In my last post, I wrote a little bit about experience points (xp) as a narrative tool for GMs. The method of awarding xp that I described is the “in-game” award of points. But there’s also a more standard, “between sessions” method. And no, it has nothing to do with killing monsters. I know, that’s…

Most roleplaying games have some kind of “experience points” or “xp.” They might call it something else, but there’s often some way to measure character advancement, improvement, or just doing a good job. In Numenera, experience points (xp) are a tool for both the GM and the player, but used in very different ways. For the…

In conversations over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself talking about Numenera to interested people–not so much the rules, or the setting, but the essence of the game. When I was a teenager, I played in a 1st edition AD&D game run by my friend Jay. Jay passed away recently and his loss from…

There’s a well-accepted “truism” in the tabletop industry nowadays: Adventures don’t sell. There’s only one problem with this bit of truth–it’s not true at all. Many, if not most, of the bestselling tabletop products of all time are adventures–Keep on the Borderlands, Ravenloft, etc. I think adventures are important for many reasons. First and foremost,…

The Numenera corebook’s design and development are complete. There’s still a lot of editing to do, a few illustrations and maps to complete, and layout’s only just begun, but things are moving along quite quickly now. It’s very exciting to see it pull together. In coming weeks, you can expect to see a number of…

So, early on in the Kickstarter for Numenera we added a bestiary as a stretch goal. This bestiary will be filled with creatures, but will also have some characters and character types, because not everything that you interact with is a “monster.” Plus, in the Ninth World, some things that seem like monsters are actually potential allies,…

As I have written in the past, I struggled with the right dice to use in the game. I was tempted to use a d10 for quite some time, and I flirted with the normalization afforded by a bell curve of some kind. The Twenty Sider In the end, I decided to go with my old…

Here’s how you play Numenera. The player tells the GM what she wants to do. The GM determines if that action is routine (and thus just works) or if there’s a chance of failure. So far, I’ve just described pretty much every tabletop rpg, ever (almost). In Numenera, specifically, what happens next is that the…

Since I keep calling Numenera a post-apocalyptic game, it’s probably worth talking about the effect that has on gameplay. Specifically, the fact that there are all these amazing technological remnants fill the world around the PCs. Now, obviously, it helps define the setting, but it also affects the mechanics. From the point of view of the people…