Character type is the core of a character. Type helps determine a character’s place in the world and relationship with other people in the setting. It’s the noun of the sentence “I am an adjective noun who verbs.”
Numenera 2 allows players to choose from a total of six different character types: the Glaive, Nano, and Jack described in Numenera Discovery, and the Arkus, Wright, and Delve presented in Numenera Destiny.
Today, let’s take a high-level look at the Wright!
About Wrights
Wrights are builders and crafters. When something special is required, a Wright can probably make it. When strange instructions—usually called “plans of numenera” or just “plans”— are found encoded in the ruins of the prior worlds, Wrights can decipher them, and using special components called iotum, craft cyphers, artifacts, or installations. (Installations are things like water purifiers, lightning towers, or force-shield generators.) They can also craft automatons and even amazing vehicles, if their mastery grows sufficiently.
Wrights are especially good at understanding and “stealing” the fire of creation that burned so brightly in the civilizations that preceded the Ninth World. Wrights are the rarest of the already rare scholars of the numenera; they aren’t afraid of weird or incomprehensible lore of the prior worlds—they try to take it apart and learn how to make more.
Not everyone who crafts items of the numenera is a Wright—Wrights are simply those who’ve trained for (or otherwise gained) unique abilities related to building wondrous things.
Wrights enjoy spending quality time building and crafting, but they also like to explore, especially because the iotum they need can usually only be found by salvaging it from places where physical danger is certain.
People are usually very accepting of Wrights, since the things they craft are often useful or even necessary, whether that be a wagon, a wall, or an installation that can light up a small community. In fact, a Wright could by viewed by some as a vital part of any community, but especially so for one that has special needs that can’t be met any other way. With enough time and recourses, a Wright might be able to provide clean water, nutrition, defense, and of course, comfortable homes for people to live.
But when Wrights begin to dabble in more exotic installations, or they make automatons or even vehicles, concern can creep in. A Wright with an automaton servant might be seen by some as a sorcerer who has infused a demonic spirit into crude matter, giving it “life,” similar to the kinds that litter the landscape and that most people have enough sense to avoid.
Wright Abilities
Wrights are capable PCs and share the basic suite of beginning abilities that any explorer has, including knowledge of weapons, equipment, the ability to use cyphers, starting Pools, and so on.
The easiest and most straightforward way for a character to craft any object or structure of the numenera is to use a plan. Plans can be found when exploring, potentially anywhere information is encoded, cached, or phased. They can even occasionally be discovered by making special requests to the datasphere. Mundane objects and structures do not require plans. But all objects and structures of the numenera, like installations, artifacts, cyphers, vehicles, and automatons, do. Thanks to constant research and study, Wrights gain access to plans of the numenera each time they advance in tier.
Other Wright abilities include the ability to ease salvage tasks, gaining extra uses from installations or artifacts, building better quality items than non-Wrights, and similar tasks.
A Wright can also use their abilities to scramble or even disable enemy machines and items of the numenera, boost cyphers, create traps on the fly, gain a bond with all the numenera they’ve previously built to garner remote triggering and other abilities, gain followers to help them in their crafting techniques, and many other related abilities.
At upper tiers, a Wright gains even greater control of the installations and other items they’ve built, granting them a variety of a powerful abilities from tapping and redirecting their energy—up to and including causing an installation to heave itself up out of the earth and become, for a short time, a juggernaut of incredible destruction.
Wrights can craft not only installations, but also cyphers and artifacts. So even if a Wright never builds an installation or helps found a base or community, they’ll be incredibly useful explorers, and able, with some study and practice, to craft the perfect complement to an adventurer’s equipment.
If you want a character good at making things, a Wright might be just right for you.
