Quote from: Benoist;726820In any case, Butcher, Numenera is worth checking out. Really.

Amazon's got it for $40. My partner-in-crime who owns a copy suggested we give it a spin before I buy it, but I think I'll break down before that. I've had a huge Amazon order in my cart for a while now... Your endorsement might just be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

The Beastiary came out last week.  

It's pretty interesting.  The manual starts with a guide to creating beasts (for GMs), then there's a small section on ecology as well as examples of livestock/pets/mounts.  

The main bestiary is an A-Z affair, (appendixes and charts rate by rank).  After that, there's a short section with "characters" (three examples of "human types" similar to the examples in the core book (Arch-Nano, Deadly Warrior, Poisoner), and a larger section with NPCs--individual NPCs who might wander the world.  (All of them are unique--Monte doesn't stat them as Nth Tier Jacks or anything like that).

Some interesting beasts there--there's a couple more Nibvonian types (similar to the wives, but "bonding" the players in other ways as a child or pet), a type that appears to get inspiration from Kaiju type monsters, a two-dimensional hound, a living nanoswarm, something so ugly if you see its face your brains will literally melt out of your nose, a weaponized meme, a collossus that contains a city in a pocket dimension in place of its head, a race of bat-like beings who are peaceful unless one of them gets a disease, etc.

It's well laid out and in addition to art, there are silhouette guides that help determine how these creatures scale compared to a human.

Monte Cooke Games have launched their web store today, and they are having a one day sale with 46% off everything (it's also Monte's 46th birthday):

http://www.montecookgames.com/the-monte-cook-games-web-store-is-now-open/

Quote from: dbm;727891Monte Cooke Games have launched their web store today, and they are having a one day sale with 46% off everything (it's also Monte's 46th birthday):

http://www.montecookgames.com/the-monte-cook-games-web-store-is-now-open/

46% off! Bought the beastiary, ended up being $27 shipped. Not terrible.

Quote from: dbm;727891Monte Cooke Games have launched their web store today, and they are having a one day sale with 46% off everything (it's also Monte's 46th birthday):

http://www.montecookgames.com/the-monte-cook-games-web-store-is-now-open/

Agghh, I'm broke until Friday. Oh well.

I'll have to get me the Bestiary sooner or later myself. The beasties in the core book are weird and awesome enough sure, but a whole book of nothing but Numenera beastie weirdness!? That's gotta be distilled awesome.

(My fave core book beastie being the humanoid with a tentacle for a head...)

Quote from: The Ent;728084(My fave core book beastie being the humanoid with a tentacle for a head...)

Heh. Made me think so much of (one of) the avatar(s) of Nyarlathotep. Cool.

Played this for the first time last night.

I liked it a lot.  It played fast.  Combat was extremely quick.  Lots of room for role playing, and lots of connections between characters that fostered more role playing.  The setting was interesting and different and unexpected.  Overall, a pretty good experience.  We'll see if it lasts over the coming weeks and months.

So, I bought the Numenera book a couple of weeks ago (along with the gorgeous DCC rulebook during the Tabletop Day discounts at DTRPG), and managed to run a few games so far. I'm running it for two different groups (which happen to have very different tastes in RPGs), everyone loves it. I also managed to play a few The Strange sessions as a playtester, so I experienced the system as both GM and player.

The things I was most worried about, Stat pools as both your buff pints and your health, surprisingly works like a charm in play. I was worried that players will be reluctant to spend points in order to improve their rolls, but I was wrong. Since the first two recovery rolls in a day only take a moment (1 action and 10 minutes), it's not difficult to be back at full points in your pools (not to mention first aid rolls to recover some extra points as well). On top of that, Edge really decreases the cost of most stuff you have to pay for, up to making them free once you have a experienced character. I guess it's just about knowing when is smart to apply Effort and when it isn't.

As a GM, my favorite feature is GM Intrusions. It allows for a lot of cinematographic improvised things that may happen as the game goes by to make things more difficult for the character, while rewarding them at the same time.

