[Information] Numenera: Solitary Excursion

[Aeternis]

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Game Title A Solitary Excursion Solo game(s) run by Aeternis using Monte Cook's Numenera

 

The Grand Orrery of Rarmon This introduction scene was completed to my satisfaction by mrBumbry, and is retained here for reference purposes only. The traveler waited patiently as Garrot tinkered with the complex device. Its movements stilled, the marvelous Grand Orrery seemed diminished - a mere machine rather than a whirling, lustrous wonder seen overhead during the city's festivals and feasts. The Orrery’s diminutive keeper, muttering to himself as he worked, was barely visible within the faintly glowing interior of the orrery’s central sphere, a golden representation of the sun. Pieces of the ancient machine lay scattered on the marble floor - some were recognizable, some were unfamiliar, and a few hurt the traveler’s eyes to even look at, seeming to writhe against the confining shackles of three-dimensional perception. Hovering around the gutted machine like concerned children, almost a dozen smaller spheres of patterned and etched metal in a kaleidoscope of colors vied for the onlooker's attention. Around the larger spheres, swarms of comparatively tiny satellite orbs also hung in the air, less vibrantly hued but no two alike. Two, placed just out of reach over the traveler’s head, were immediately familiar - one bore a greenish-blue patina marred by a single large patch of green and brown, the other, a pitted orb of lusterless grey, bore a glassy emerald-green band around its circumference. Seen up close, the incredible detail of the Grand Orrery more than made up for its disappointing apparent size. Staring too long at this model Earth, the traveler could easily imagine falling down toward the real one from an astronomical height, Eventually, the mechanist noticed his guest and extracted himself from the machine. Shoving a complex eyepiece up and out of the way with one grimy, lubricant-stained hand, Garrot squinted at the travel-worn figure in the shadowy margin of the orrery enclosure. “You’re back.” He observed gruffly, voice echoing in the arched room. “I hope you’ve had some success. The grand procession is the day after tomorrow, and the Empress will have my head if the Orrery isn’t ready by then.”

 

The Creature in Glass The night's storm, as predicted by the village's resident Aeon Priest, had been fierce and violent. All night, the winds had howled and clawed at the sturdy brick and stone buildings clustered around the town's life-giving harbor, and grey waves, lit fitfully by bright tongues of lightning, crashed onto the pebbly beach, battering the slips where the town's fishing boats would have been stored on any other night. This night, however, with the timely warning of the priest, the villagers had moved their vessels well inland, and the only things in the path of the storm's fury were a few empty sheds and the all but indestructible chrome-walled lighthouse at the harbor mouth. Dawn broke grey but calm, and barely a ripple disturbed the water from shore to the western horizon. Between the village and that horizon, though, something quite strange had appeared, blown in on the storm's wild gale. Blocking the mouth of the harbor, a monstrous piece of floatsam lay mired in the shallows. Longer than all eight of the village's fishing boats laid end to end, the perfect cylinder of clearsynth could have almost contained the town's sturdy lighthouse within itself. One end of the cylinder was capped with a metallic plug, like the lid of a titanic jar. Inside, a creature as big as any house in the town floated motionlessly. It wasn't quite aligned vertically - it seemed to have its own idea of "up" which was indifferent to gravitational pull. The commotion raised by the early-rising villagers who first beheld the gargantuan glass enclosure and its prisoner in turn roused the town's venerable Aeon Priest and the few travelers the town had given refuge from the oncoming storm. The priest, seeming unconcerned with the danger, soon hobbled out onto the breakwater, approaching the anomaly, and daring the visitors to follow. The entrapped creature's huge, featureless head turned to briefly follow the priest's hobbling approach, but it seemed to quickly lose interest in him. Other than that it had a definite head, the creature was difficult to classify. Below its bulbous cranial mass, the entity had a smallish body, from which hung with a number of appendages, some jointed like an arthropod's and some ropy and fluid like a squid's. The lack of sensory features and its coloration - an oily grey-black that seemed to push back against even the muted colors of beach and waves - made it apparent that the creature was not native to the shore on which it had landed. A closer look at the massive glass-like habitat revealed that it was divided by interior walls of the same transparent material. The creature occupied a sealed-off space within the cylinder comprising only about a third of the total length, bordered on one side by the thick, metallic plug, and on the other by a bulkhead of some sort near the device's midline. The space beyond that bulkhead was a confusing jumble of smaller, thinner barriers, all transparent and refracting the light of the morning sun into a thousand rainbows. As the priest approached as close to the cylinder as he could while keeping his feet dry, the creature's slight restless motions ceased. It wasn't facing him, but it seemed he had its attention. "Greetings!" The old priest eventually called out, waving to the creature. If he was nervous, he was doing a good job of not showing it. "Do you need assistance?" The entity did not speak, but a subtle change in the motion of its body suggested it had heard the question, "Do you need help..." The priest made a wide pushing motion toward the sea. "Getting back to sea?" He had, it seemed, concluded that the enclosure was not a prison, but a vehicle, though the onlookers could see no reason for this conclusion. Perhaps it was merely an excuse for not offering to try to open the glass cylinder and release the creature within. The creature became very still for several seconds, then drifted closer to the wall of its enclosure. Its expressionless head seemed to be gazing not the Aeon Priest who had addressed it, but instead the onlookers standing on shore. Despite seeming not to have its attention, the priest stumbled and fell to his knees, and it was several seconds before he pulled himself back to his feet. "It wants... a volunteer." The priest announced shakily, half-turning to address the villagers and visitors clustered behind him. "For some sort of unspecified service. I was deemed not suitable." The onlookers murmured restlessly among themselves. A volunteer for what, some asked? And what would the titanic creature do if it was denied?

