Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera [UPDATED]

TreChriron · Aug 8, 2012

This looks like a fun setting. I always enjoy Monte's creative ideas in his settings. Arcana Evolved/Diamond throne is one of my favorite!

Evenglare said:
Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. ... .

Li Shenron said:
I also thought 1b years is silly...

Who cares? It's just a game fiction. It's like all the awesome graphic novels, comics, and high styled movies adapted from such out there. Watched an anime? Heavy Metal anyone? There is a PILE of great creative settings and stories out that that have (bleep)-all to do with scientific accuracy.

tleilaxu · Aug 8, 2012

one could think of "a billion years" in the same sense that chinese use "10,000 years" or "the 10,000 things" or the bible uses "40 days and 40 nights", which is to say "a long time" or "myriad"

GSHamster · Aug 8, 2012

One thing about one billion years is that it is a long enough timescale for evolution to really kick in. Other timescales being bandied around, like a hundred thousand, or even one million years, are too short to really see major changes on an evolutionary scale.

A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.

Psion · Aug 8, 2012

Evenglare said:
Looks cool... as an astrophysicist I cringe when I hear "a billion" years. I don't know if he understands how long or not long that is considering what he's said about it. 8 great ages have past on earth... Now it took around 5 billion years for life to advance on earth as it has. Humans go to where we are in what... ~12,000 years? Around 65 million years is when the dinosaurs had their heyday. Now im no anthropologist but A billion years is... I ... ugh.. I Dont even know it just seems like he picked a large number and said Eh...... there's also several other things to think about, considering the moon is going to be much farther away from us then ( if it isnt gone altogether from some rogue comet or something), Saturn wont have rings, the sun wont quite be red giant yet, but it will be past mid age... I can't imagine the earth being anything other than a desolate wasteland ( of course you can say SCIENCE-MAGIC and take care of that) . I dont know, im definitely curious just to see how much thought was put into it.

If he was going for a Zothique/Dying Earth sort of setting, then choosing astronomically significant timeframes might have been purposeful. These stories do picture Earth as a much changed (or dying) world.

Of course it's science *fantasy*, so it might not be worth dwelling on that overmuch.

Morrus · Aug 9, 2012

GSHamster said:
A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.

I dunno. Our last mass-extinction event was, what, 60-million years ago?

One every 60-million years gives potential for more than 8 civilizations.

Dice4Hire · Aug 9, 2012

GSHamster said:
One thing about one billion years is that it is a long enough timescale for evolution to really kick in. Other timescales being bandied around, like a hundred thousand, or even one million years, are too short to really see major changes on an evolutionary scale.

A billion might be a bit too large, but I think you definitely need at least 100 million to do things like dinosaurs rising up and then going extinct.

With the technology he mentions, who needs natural evolution?

Dice4Hire · Aug 9, 2012

Morrus said:
I dunno. Our last mass-extinction event was, what, 60-million years ago?

One every 60-million years gives potential for more than 8 civilizations.

But how long does each of these civilizations last? A few million years strikes me as pretty ridiculous.

And with erosion and whatnot, how could anything be left a billion years later? Even with super-advanced technology?

Sir Robilar · Aug 9, 2012

Jeffery427 said:
Setting seems possibly interesting, but certainly done before.

Could anyone point me to an RPG where this has been done before?

I'm just curious as I don't know of any Science Fantasy RPGs.

calprinicus · Aug 9, 2012

Sounds interesting. Wish more was posted about the mechanics. Wonder how he plans to make it easy to run on the fly with little or no preperation. I'll Probably throw enough at the kick starter to buy a PDF version.

Forgot to quote but traveller and gurps both had good sci-fi themed RPGs.

Sir Brennen · Aug 9, 2012

Sounds like someone's been reading their Book of the New Sun (though in that series, "only" a million years have passed). For better or worse, the Gene Wolfe books are probably going to color my thoughts on Monte's game.

I think people aren't grasping how mind boggling a billion years is. That's basically the time from multicellular organisms appearing to us dropping robots on Mars. That's enough time for a hundred - or even a thousand - civilizations to rise and fall.

Over that span of time into the future, it's really unlikely that human descendants exist in a form even vaguely resembling us. Either technology has made them trans-trans-trans-to-the-Nth-power-humans, and/or during the periods after the fall of the various civilizations, natural evolutionary forces came back into play. It be entirely reasonable for them to be as different from us as we are from fish, at least. A billion years in the future, and Earth might as well be considered an alien planet.

I'm not sure what Monte's tweet is implying, but for a sci-fantasy setting like this, probably better just to say "in a future far, far away", and leave it at that.