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#numenera
vexwerewolf · 1 year
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I love that Numenera has two dozen wild explanations for why your character has superpowers and they range from "cybernetic implantation" to "alien abduction" to "nanotech" to "an alien virus rebuilt my body"
But then one of them is just "Drugs"
Smoked a ton of zaza and now I can teleport
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Character Spreadsheets
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Hello!
For folks who don't know me, my name is Mint, and when I'm not recommending ttrpgs, I like to design play-kits for different ttrpg games to facilitate easier online play. These player kits are designed to be shared with a playgroup in which everyone has editing access, with either character templates that can be duplicated, or a list of playbooks for games that use those instead. I've finally collected all of my useable play-kits into one folder, which I am sharing below for anyone to use. If you would like to use one of these, open up the file. Then select "File" -> "Make a Copy". I have included a tab on many of these games that is labelled "Lines, Veils & Lures." This is a modified version of Lines & Veils that my table uses that incorporates Lures, which are things that the group wants to see in game.
Most sheets also include a link to where you can get the game they are made for, up in the top row of the sheet. So if you see a play-sheet you like, you can find the game pretty easily from there! I've done sheets for big games like Numenera, and little games like Cryptid TV. I'm always working on more, so there will be more that are added to this folder over time. I'll probably also be editing these sheets themselves as I update sections, add links, and incorporate more Lines, Veils & Lures! You can check out the sheets here!
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Have you played NUMENERA ?
By Monte Cook
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In the distant, distant future (approx. 1 billion years), the Earth is littered with the ruins of ancient technology from fallen empires that might as well be magic.
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markdrummondj · 4 months
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Eidolon Tree - Iridescent As the blades of grass moves with the wind, so does their hue. Download the map and the alternate variants here! - https://www.patreon.com/posts/90099735
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honourablejester · 3 months
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Numenera Oddities
So. Numenera does the thing I love from D&D 5e, and that is trinket tables. Or, in this case, oddity tables.
Oddities are ancient salvaged techno-magical items that aren’t necessarily directly useful, like the more powerful one-shot cyphers or reusable artefacts, but are more there for the flavour of the world. Characters often start with them, GM assigned, and I assume you can find more of them out and about. And … I do love them. These are from the Oddity Table on pgs 305-307 of the Discovery corebook, and they’re just … so illustrative of this future fantasy, scavenger world, 'remants of past civilisations' setting.
I think one of the things that I most love is that, from the characters’ POV, in their medieval fantasy setting, these are inscrutable artefacts of a bygone civilisation, but from our POV, with our technology, you can so clearly see what some of them are intended to be:
26 – Series of thin plastic cards that show all kinds of unknown creatures. (Somebody had trading cards or card games during the past billion years)
20 – Plastic bottle that contains a spray that cleans any stain and never runs out. (Somebody finally invented a universal household cleaner, an infinite universal household cleaner, I bet they made an absolute mint)
30 – Metallic jar that maintains the temperature of liquid inside indefinitely. (Somebody made an improved thermos)
60 – Cup that instantly boils any liquid poured into it. (As well as an instant tea/instant pot noodle/instead meal cup)
33 – Small wand-like device that keeps away normal insects in a 5ft radius. (As well as mobile personalised insect zappers)
55 – Shirt that displays your muscles, bones and internal organs when you wear it. (And, for whatever reason, a portable x-ray shirt? Was this a practical invention first, for field x-rays, or was it for funsies, or both?)
58 – Bracelet with a tiny bell charm that rings like a massive bell when intentionally rung. (Personal protective device?)
80 – A bracelet that rends you unable to reproduce while worn. (An easy, non-invasive contraceptive device, interesting)
76 – Ceramic ring that makes you feel as though gentle hands are caressing your body. (As well as a possible sex toy? Or aide for touch-hunger? Not going to lie, if I touched this with no context and no idea what it was going to be, I’d freak the hell out)
79 – A pair of small, floating cubes that keep a small, enclosed room at the temperature at which water freezes. (Portable refrigeration)
Like, a lot of these are clearly futuristic novelty items or household appliances, as well as some more in-depth and casual medical technology. And I love that? I love that. You’re in a medieval fantasy scavenger world where the detritus of past super-futuristic civilisations litter your world, and you’re there picking up random bits of ancestor junk and trying from your own frame of reference to figure out what the fuck they had going on.
Some of the oddities are a bit more inscrutable even from our POV.
