Numenera 2: The Kickstarter Is Live!

It's always an event when Monte Cook Games launches a Kickstarter. As a company, they have mastered the art of crowdfunding, with several well-executed, extremely successful Kickstarters under their belt - the original Numenera in 2012 raised over half a million dollars, and in total the company has run 11 high-profile, slick campaigns. The latest promises to be more of the same - Numenera 2: Discovery & Destiny has launched!

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This Kickstarter, five years after the original Numenera, is for two books entitled Discovery and Destiny. The first, Numenera Discovery, is, in their own words "a revision of the original Numenera corebook. Next summer, we will allow the original corebook to go out of print, and Numenera Discovery will take its place." However, MCG does go out of its way to point out that "Numenera Discovery is not a new edition".

The second book, Numenera Destiny, encompasses empire and community building. "You can make the world a better place. Help a community defend itself from abhumans or the iron wind. Create centers of learning or trade. Innovate, build, and protect. Manage an entire community and help it prosper and grow—or simply create a cool base or vehicle for your adventuring group."

The Kickstarter is certain to do well. I predict it funds in under an hour, and breaks the half-million barrier again. It's not a cheap one, though - it's for two books, and they cost $60 each in print; and if you want the full PDF set plus all the PDF stretch goals, it'll set you back a cool $100. MCG experimented - successfully! with it's Invisible Sun Kickstarter last year ($197 was the lowest pledge) and showed that expensive Kickstarters can work perfectly well.

As I said above, MCG Kickstarters are always an event. They're one of the companies to watch when they run a Kickstarter, because they invariably do it spectacularly. I think it's fair to say that these guys are experts at this!

Find the Kickstarter right here!

MCG's previous Kickstarters, which started annually and then become twice/year in 2015, include:

• Numenera: A new roleplaying game from Monte Cook ($517,255, August 2012)
• The Strange, a Tabletop RPG by Bruce Cordell & Monte Cook ($418,478, October 2013)
• Exclusive Numenera Boxed Set Edition ($286,565, November 2014)
• No Thank You, Evil! a Game of Make-Believe for Families ($111,750, May 2015)
• Numenera: Into the Ninth World ($417,560, August 2015)
• Worlds of the Cypher System ($304,430, February 2016)
• Invisible Sun ($664,274, August 2016)
• No Thank You, Evil! The Adventures Continue ($60,112, October 2016)
• A Strange Box ($162,819, February 2017)

That's a total of $2,943,243. Not counting the current one, of course!
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[TrickyUK]

As the KS approaches the end, I have to say that I have remained disappointed. It could be that my opinion was marred from the start. I didn’t like the presumptuous approach, with offering $120 worth of books for $280 on the basis that stretch goals were obviously going to be met and thus the pledge would be at least worth it’s retail value in time.

Now that the end is in sight and stretch goals have added a number of products, I looked at whether it was finally worth backing (for me personally). First off, I was only interested in RPG books; cards and novels don’t appeal to me. Even so, the total value (as given by the add-ons) for all the print RPG books is $335 for a $280 pledge. That is almost value for money. I say almost because I still need to add shipping (to UK) and when I estimate what the costs of these books will be online when released in the UK, I get a total figure of around £220. The exchange rate for $280 ends up around £220 also, but there is still shipping. And so, why would I want to have my money sat in MCG bank for the next 9-24 months, when it could be sat in mine. I simply did not see any additional value to me.

I do think that the approach to the campaign was very interesting. Seeing how involving the backers in a sort of mass community narrative experiment, which also tried to generate increased interest and pledge levels, was fun. I’ll admit I had seen enough of the narrative stuff after a couple of weeks and my preference would have been to see that aspect moved into a different space and left the backer comments for focusing on the KS itself. Despite there being over 2,000 backers, the comments were dominated by a much smaller number of people telling an collaborative story. My hat off to them; there is some good stuff there, but I just wanted it housed elsewhere on the web.

I guess what I have learnt is that I like KS from a financial investment point of view. I will invest if there is a low risk, value for money return. This KS, in the end, has felt like a social experiment with some money floating around in the background. The added value was being able to show off your creative side and be part of that backer community. And that wasn’t for me.

However, despite my negative outlook in general, I am really pleased that the KS did so well and l am looking forward to Numenera 2 and the new supplements that will be released over the next couple of years.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Tricky, those are all fair points. But here are a couple of others:

• You're after the RPG books only; that's fine. But one of them is a KS exclusive--you won't be able to buy The Trilling Shard.
• We ship UK orders from Devon, so shipping won't be that much.
• Busiest two days of the campaign are underway now. Who knows what else we might add?

It's perfectly OK, of course, if this campaign isn't for you--but I hope you'll give it another look before it ends tomorrow!

--Charles

 

[TrickyUK]

Tricky, those are all fair points. But here are a couple of others:

• You're after the RPG books only; that's fine. But one of them is a KS exclusive--you won't be able to buy The Trilling Shard.
• We ship UK orders from Devon, so shipping won't be that much.
• Busiest two days of the campaign are underway now. Who knows what else we might add?

It's perfectly OK, of course, if this campaign isn't for you--but I hope you'll give it another look before it ends tomorrow!

--Charles

I’m definitely intrigued by the final mystery book. Hope that the reveal isn’t timed too late (noting time difference in UK) for me to give 1 final consideration.

 

[CharlesRyan]

Welp, we've unlocked another book! That's now twelve titles in the all-the-books rewards, and it looks like we might add one more before it ends!

If anyone hasn't checked this out yet, I urge you to give it a look--Numenera is a great game (and getting better, after this!), and this is one of the biggest RPG Kickstarters ever. It's a deal not to be missed, but it's all over in about three hours!

--Charles

 

[BenTheFerg]

Yup. The new Numenera looks awesome. Liking the loom of the new types/ classes. The Io deck will be a useful addition. Looking forward to reading the campaign book too... awesome KS!