 

What is Numenera? This game is set in Monte Cook’s wonderfully strange Ninth World, a deep science-fantasy universe littered with the remnants of eight - or perhaps more - fallen supertechnological civilizations. A Numenera game is said to take place approximately 1 billion years in our future, on Earth - but an Earth shaped by a billion years of habitation, in which not even fossils of our time survive. The Ninth World is what the peoples of this changed Earth call their own civilization. The world’s scattered relics of the past - the numenera - are at various times treasure, foe, obstacle, and environment. Most adventurous explorers learn to quickly adapt what they find into useful things. For those who don't brave the unknown, the numenera are not some distant, faraway concept - they are very much a part of every day life. Nearly every human settlement is built nearby, around, or even inside the relics of a prior world, and tools forged from the incomprehensible ruins of the past make almost every aspect of a Ninth Worlder's life possible. The Ninth World is roughly analogous in many cultural aspects to the early parts of what we know in our time as the Renaissance, and many of the things which make society possible are built on ancient and poorly understood foundations. A character in a Numenera game doesn't usually know what will happen to them when they set out on an adventure. The possibilities, like the numenera themselves, are practically endless, and stretch from the crushing depths of the sea to the stars. Tales abound in every watering hole of adventurers mistakenly activating ancient devices and being shunted to distant worlds, or transposed into alternate realities of their own world, or having those machines alter their bodies and minds to some long-forgotten pattern. In exchange for braving these risks, explorers of the Ninth World can expect to be rewarded with some of the wealth and power of prior worlds.

