So the setting has accompanying art. Apparently only 1/3 of the people drawing actually got instruction on what to draw. What I mean by that is that 1/3 is actually consistent with the setting ie. barbarians plus futuretech interspersed while the other 2/3 is half steampunk and half full medieval/D&D. There's no coherence. One picture is just a knight in armor (with an erection codpiece. Wow.), another is a steampunk lumberjack machine. Total incoherence of theme. And the futuretech pics are so samey it's weird. There are pictures of example characters where everything future-y is chrome with glowy blue bits. Chrome + glowy blue bits = future! There's very little variation on that theme. The steampunk and medieval pictures just make no sense. They look like they were pulled from google images or deviant art pages. It's completely schizophrenic.
The maps are fine, nothing unique about them. They pull a Fable though and only show you a tiny chunk of the world. I don't understand why. It's 1 continent but it only shows an area that seems to be the Southwest corner and it's about the size of the continental US. It has a similar problem with Eberron that I ran into a lot as both DM and player: too many locales. In some areas they just sweep over the villages saying there are a bunch in an area. In other locales every single place with more than 300 people is labelled and given back story. It's just a lot to slog through and you start to lose the flavor of areas when they try really hard to make every small gathering of people unique in some way. There's a reason why there are very few coherent maps of medieval Europe; crap like this. A billion factions that all know and interact with one another and swear fealty to people and have fealty sworn to them. It gets so messy. One thing Monte talked about was each region having it's own flavor but reading this I've gotten really simplistic things to take away from areas. This one has crystals. This one emphasizes dreams. This one has boats. This one has forts. Every kingdom is very bland without many distinguishing characteristics. I can see direct translations from Dark Sun and Eberron here too but even those are dumbed down.
It really resembles Eberron in the Nine Kingdoms area known as Steadfast. Each kingdom has a 'flavor' and the king/queen/sea captain of the locale is the ideal of that flavor. Similar to Eberron in that sense but very much toned down. In Eberron you had nations like a totalitarian utopia of robots, a dictatorship of undead, a democracy of mages, some demon lands, counties of monsters etc. Throughout those you had Dragonmarked houses which controlled the basic staples of D&D games: banking, postal service, transportation, hotels etc. Each faction was very unique and had reasons to maintain the peace. It still had a similar amount of mystery as Numenera (What happened to the giants? What happened to this specific Dragonmarked house? What happened to Cyre?) and there was a lot of variety without being overwhelming. In Eberron fluff you could zoom in and zoom out. For example: you control a powerful adventuring party that has gained influence enough to start fielding forces. You can now zoom out to the country level and figure out whom to invade or start politicking with. If you get even more powerful you can even zoom out to the continent level where each continent is controlled by a large faction (Dragons, Elves, Psychic Spirits from Dreams [seriously], and Giants [formerly]) or you can zoom in to the city level and have adventures there. With the level of your party you were able to change the level of adventure you had.
Now, I may be being unfair, Eberron had splatbooks after all, but in the beginning of Eberron you could do all these things. The splatbooks merely let you run your campaigns in the other continents. You were able to go from starting level characters to high level adventurers just using the corebooks without feeling like you had to completely rewrite the fluff to fit in your uber-heroes. It's a great setting. Numenera may get better with more splat but right now it's just Eberron Basic with a new ruleset. Still gotta look at the ruleset...
In Numenera you have the problem where the more powerful people just get X-device that does Plot Damage. In real terms there are several high-level characters listed and they just get a special unknown device that does half a high-level character's health. Same problem exists in Exalted (among many problems that exist in Exalted) the higher-level enemies just have Plot abilities. Some of them are completely immune to damage for all intents and purposes (1 mote to dodge an ability, gains back 2 motes a second) and have instant kill free skills. If you need DM fiat to beat an enemy then the game designers screwed up.
