Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera [UPDATED]

[trancejeremy]

Definitely shades of Zothique. Which is a good thing.

I'm not an Astrophysicist, but I did study to be one, and I seem to recall that the Sun is middle aged right now. A billion years in the future it's going to be noticeably brighter, like 10%. But the Earth should still be livable, if not as nice as it is now.

Also interesting is what the world will look like. 250 million years from now it's supposed to (maybe) basically be one big continent again.

That's actually when my D&D campaign setting is set (since I liked the map I found of the proposed supercontinent). But taking a page out of Larry Niven's A World Out of Time, the whole solar system has been rearranged somewhat. Since he mentions "Cosmic Engineering" sounds like that might be a possibly here as well.

 

[Li Shenron]

I also thought 1b years is silly... 10.000 years might have been enough for 8 great civilizations, and 100.000 years definitely more than enough.

But besides that nitpick, it looks it has the potential to be a great setting!

 

[Connorsrpg]

Another person that is not that into futuristic settings that is intrigued.

There is certainly enough fantasy to make this interesting, though unfortunately, I am very unlikely to ever get to play it.

I figured the 'billion years' was just an expression. As others have said, I imagine this is too many years. (When you compare to the billion years preceding all this).

Anyway, I am also interested to see what he does with the mechanics and I especially liked the part about it being very challenging and not easy. I have lied a lot of Monte's work for this reason.

 

[mach1.9pants]

I can't say I am a fan of renaming coming RPG terms for the campaign, just call them spells cos we (as players) are going to. And no one I know will want to run a PC class called nano, unless they are full of very small bots! You can say spells are known as esoterique in the world, and leave it at that

EDIT: still interested in the premise tho, just things like that (even Gygax did it!) are annoying to me

 

[variant]

Not really my thing. Never been a big fan of the 'future Earth, but not really' settings. Plus, honestly, I don't need another completely new RPG system to learn if it doesn't really do anything special.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Well, a billion is probably just an error. The idea of different civilizations with different technologies is interesting, especially if one was genetic manipulation and that went ... badly.

One problem I have with futuristic settings is how to allow travel from one planet to another, without the full range of technology that would normally allow that.

I think balancing stuff like this is very difficult, and overall I would have to say 8 empires is too much, and a billion years is way too much.

Sadly, it is not my cup of tea, but good luck to him!!

 

[DaveMage]

Ugh. Another Kickstarter.

If I hadn't just supporter Traveller, I might have looked at this, but as I don't play much Sci-Fi, I think I'm set.

 

[Morrus]

I have to admit, I'm not really getting the folks who don't like "a billion". Is there something special about the time period of a billion years hence that makes setting RPGs then particularly unattractive?

There's a cool timeline of the far future here (which I'm sure Monte must be intimately familiar with by now). Life will still be OK on Earth for another half billion years after that.

And 8 great civilizations seems reasonable. If you consider ours for the last few thousand years one civilization, gaps of tens of millions of years between civilizations with nothing much happening seems perfectly reasonable to me.

 

[Serendipity]

Sounds quite interesting, and a bit of a break from bog standard fantasy or space opera for that matter. I'll be keeping an ear out for this one.

 

[keterys]

Life will still be OK on Earth for another half billion years after that.

I dunno - I suspect he didn't use the two lines about lack of carbon dioxide killing off all plant life (and most life in general, albeit not all life)

Granted, I think CO2 generation is well within the realms of explainable with science.