Rulebooks and Rules If you do not possess the Numenera core rulebook, I can’t provide one for you - you have to find your own, and sadly there is not to my knowledge an SRD for this system. It should be noted that you can find rulebook PDFs on DriveThruRPG, but they aren’t free. Amazon usually has physical copies available as well, but I don’t expect anyone to go buy a $50 book for a chance at getting a solo game with me. If you have it, use it, if you're interested but can't source the book yourself, I can provide a concise guide to the Cypher System mechanics, though it does not list your character creation options. If you can't source the book, but are intrigued by this system and setting, come up with a concept for your character, then come find me in the site Discord server or shoot me a PM, and I'll give you a few fitting descriptors and foci to choose from, that will let you fill out the application. If you have expansion material (such as Character Options), you may apply using character creation options from that material if you wish. Only official Monte Cook Games material for Numenera will be accepted, but if it came from MCG and is for Numenera, it's allowed. It would be nice if you told me what book to look in if you're using uncommon options, of course. Players who have never played this system are of course welcome to apply, but if you feel like adjusting a new system will have a paralyzing effect, then please don't apply. This is not a game where I want to be responding to PMs asking for example actions every time I make a post. Numenera rules are fairly lightweight and how you handle situations is fairly fluid - often I'll ask how you're going to overcome a described obstacle or challenge of a given level, and you tell me which of your character abilities applies to the situation and describe in your post how that works. If that doesn't sound like something you can do - more than that, if it doesn't sound like a fun way to structure challenges in an RPG, we'll drive each other up the wall trying to play it. While the site does not have a sheet profiler for Numenera, I've got an Excel/Google Docs sheet template for the system, allowing you to host your own sheet in your cloud documents provider of choice or to attach a copy to a designated forum post.

About this Game I am looking for one player to play in a Numenera solo game, or possibly two with a joint application. I do not have a lengthy plot teaser or foreshadowing for this advertisement, because I wish to tailor my plot plans to the player and character I eventually pick to play with. That does not mean this is a sandbox game - it isn’t. There will be a plot, but I can't exactly tease it if I'm going to adapt my plans based on the character(s) I take on. There are several plot threads I am considering that start at the scene presented, and what character I have to work with will help me choose which one(s) to use (or whether to create some new ones), and how to approach them. To some extent, the application process revolves around applicants telling me what sort of plot they want. Plot themes that appear in every Numenera game include exploration and learning. Your character constantly finds new things to learn about in the world, be it strange, mutated plants, gleaming, incomprehensible artifacts, or alien visitants. Depending on the character and thus the plot, this game could take on elements of Lovecraftian monsters might or might not drive your character mad.cosmic horror, Certain things might force unasked-for transformations or mutations on a characterbody horror, Heist adventures and the likepicaresque, Noble warrior riding out to find the one relic that can break the curse and rescue his true love, etc, etc.high fantasy, Your character might end up on the battlefield in one of many border wars between kingdomswarfare, sleuth activity - this might include chasing human criminals or sinister, Lovecraftian goings-oninvestigation, Repairing and operating an ancient spacecraft and using it to explore distant worlds, getting lost in a maze of star portals and trying to find your way back home, etc.space opera, and more.

About You, the Applicant You are a good fit for this game if: You haven't played in one of my games before, and I haven't played in any of yours. Bonus points if we've never played together in any context, but if we've been co-players in someone else's game and you're far and away the best app, I'm okay with that. You are probably a more recently joined site member, perhaps in the last year. This is not a requirement, but I have had the best solo game results with newer members, historically. I am not sure why this is, but I'm not going to question it. You appreciate the relative freedom of a solo game and the deeply strange possibilities of the Ninth World appeal to you. Perhaps you had Numenera on your radar for a while but were just needing an excuse to try it. You tend to be a "quality over quantity" poster who makes reading your posts rewarding and believe that the narrative aspects of RPGs should take precedence over the rules aspects when the two conflict. You can roll with the unexpected in-game and even hit back with sometimes unexpected but deeply characteristic responses and actions. You write the application that best fits my preferences as a GM among those complete when I close this advertisement, 20 full days (I'll replace this with a date and time when I know the date and time.?) after it appears in Games Seeking Players.