To go back to my first point I find the amount of 'variety' stifling and simplistic. A lot of the 'Weird
of ______' are similar to each other or completely meaningless. A path appears for an hour sometimes, a door appears for an hour sometimes, a mountain appears for an hour sometimes, a blue pyramid appears for an hour sometimes. No one knows anything about them (up to the DM, I guess) so in the book the setting gets really dull. Why is it that so many things have to appear and disappear? Why are almost all of them appears for x time (where x is usually 1 hour)? There are several "x in box" where x is a dog, robot or woman or something. There are several wandering automatons. There are several powerful but mysterious old people and there are several cults based around things that may have happened (ex: satellite fell and a dude walked out. Dude and satellite never seen again = Cult). You get the picture. The things that should be most interesting, they're called 'Weird' after all, are in fact repeated over and over again and become dull quite fast. Even the unique 'Weird's that aren't repeated are pretty dull. For example: a fish that talks. That's all it is. It just talks. Wow! Crazy futuretech! I hate to harp on this but how is it that 1 continent on Eberron has more variety and unique places and objects than this 9th world has? It has access to anything you could imagine. Literally. The past civilizations are said to have had pretty much all powers ever (Infinity Gauntlets for everybody essentially) and yet we get around 5 tropes and they rinse and repeat. With the amount of variety available it really shows how rushed/little creativity was put into this. The most unique element is a floating obelisk that teleports you to a satellite. But the teleport part doesn't work anymore. So the most unique element is a floating obelisk.
Last point is the variety of races. Or lack thereof. Lack thereof. There are 3 + mutant humans. Mutant humans can get crazy and that's fun but it's totally random and that's not fun. I'd allow my players to just select your upgrades. That's more fun. Anyways it's Humans, Varjellen and Lattimors. The Varjellen are fish-looking people with the ability to reach inside their chest and rearrange their organs thus improving their abilities. The Lattimors are ox people with fungi that make them sentient. Both are interesting options but they're the only options. In an interview Monte has said you'll have more races because you'll have more abilities to alter your character. But a lot of that is up to the DM and whether or not you survive. Also by that logic then 3.5 Clerics and Wizards are technically hundreds of races due to their transmogrifying spells. If a cleric gives himself dragon wings does he count as a new race? According to Monte, 'yes'. You're able to modify your human with cybernetics or genetic manipulation which would put the race count at 6. Humans, Cyborgs, Furries, Mutants, Varjellen and Lattimors. But every character will have cybernetics so Humans and Cyborgs get condensed and mutants can be more ideal furries than the gene manipulators so they get combined too. Mutants just get the gene manipulation bonuses at the start of the game instead of later. And they can get it later too. So in the end we're back to 3 + mutant humans.
Monte likes to say in the book that cybernetics stretch the definition of what is human. While true the fact that no one understands cybernetics and have the medieval mindset it's defined pretty linearly by the locals in the setting. It's either full or partial acceptance. Anyone who didn't accept cybernetics would be wiped out. The closest is Jaekylls who rely on bio-cybernetics anyways. The equipment a character chooses isn't a variety of character. It's a variety of equipment. But seeing as you almost never know what it does it's hard for me to even consider it a choice. You can even figure out what it does and yet it defines your character. Huh? I have no idea how spleens work but do they define me? Do they change my race? It's a simplistic way to just gloss over the fact that you forgot a pure robot race. I mean come on! There are robots everywhere! Not in character select? Blarg. But also it's just a trick to get out of the fact that the most unique race Monte ever came up with was Lion people. Even disregarding that having 3 races in a future where anything is possible is unconscionable. Hell, read Hitchhiker's guide and pick 5 races. Bam. Creative bankruptcy is apparent in this book when the races are so bland.
I really haven't warmed up to the Numenera setting yet and it's making me long for even more psychotic settings like Exalted. Even the rules-mageddon that it is.
Afterword
To let you into my thought process I want to talk more about what I hoped this game would be. First teaser was a Human and his thuman pet climbing a floating monolith and discovering the interior. What I then hoped was that there would be a lot more information known about the world by the populace and that there would be a huge variety of races and character types to play. I heard '1 billion years' and thought wow, that's gotta mean crazy crazy imagination playground. I was thinking robot kingdoms with AI's acting live hive organisms, energy beings enslaving humans with psychic powers, muscle-bound space mercs invading from the sky and decimating cities and villages, bio-enhanced warrior-queens coming in from under the ground only to vanish into shadow when the tide turns. I mean I was imagining crazy stuff but thought, "if I can think of this in 5 minutes and they have months then this setting will be crazy". Instead it's 9 nations ruled by cyborgs and a papacy dedicated to technology. VARIETY. All sorts of interesting ideas just get tiny blurbs while a queen whose only defining characteristic is that she is old but looks young gets several paragraphs. They made the most boring ideas the focal points.
