe less so in sci-fi fantasy.


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## pneumatik (Aug 12, 2012)

I was thinking about what exactly you could have in the past for a game happening 1 billion years in the future. For starters, the entire WH40k universe could have played out with mankind eventually losing. Maybe Tyranids ate us, maybe Chaos absorbed Earth into the warp, or whatever. That future plus recovering from its ending could easily take millions of years. In Numenera this civilization would explain all kinds of incredible weapons. Power armor and the general emphasis on melee combat would actually fit into a medieval setting pretty well.

And that's just one civilization. The second could be Dune, leaving behind mind-altering chemicals, extended life, and the ability to access your genetic memory. The third could be the Hyperion Cantos setting, which would have left behind strong AI and teleportation. For the fourth, why not Athas? Life bending, advanced beings, strange mutations, and other planes of existence. And that still leaves four more civilizations to provide whatever else Monte wants in his game.

The time between all those civilizations might just be boring. Maybe it's easy to get to our current level of technology but hard to get past it, so we spend millions of years at this level without reaching what the game considers a great civilization. Or maybe we're all really Moties and we just keep blowing ourselves up and starting over - the Great Sieve is still ahead in the real world.

So one billion years can work. It's enough time to put anything in you want, though it's also so much time that it takes work to fill it all in.


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## Underman (Aug 12, 2012)

Maybe after a billiion years, the Earth isn't even the original Earth anymore. It was destroyed after the 4th era, inhabited by space dolphins in the 5th era, and completely rebuilt by hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings (ie., mice) in the 6th era. And if you travel from Earth 2.0 to the sun, it turns out to be artificial operated by fire archons, and the moon is a remnant of Earth 1.0


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## Zelkon (Aug 12, 2012)

Barf. More rules light systems with ridiculous settings.


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## Underman (Aug 12, 2012)

OK, instead of complaining about the billiion years, let's come up with era-by-era ideas. I'll start:

* * *

*1st era*: Humans became transhuman and ascended to another dimension (ie became "gods")

*2nd era*: A new generation of humanity evolves from DNA seeds (part of a renewal process initiated just before the Ascension). Transhumans who hadn't ascended ('fallen angels') secretly co-exist with posthumans. Civilization eventually self-destructs with nuclear war.

*3rd era*: Nuclear winter and post-apocalyptic age (like Fallout)

*4th era*: Posthumans have evolved (devolved?) into something like subterranean Morlocks. Nature recovers and eventually flourishes. Posthumans reclaim and recolonize the earth.

*5th era*: Earth resembles the early 20th century. Lovecraftian Great Old Ones slither towards earth from space or awaken from the previous era (they were attracted to Earth by the nuclear war of the 2nd age). A century later, there is a short and brutal war, and the world's population is decimated.

*6th era*: Earth is a nightmare hell where Great Old Ones and Elder Gods vie for supremacy. The Ascended transhumans return to Earth for the 1st time after millions of years. They spawn a black hole that destroys the entire Earth and the Lovecraftian horrors along with it.

*7th era*: The transhumans completely rebuild Earth from scratch. Various politics ensue between different factions. Some want to rebuild an exact duplicate, some want to radically improve on the original, some want to rule the New Earth, some want to rebuild and split. The final product is not an exact duplicate, they take the liberty of making some changes. Life reboots with first dawn on New Earth while some transhumans continue to walk the earth and tinker with the final touches.

*8th era*: Insert your campaign-specific Second Age of New Earth

*9th era*: Numenera, Third Age of New Earth. Possible hostilities between "good" and "evil" transhumans/gods and secret war with vengeful Outer Gods and Great Old Ones who survived the 6th age.

* * *

What would be your Nine Eras?


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## darius0 (Aug 12, 2012)

For those who think there is completely unbelievable or that there is no possibility of humans or close-to-human creatures in 1 billion years, there are "living fossils" on Earth now. Some of which have changed very little 300-500 million years.


