Numenera

I've gotten a pdf of the core rules of Numenera and want to get my thoughts about it out here. I'm not so much interested in the rules because the people I game with tend to break them so it's a competition between DM and god-like beings so not worried about imbalance. What bothers me really is the story. It falls for a lot of the 'errors' I see in other settings. Let me explain:

First off, if you haven't heard of Numenera it's an RPG by Monte Cook crowd-funded through Kickstarter. It's set 1 billion years in the future on Earth ("Ninth World" in the book) and you take the role of adventurers in this world filled with futuretech and few answers.

The initial warning signs are readily apparent: 1 billion years in the future. What does that mean? It means that nothing that we have around today is still around. Nothing. Only the basic elements that we use today will still be around then. It would also mean that having the campaign on Earth is nonsense as our sun would have boiled off all the water and blow away the atmosphere by then. But that hasn't happened and no one knows why. No one should know why either, everyone is pretty much completely oblivious, the book says that pretty much everyone is at the level of 1000 AD (not counting futuretech). Also Mercury is gone. Okay. The problems with the fluff are already starting to mount:

• A billion years (but nothing that should happen by then happened)
• 1000 AD mindset/tech level
• Mercury is gone

Why are these problems? Well if you are going to set something a billion years in the future and then ignore all the things that happen a billion years in the future then why bother? Why not just 100 million? That's plenty of time for civilizations with hypertech to rise and fall and spread across huge distances (especially since there are devices mentioned in book that can instantly cross interstellar distances) and then collapse. The continents would be hugely different and the same changes that exist in the book would exist here. So pretty much Cook says '1 billion' and then says, 'but without any consequences past 100 million. So really just 100 million but A BILLION.' It's already promoting drivel. If you are going to use a setting and then use none of the 'setting' then why bother? I want a story about medieval times but without feudalism. Alright but then why write about it? It's pandering to get people to look at it...kinda like the rest of the book. 

So everyone is completely unaware of what anything does. They can sew and work metal but tech beyond that is beyond them, except where the futuretech somehow started working for them. They're all at the level of D&D in every edition though: all technology is magic. What bothers me is how similar it is to D&D specifically things like Greyhawk and Eberron. Since no one can distinguish technology from magic why not just make it magic? To illustrate my point I'll use an example: in the book there are these guys called the Jaekels. They modified their bodies to have wings and creepy tattoos. There's a picture included. In the book they abhor technology other than genetic manipulation. But if in the end what you have is magic hawk people that modify themselves with something they call magic then why don't you just drop the futuretech bs and say it's magic? Really this is the part of the setting that confuses me most: all technology is magic and everyone who uses it is a magic-user. Every effect is magic and every device is magic. So why not just make it magic then? If you're not going to explore technology and instead have everyone just know it as magic and be unable to do more than fiddle with it then why bother at all? What's the point of all this futuretech when all Monte Cook did was "ctrl+ f 'magic' replace with 'futuretech'". The setting does nothing with technology! If no one knows how to do it other than magic-users (Nanos in the setting. Because it's future sounding I guess). Here's what I've found: the entire setting is just alternate names for D&D tropes. If you've played 3.5 you've played Numenera. Numenera, in my opinion, is just Eberron with less variety. And since no one knows a single thing about any of the tech why bother? The setting is just a waste.

In the end Numenera is a very juvenile fantasy setting. It's just 8 year old pandering. Lizard Knights with laser lances! A huge metal dude! An evil queen who controls dreams! It's the plots of 80's cartoons amalgamated into a mess. Take the villains from Bravestar and He-Man and you have Numenera's BBEGs. 

I should look into the rules of how this game is played because this silly mess of fluff is not helping get me interested in playing this game at all.  

PS: Mentioning Mercury being gone is useless fluff. No one can get to space by any known means and no one has any idea what space even means, 1000AD mindset remember? The universe is just heliocentric rings to them. It makes you the reader go, "hmmm, how'd that happen" then "wait, why does that matter?"