Kickstarter Tea Leaves -- Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny

(Note: This post assumes that you are familiar with the basic rules terms used in Numenera and other Cypher System products and that you know a little about Numenera's setting. If you don't have this background knowledge, the post may be confusing.)

Today, Monte Cook Games launched a Kickstarter called Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny. The project is billed as "two new corebooks for Numenera." However, the description says that the mechanics of the game will change only marginally and that virtually all current supplements will be compatible with the new books. However, these new core books -- Numenera Discovery and Numenera Destiny -- will each be roughly the size of the current corebook, simply called Numenera. This means that there will be twice as much material in the new Numenera core rules as in the current ones. What will this new material be? I'm willing to hazard a couple of guesses, based on the description of the new books in the Kickstarter.

The first fodder for speculation comes from the two supplements that are listed as not entirely compatible with the new core: Numenera Character Options and Numenera Character Options 2. Specifically, MCG says they "will retire these titles" because they "will become substantially less relevant following the improvements in Numenera Discovery." Since those two titles contained -- among other things -- descriptors for prototypical citizens of regions of the Ninth World, we can surmise that more mechanics tied into the cultures of the setting will be moved to the core rules. This may herald a movement to tie the rules of Numenera more closely to the setting. Such a change could potentially benefit the game, since the Ninth World is the star of the game but has never been intertwined with the mechanics the way, say, Rokugan is tied into the rules of Legend of the Five Rings. Furthermore, there is little incentive to keep the Numenera rules generic now that a generic version of the underlying system is available in The Cypher System Rulebook. However, too much integration may change the rules too much to maintain the backward compatability MCG is promising, so the finished product probably will not have every mechanical aspect of the character tied to the setting the way L5R does. I do expect to see the descriptors from the Steadfast nations in Numenera Discovery. There may also be foci specifically tied to nations or regions of the Ninth World.

The second thing that struck me was the entire premise of the second new corebook, Numenera Destiny. The description makes it sound like a GM's guide with a detailed emphasis on a specific type of campaign. The stated idea behind this book is to support a kind of campaign in which the PCs use the treasures they find in ruins to make the Ninth World a better place, perhaps more like the wondrous civilizations on whose ruins it rests. Despite MCG's statement in the Kickstarter description that this kind of campaign was one of the original goals of the game, this strikes me as a bit of a retcon. Chapter 23 of the original corebook gives four different "flavors" a GM can put on the Ninth World, but most of the writing in the book seems to support the "post-apocolyptic" spin as the default flavor. In this take on the setting, the PCs use the Numenera they find to help themselves and their communities survive. The description of Numenera Destiny lines up with the "hopeful new world" flavor, which seems much less supported by the text as a whole. Given this shift in focus, I wonder if there will be multiple slants on the setting in the new core books or if everything will be presented through the lens of a hopeful new world.

In short, I expect a consistently brighter setting (for better or worse), with more mechanics that tie into elements of the setting.