Playtesting The Stars Are Fire
A science fiction tabletop RPG might be thought of differently than a fantasy game. And by differently, I mean implicitly …
Voices of the Datasphere
One of the topics about the Ninth World that I’ve been asked about the most—to the surprise of no one—is …
My Love for RPGs Led Me to Numenera
My Love Affair with RPGs My first experience with roleplaying games was at Scout camp. The older Scouts, huddled around …
Designing for Surreality, Secrets, and a Supreme Experience
When Monte first discussed Invisible Sun with everyone here at Monte Cook Games, three things stuck out to me that …
Making Levels Matter for Cyphers and Artifacts
One of the key features of Numenera Destiny is that PCs will have a robust and detailed set of rules …
Shaking Up Your Followers
Follower (noun): someone that a character has inspired (or asked) to come work with them or assist them for an …
Smoothing Out the Rules
One of the things we wanted to do while updating the Numenera corebook to Numenera Discovery and Numenera Destiny was to …
Numenera Salvaging and Crafting
Which came first, the Wright—a type begging for an interlocking crafting subsystem to support their play—or a salvaging and crafting …
Numenera Callouts and Compatibility
When we first starting talking about creating Numenera Destiny and Numenera Discovery, we agreed that we wouldn’t make these new …
Giving Players More Choices
Numenera Discovery was an opportunity for the designers to take a hard look at Numenera player characters with a more …
Player Intrusions
From the earliest days of Numenera, people asked, “Why are there GM intrusions and not player intrusions?” I felt, at …
Arkus, Delve, and Wright — Designing New Numenera Types
Numenera Destiny introduces three new types: Arkus, Wright, and Delve. As you can imagine, a lot of design time, iteration, …