With the Kickstarter reaching it’s early stretch goals, the book has grown to be around 400 pages. The book will be a full-color hardcover. Here’s my rough vision for what the Numenera corebook will be like:
1. There will be about 100 pages of rules material, perhaps less. And the vast majority of that will be character options, rather than rules. The “how to play this game” part of the rules will likely fit into a dozen pages or so, at least as I have envisioned it now. (Playtesting usually makes such sections grow, so we’ll see.)
2. Another 100 page or so might be devoted to GM advice, and a how-to approach to running a Numenera game, including lots and lots and lots of interesting of numenera treasures and dangers to find. I really think that the game will benefit from lots of GM advice. There’s a lot to discuss regarding the technology and the wide-open nature of the setting, as well as the general “imagination gone wild” tone.
3. The rest of the book, about 200 pages (thus, about half the book now), will detail the setting. And an ample amount of that will be adventure material. Setting material would include a bestiary of foes: various creatures and a bunch of ready-made NPCs.
I plan on presenting adventure material for this book much like I did in Ptolus. Which is to say, at many different levels of detail. There will be many, many straightforward adventure hooks, suggestions, and rough outlines, for GMs who just want an idea or two to run with. That’s the first kind of presentation. The second, I would describe as a sort of intermediary approach: perhaps a map with brief descriptions, some ideas, and some NPCs or creatures to use. The last approach would be full-blown, fully-detailed adventures. This means that no matter what kind of GM you are, there will be adventure material for you. I’m a firm believer that nothing gets across how a game can be run than adventure material, and presenting it in many ways gives a lot of options.
Overall, the setting will have a “sandbox” approach, with a lot of information that can be used by GMs in a lot of ways. I’m more interested in really showing how to run a game in the Ninth World than I am in detailing what’s under every rock, but with this expansion in size there’s room for plenty of detail too.
This is all subject to minor changes, but you get the general idea of where I’m going with it.
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