Early on they emphasized how the limits of our physics would be done away with, how biology would be bent as easily as a spoon and how technology would fuse seamlessly with society and the game. Instead 50% of things you come across kill you and the more you have the more likely it will explode. Seamless integration. Biology is mostly done through DM and character creation. Physics is still thoroughly limited except at very specific Numenera's but the physics breaking isn't really that at all. (Pretty much everything in the book that's 'crazy physics' is a teleportation device). Oh man the Amber monolith. Huge massive Amber Obelisk floating in the air with spinning disks around the middle and a cyborg-gorilla guarding the interior. What does it do?! It teleports you to a space station. In Star Trek that's a pad the size of an NYC apartment (the nice kind). In this it's a massive mountain of amber turned into an obelisk. I was so disappointed when that fluff came out. Apparently all the power of the monolith is just to teleport to a space station that has some more powers.
They really didn't do anything with the base idea is what I'm getting at. It would have been better to have the citizenry to have advanced knowledge of a lot of technology but little knowledge of true hypertech like sun-modifying devices and dimensional portals. Everyone should know a lot about cybernetics and take stuff from what would be our future routinely. I mean a setting like Deus Ex but post-apocalypse would be a nice base. This medieval setting with technology instead of sorcery is so bland. Everything here can be done in 3.5. Only satellites can't be and no one really sees them. Blah, maybe I'm just being too demanding for people to wow me with creativity. But at the same time I've never hated on Exalted's setting. Never hated the Warhammer 40k setting. I don't demand much obviously as 40k gets routine hate for it's lackluster creativity. But Numenera just set me up for high expectations and failed to even meet my lowest. Having no one know anything turns this from a setting of discovery to a setting of railroading. I've seen what happens when DMs (both experienced and not) get a new setting with lots to fill in. They blow it. People can't be creative on the spot, it's difficult. Even planning it out ahead of time means that you'll need a DM who's a good writer. So everyone who wrote this book is out. I don't care how amazing your DM is, if he can come up with a brand new story every time and it's well-written enough that he can plan ahead for player reactions and alter the story on the fly then congratulations. You have a DM that can play literally any setting well. That doesn't prove Numenera is good. A bad setting made good by a DM does not justify the setting.
What I would have liked for Numenera is either of two things: 1. Post-apocalyptic where there are no kingdoms or organizations above the level of warbands or 2. Further along in the story when a lot is figured out but extreme dangers abound and other powerful futuretech societies vie for the remaining/undiscovered hypertech. Having people operate farms with plows at the same time as people with rayguns are blasting away buildings makes the setting really schizo and 80s. If you want to play this setting just watch old episodes of He-man. It's like that but super-serious.
So yeah. That's how I feel about the setting. Needed to get that out. Pretty disappointed with things and hoping that the splatbooks and Torment: Tides of Numenera will help flesh out this bereft world.
I'm surprised no one has replied to your well reasoned opinion of this setting. While I did not participate in the Kickstarter, I did buy the game and am semi-active on the NinthWorld forums.
ReplyDeleteAlot of what you have to say in your Afterwards mirror many thoughts I've had as well. Especially the Adventure Time and 80s comic references. I struggled with the setting for a few weeks and came to the conclusion that I could take some other Sword & Sorcery or Post-Apocalyptic setting and amp up the understanding and prevalence of stylistically Sciency elements and have a meatier more realized setting.
I guess one way to describe Sciency is to use a magic item from AD&D as a example - a dart that transformed into a swarm of bees that hurtled toward its target. In a Sciency fantasy game, I would more likely describe it as a hand-held missile that splits into swarming metallic shards that seek their target unerringly.
I'm getting off point here. Just wanted to say I agree that the setting is kind of weak. It does have lots of cute shout-outs to other games, comics, TV, and movies. I don't have any experience with Eberron, but I might take a look at that for inspiration. Maybe, NeoExodus too.
I do however like the rules system. It's pretty easy to get a handle on what a character is and what they should be capable of doing with lots of room to expand beyond the Fighter, Magic-User, Thief paradigm. Easy to grasp character concepts lend themselves very well to two-fisted adventure gaming.