Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera [UPDATED]

[malcolm_n]

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.

Such an amount of time would mean a complete reset of everything. Each civilization would have to basically start fresh.

In any case, it's not a deal breaker for me. Even with a full reset between each civilization, that's 111 million years between each. Plenty of time to have us do all these things and lose them again to start over.

 

[Ulrick]

1 billion years?

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Far Far Far Far Future there is only WHAT?

 

[The_King_in_Yellow]

1 billion years?

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Far Far Far Far Future there is only WHAT?

No grim dark presumably, let us not go there for it is a silly place.

 

[HeinorNY]

How far in the future did Jack Vance Dying Earth stories take place? The sun was dim and almost gone.

Preventing the Sun from growing into a red giant and destroying Earth is something that, even if we don't have the technology to do now, at least we can imagine it theorically, which is already some feat. If we can imagine it, people from the futue can do it.
And teleportation is a lot more unfeasible than saving the sun, but widely more accepted among sci-fi fans.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Yeah that is another far far future RPG, Pelgrane's Dying Earth. The far far future is a common science fantasy trope, and certainly not a bad one! I can't beleive the amount of discussion over the billion years thing, to me it is who cares? Is the game and/or setting good?
Interesting side discussion, but not something that would in anyway effect my decision to support the game or not. I always want to get an accurate map of the earth with the seas water level raised or lowered by 10-30metres and make a game world from that. See how long it took the player's to figure it!

 

[Minigiant]

Although I like the idea...

I am disappointed he bothered to make a class based game and went with warrior/mage/mage-warrior.

 

[amerigoV]

I think people aren't grasping how mind boggling a billion years is.

If its anything like dollars, it's really not that big of a deal.

 

[Dice4Hire]

A few million years between them. They don't have to last a few million years each.

That makes less sense, though. A billion years is ridiculous, and hopefully it will be changed.

I would say that 50,000 year civilizations separated by long periods, like maybe up to 150,000 years of barbarism, so maybe 1.5 million years total for 9 ages would be the longest that would really work for me.

 

[Morrus]

That makes less sense, though. A billion years is ridiculous, and hopefully it will be changed.

I would say that 50,000 year civilizations separated by long periods, like maybe up to 150,000 years of barbarism, so maybe 1.5 million years total for 9 ages would be the longest that would really work for me.

Here's a timeline of the development of life on Earth. Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and it took 0.8 billion just to develop simple cells. It took 4 billion years to get to simple animals.

Nine complete civilizations in a billion years might be - if anything - a little rapid - depending on how wiped out each civilization is. And we might eb talking ancient, glaxy-spanning civilizations here far older than our relatively short-lived one. As sean said, above, we probably don't even qualify as one yet.

 

[fled]

since no one is bothering to read the author's comments on "a Billion years"

Of course, it’s not precisely one billion years in the future. The date isn’t 1,000,000,2013 AD. (No actual date, according to our system, is mentioned, because it’s irrelevant.) When you’re using numbers that big, you can round up or down a few million and not notice. More importantly, the people of the Ninth World don’t know the age of the planet, and they certainly don’t care how far separated they are from us. But we care. So let’s talk about a billion years for a moment–because it’s fun.

A billion years in the future puts the people of the Ninth World farther from us than we are from the dinosaurs, temporally speaking. By a lot of years. In this time frame, continental drift has brought the continents all back together again, and probably also seen them break apart again (in the Ninth World, this has happened and actually they’ve come back together again, but we don’t know if that’s natural or the product of some past technological workings). The sun’s luminosity should increase about 10 percent, drying up the oceans and making photosynthesis impossible. But in the Ninth World, there are oceans–actually there’s only one–and plants. So again, some kind of major engineering, even megascale engineering, has gone on here.

But here’s my favorite bit. Even by conservative estimates, assuming sub-light speeds, it would take a civilization about 50 million years to colonize the entire galaxy. In a billion years, this could have happened many times over. A billion years is enough time for a civilization to raise to a position of vast power (perhaps even being the seat of a galactic or even intergalactic empire), collapse entirely, and for the Earth to lie fallow for a long time to give rise to yet another civilization. And another. And another. Maybe some of these civilizations aren’t even human.

- Monte Cook