On the last session we played, the players had a fight with a mercenary they have been tracking for days since she stole something the players want to return to the original owners. They found her in an underground chamber in an ancient "temple", and they started to fight. Each of my three players rolled a 1 on his dice roll in succession (natural 1 in Numenera means a free GM Intrusion). I decided that as one of the players threw a metal disct toward the mercenary, he instead hit a hidden control panel in the chamber, so the whole temple went crazy. Following that, the nano tries to do a mental attack on the mercenary to stop her, and he rolls a 1. Since on the previous chamber there was a weird mechanism involving telepathic statues, I decided that as the temple went crazy the statues automatically linked to his mind, stunning him while showing him super weird images from the past (I allowed the player to roll in order to obtain information from the visions). The mercenary run away with another relic, while my players chose to stay on the temple and try to stop it from exploding (which they miraculously did in a very badass scene). And that's when the session ended (I can't wait to get back to it).

If I was running another game, I'd probably do a simple fight (I certainly didn't planned all that, it was supposed to be a simple fight so they could get the information they needed to move along), but since the system forced me to introduce Gm Intrusions, and since all my players happened to roll a 1 in a row (seriously, how many times does that happen?), I decided to make the best of it, and my players enjoyed it. Of course a good GM could have done the same with any system if he felt like it, but I'm glad that the Cypher System forces the GM from time to time to improvise and patch his notes, while rewarding players at the same time.

It was a great (and extremely fun) experience, and so far the games are turning out better than I originally thought. Numenera is going up very fast in my game ranking list, probably even among my Top 5 games.

Numenera is great for what it is: an unapologetically narrative role playing game that assumes its identity minus the Forge bagage and manages to be truly original in places. I can see how it can rock the world of gamers who like these things.

The setting for me, personally, is the real value here. The system is not my cup of tea. I could imagine playing it and having tons of fun, but that is not my GMing style at all. The GM intrusions for the sake of the fiction, the players roll all the dice design of the game, these just rub me the wrong way as a GM.

It's certainly worth a look in any case.

Quote from: Benoist;745724Numenera is great for what it is: an unapologetically narrative role playing game that assumes its identity minus the Forge bagage and manages to be truly original in places. I can see how it can rock the world of gamers who like these things.

The setting for me, personally, is the real value here. The system is not my cup of tea. I could imagine playing it and having tons of fun, but that is not my GMing style at all. The GM intrusions for the sake of the fiction, the players roll all the dice design of the game, these just rub me the wrong way as a GM.

It's certainly worth a look in any case.

These things taken into consideration, could you just play it "straight"?

By that I mean "BRP/D&D/Traveller" style, like a "normal" RPG.
>inb4 define normal. You know what I mean, non-forged stuff.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;745731These things taken into consideration, could you just play it "straight"?

By that I mean "BRP/D&D/Traveller" style, like a "normal" RPG.
>inb4 define normal. You know what I mean, non-forged stuff.

No. Not with the system as it is. You could theoretically rebuild it from the ground up and whatnot, but that'd represent just as much work as using the setting with an house ruled D&D or GURPS or d6 would represent. Plus, it would completely excise what was the point in building the Cypher system (as Numenera and The Strange's system is called) in the first place.

One thing is sure: Monte Cook is a marketing genius.
The effort necessary to produce glimmers is very low compared to the amount of money each supplement brings into his hands.

Glimmers and Cyphers. I hear these words and I must read to discover their meaning, because at this point (not knowing the system) they are very opaque.

A good or bad thing system-design-wise?

Cypher's an in-game term.

Glimmers are short products Monte's releasing to both supplement the official big ones--most of those big ones which a lot of Kickstarter backers will be getting for free.  Think of Glimmers as akin to the size of a lot of the products SJG passes off for GURPS--not big books, but small short subject booklets.  They are about 3-5 dollars and are probably anywhere from 18-32 pages.