Application Format The following sections should appear in your application. Descriptive Sentence: A sentence of the form "{NAME} is a {DESCRIPTOR} {CHARACTER TYPE} who {FOCUS}". This sentence represents your high level mechanical choices in the Cypher system - Character Type, Descriptor, and Focus are all choices which influence both character lore and mechanics. Mechanical Strengths: A phrase or at most a sentence describing your character’s capabilities during an adventure. For example, “strong, durable warrior” or “nature-savvy mystic” would do nicely. I don’t want a paragraph here. After you complete this section, you can stop thinking about mechanics for a while. No mechanical details should appear in any part of the application below this point. First Impression: Come up with a paragraph or two describing your character. This section includes both appearance and personality details. Be specific and try to avoid using hedged contradictions. A Character portrait is optional, I encourage you to provide one if you have a good one. A good portrait will help your app, but a bad one will count against you. Character Lore: A brief blurb about your character’s life to date, where it is relevant to any future plot. 1-3 paragraphs should about do it - you can expand as the game progresses if you’re accepted. Don’t pad this - really focus on details you think would be relevant to my plot planning. Plot Suggestions: Because I am recruiting for a solo adventure, the nature of the character to some extent drives the plot. Please provide some hints (bullet points or a paragraph) about what sorts of plot elements, adventure hooks, or story arcs would fit your character the best. You can also note any setting details you'd like to see explored, any places you would like to have your character go, etc. I can’t promise I’ll use all of your suggestions, of course, but this is your opportunity to tell me what you think your character would be best suited to doing. Finish the Scene: This part is the meat of your application. Finish the scene I opened the post with (The section titled "The Creature in Glass"). What happens next is entirely up to you, within reason. What does the creature want? What makes a person a suitable volunteer? What will volunteering entail? This particular solo game hook was created with the Numenera "Into the Night Into the Deep Into the OutsideInto the..." expansions in mind, though it doesn't necessarily have to lead to a game that uses them. You don't need to own those expansions to play a Numenera game using them - they're setting guides with material for the GMs to use - but if you have ever picked one of these books up and like the idea of one of the places or things you saw there, by all means incorporate it here. Similarly, while I have some preconceived ideas about what the Creature might be and what it's doing, I will adjust what I have to match your scene if the details contradict.

 

Q&A Really? You’re accepting one player? That’s not a real question, but I’ll answer it anyway: Yes. I am hoping that I will add more solo games with the same general preference later, but I am not going to commit to that specifically right now. For this particular solitary excursion, I might accept a joint dual application if it wows me, but it would have to be quite good. Is this the trial run for something bigger? No. I was looking to run one or two solo games this year, and this is me doing exactly that. Usually I do solos by invitation or recommendation by a fellow GM, but I didn’t have any people in mind to invite right now. There is no shared plot and this is not some sort of text-based massively multiplayer adventure - plots will be planned separately. Is this a short introduction to the system adventure? I'll run the adventure as long as the player has interest. If the player I accept tells me they want only a short adventure, I'll plan for something short. Otherwise, I'll probably default to a plot which could possibly go on for a long time. I don't think I've ever dropped a solo game - for me, they're very easy to keep up with. What tier does this game start at? We'll start at character tier 1 - that makes character creation fairly simple. When I finish the scene, can I...? You can write anything that you think reasonable. Annoy the GM with requests for permission you already have at your own peril. If/When you open this back up for other applicants, will my original app still be valid? If/when I decide I have time for more solo games along this vein, I will reopen this thread, changing nothing but the opening scene. The application process the same, perhaps with a few tweaks due to lessons learned, but no major alterations to my requirements (and none at all without good reasons). Characters previously applied with are always eligible to be resubmitted for later postings - you just need to re-do your app's Finish the Scene section to reflect the new scene I am asking applicants to finish.

[purplerook]

@Aeternis, I am a big fan of Numenera and the Cypher system. I have a lot of the materials, but never had a chance to play. I am relatively new to the site, but already loving the PbP format. I think it provides an opportunity for more role play and character development than face to face games. Please except this application for when/if the Solo Game re-opens.

Descriptive Sentence: Mechanical warrior who fuses flesh and steel
Mechanical Strengths: Powerful fighter with an intuitive understanding of machines
First Impression:

 

People seeing Mace for the first time, are drawn to his face. One eye is natural, while the other eye is clearly artificial. Mace's close cropped hair is a patchwork of color, ranging from deepest black to brilliant white, with the color changes both across his head and with individual hairs. Looking past his hair, and under his armor, Mace's skin is a similar patch work ranging from deep black through bronzed, all the way to pale skin. Over time, people will notice that Maces body appears change and shift as small black veins appear, move and disappear over time across his skin.