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## Belgos (Aug 13, 2012)

Wow:  Ten pages on one facet of a premise.  I'm going to take this as example of why 'showing the audience versus telling the audience' can be very important.  

Can we move on now and talk a bit more about the classes, the system and other aspects of it?


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## Otakkun (Aug 13, 2012)

Belgos said:


> Wow:  Ten pages on one facet of a premise.  I'm going to take this as example of why 'showing the audience versus telling the audience' can be very important.
> 
> Can we move on now and talk a bit more about the classes, the system and other aspects of it?




We need more info for that.


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## fled (Aug 13, 2012)

Belgos said:


> Wow:  Ten pages on one facet of a premise.  I'm going to take this as example of why 'showing the audience versus telling the audience' can be very important.
> 
> Can we move on now and talk a bit more about the classes, the system and other aspects of it?






> First you choose one of three types:​
> 
> 
> *Glaives*are the warriors of the Ninth  World.  Glaives can wear heavy armor and wield massive weapons, or they  can fight with light weapons and armor so they can move quickly.
> ...




In addition to the base class, it seems there will be quite a bit of flexibility and variance in mechanics when one selects descriptors and focus.


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## Nikosandros (Aug 13, 2012)

Shieldhaven said:


> 2. Spending experience points for short-term benefit is something I straight-out hate.



Same here. I think it's a terrible idea, and I've always hated it whenever I've seen it...


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## fled (Aug 13, 2012)

This is easily excluded / amended via "house rules". Also keep in mind the system is still in play testing.


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## Nikosandros (Aug 13, 2012)

fled said:


> This is easily excluded / amended via "house rules". Also keep in mind the system is still in play testing.



Of course and I didn't mean to imply that I'll reject Numenera because of this. As a matter of fact, it's rather likely that I'll support the Kickstarter.

However, it is a mechanic that I strongly dislike. I don't care for it as an optional rule in GURPS (one of my favorite games) and I was glad when it was removed from Savage Worlds.


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## Imperialus (Aug 13, 2012)

I love the science fantasy/sword and planet style of fantasy so I'm all over this one.  Here's hoping for some pulp in the style of Howard, Carter and Burroughs.


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## fled (Aug 14, 2012)

Zelkon said:


> Barf. More rules light systems with ridiculous settings.




I'll take rules light over mechanically burdened anyday. Unforunately actual role play is becoming a lost art. Back in 2nd ed, once my characters got into the teen levels, I was more interesting in building a kingdom, tower, clan, alliances, whatever than actual combat.

Anone who has ever cast a 9th level spell in game knows how much of a total joke combat becomes.


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## Von Ether (Aug 15, 2012)

Morrus said:


> "science fantasy" post-apolocalytpic far future setting.




We call that the "Dying Earth" genre around here. You'd think that with his strong built in D&D audience he'd just say that. *cough* Jack Vance *cough*


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## Animal (Aug 16, 2012)

> First you choose one of three types:​
> 
> 
> *Glaives*are  the warriors of the Ninth  World.  Glaives can wear heavy armor and  wield massive weapons, or they  can fight with light weapons and armor  so they can move quickly.
> ...




So.. It's class+descriptor+focus? Sounds kinda familiar.
*cough*class+background+specialty*cough*


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## fled (Aug 17, 2012)

I likes...



> *Stats*
> 
> There are three stats in Numenera: Might/Health, Speed/Agility, and  Intellect/Personality. But we just call them Might, Speed, and Intellect  for simplicity. They represent exactly what you would think they do.
> 
> ...


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## fled (Aug 17, 2012)

VERY interesting blog post by Monte on use of XP by GM's and Players in game. I like. A lot.

Experience Points and the Numenera GM | Monte Cook


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## fled (Aug 17, 2012)

Repeated post


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## Tom Servo (Aug 29, 2012)

The Kickstarter is about half way through so I thought I'd give this thread a bump.  It has already been funded and is well into the stretch goals.

The setting looks fascinating.  I am really looking forward to getting this next summer.


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