Mace's bizarre appearance puts off most people, but is strangely attractive to people interested in mechanical devices. Beneath his forbidding exterior, Mace has a wry - some might say fatalistic - sense of humor. Since mechanical knowledge is literally a matter of life of death, Mace is an avid student of information pertaining to anything mechanical.

Character Lore:

 

Mace's first coherent thought was waking up in the camp of a group of explorers who had found him wandering in the wilderness. Over-time, Mace has had brief flashes - memories or dreams - of the time before he awoke in the camp. The flashes are more sensory impressions - burning, pain, being ripped apart - than coherent memories. There are flashes of fire, crawling through tight spaces, raking claws of a beast. Maces only clue and his favored weapon is a four foot long metal pole, with a heavy chunk of metal on one end. Whatever the component's initial use, it is now Mace's favored weapon and namesake - a two handed mace.

Mace quickly came to an unfortunate realization about his body. His body contains a collection of tiny machines that are continuously maintaining and enhancing his body. These machines provide him with enhanced physical abilities, but need periodic nourishment and repair. Sometimes, this nourishment is a simple piece of metal or a chemical or two. Other times, his body required more 'exotic' items. This physical need drives Mace to scour the wilderness. At the same time, Mace is wonders where he came from, who or what he is, and whether there are others like him. So, he searches both the Wilderness and the libraries of 'civilized' lands.

Mace is on a journey of exploration. He is exploring both his physical body and his mind, where it has become clear than information and memories are stored to which he does not have conscious access. Mace has found that he has an intuitive sense about his body's needs and how to care for it. This knowledge bleeds over to a lesser extent in understanding and interacting with other machines.

Plot Suggestions: 1) Mace requires components to repair - and possibly enhance - his body; 2) Mace is looking to uncover information about his origin, 3) Mace is a free-lance explorer and can be commissioned on adventures into the Wilderness.

Finish the Scene:

 

"And a warm greeting to you as well Garrot. As you can see, I still have my head." replies Mace in a wry tone. Surveying the parts scattered across the room, Mace continues, "and even if I did, it looks like you would be hard pressed to get it back together in a couple of days. Besides, you know that sooner or later, something is going to break that you cannot repair or replace." Garrot replies in a sarcastic tone "The same thing could be said for you, but that does not stop me from continuing to try and fix you."

"This is true." comments Mace. "Well then let's take a look at what I have. I did not find what you wanted, but I did find a number of interesting items. Of course, there was a nasty nest of creatures camped out inside the old device." Mace proceeds to extract an oblong package from his pack. The package turns out to be a heavy canvas sheet, that when spread out on the ground reveals a large number of pockets with various small items stuffed into the pockets. Garrot and Mace review the various items in pockets. Garrot's comments gradually change from "No. No. Never work." to "Well maybe if I..." to "That could work." Mace comments "A famous philosopher once said 'you cannot get what you want, but if you try real hard, you might get what you need." To which Garrot replies "Never heard such nonsense...now help me get this monstrosity back together."

Garrot and Mace work to put the complex device back together. A day of hard work and the device comes together. As Garret begin testing the device, there is pop and whiff of smoke from one of the smaller orbs. Twenty minutes later, Garrot is gazing at a small burnt piece of some exotic material, with an expression that mixes resignation and fear. He mutters "If I start running now, how far can I get before they catch me." Mace looks at the small piece and utters deep sigh. He starts poking and prodding his side. His skin folds back to reveal a small black compartment embedded in his body. The compartment opens at a mental command from Mace and he extracts a small item. Its unburnt size and shape are a duplicate for the burnt component. Garrot eyes the component, his voice balanced between hope and concern "Can you spare this?" To which Mace replies "Redundant System. However, I would like to get a replacement. Any suggestions on where I can look?" Garret snatches the un-burnt component and then replies "Well there are rumors about a place..."