7 – Box with a tiny group of musicians in it who play when it is opened and look horrified when it is closed. (Now, this could be a novelty item again, but this is also a setting where ancient crystal obelisks eat people and trans-dimensional portals and pocket dimensions are also a thing, so … not beyond the bounds of possibility that those are live and enslaved musicians getting shunted into a pocket stasis dimension every time you close the lid)
And some have a language barrier in effect:
16 – Small rod that emits a voice saying the same thing in an unknown language every time a button is pushed. (Could be anything from a personal memo to an ancient distress call)
47 – Five metallic plates that orbit around your head and display ever-changing, unknown symbols. (I fucking love this one, if I was a scholar in this world I would dedicate my life to figuring out this language from the presumption that those symbols are some form of reading from me and if I can just figure out what they’re reading from what symbols show when, maybe I can Rosetta stone this language out? I mean, that’s a lot of assumptions, but you’d have to at least try, right?)
There’s also a series of oddities that are clearly communication/monitoring devices:
17 – Glass plate that shows what seems to be a live image of the moon, but from a closer vantage.
43 – Glass cube that shows what seems to be a live aerial view of an unknown, ruined city.
89 – Plate of glass that, when you view the night sky through it, reveals ten times as many stars.
And we, the players, know that the setting does have ancient satellites still in orbit around the planet, full of nanomachines and other ancestors-know-what. So these are clearly receivers for satellite feeds, or possibly in the last case a light-pollution filter. Though I’d be interested to know if that last one is a live image, or if it’s an image of the stars of this world several million years ago.
And then, in the midst of all that, there are several oddities that are clearly just art, or novelties, or just for fun:
57 – Amulet that, when worn, projects holographic images of fish swimming around you.
Is this a nightlight? A holographic art piece? A fun fashion accessory? I don’t know, but I desperately want one, and no matter how useless it is, I would not sacrifice this one oddity for any number of more useful cyphers or artefacts. It’s pretty, and I love it.
I love the design philosophy of these, the illustration of the world and its history that they provide. And, I mean, some of them, like D&D trinkets, can also function as plot hooks. Where is that unknown city on the live feed? Are those musicians real people trapped in a horrifying pocket dimension? Could you Rosetta-stone one of the ancient languages from that metallic plate device, and if you could, what other, potentially more powerful secrets would it unlock?
They’re just … I love trinkets. I love environmental worldbuilding, I love archaeology, I love the illustration of setting inherent in physical objects. These are fantastic.  
Trinket tables are the best. Honestly, if you are designing a game, do put in a class of objects that don’t exist for any mechanical, game purpose, but are just there to show your world. To show the ethos of your world via the tiny details and physical objects that populate it.
Also, this game appears to be, to a large extent, ‘fantastic archaeology: the setting’, and I’m here for it. Absolutely!
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the-ampersand · 5 months
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Since I am still chewing on the DIE Stapling post, I am going to do another about effort mechanics in ttrpgs because I am trying to write that Blasphemous inspired Trophy Gold hack (placeholder name: Penance). And one of the coolest mechanics for Trophy is its Risk Roll, which is basically an effort mechanic.
"But, Ampersand, what is an effort mechanic?" I hear you ask, dear mutual I am making up in my head. An effort mechanic allows you to reroll an action you have already attempted but failed or to get a bonus to a roll at the expense of some resource. Usually, that resource being the character's health. But it can also be something else like clues in an investigative game or even a narrative consequence (but that's usually called a Devil's Bargain).
The important part is that it gives a benefit but requires a sacrifice. And that's when the whole fanfare of psychoeconomics start. Because you need the sacrifice to be big enough to give the player pause and not use it every roll. And also you need the benefit to be significant enough to make it worth the risk and the expense. If properly adjusted, an effort mechanic can become a slow but sure spiral into the characters downfall.
Let's look at some examples!
Numenera is the first system I learn that had such a mechanic (but certainly was not the first ever). It is pretty straightforward in its implementation, too. You spend a fixed amount of the appropriate life pool and you get to reduce the difficulty of a task. Easy enough. But Numenera, being a tradgame as it is, the power creep upends any weight of the sacrifice. Once you level up enough, your pools become deep enough as to make effort something to just add to whichever skill roll you thought it needed a bit more oomph. This is not something wrong per se, but it can easily make your characters overly competent!
On the other hand, there's Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is a peculiar OSR game in that it is a really spiced up retroclone, wriggling DnD B/X ruleset to a point where it is almost unrecognizable. I am sure there are plenty effort mechanics peppered in the text, but I want to point out its magic system because I absolutely adore it. To be a wizard in DCC requires active dedication. That is because almost every spell has a writeup of about an A4's length, filled with the various effects a spell may have once the dice is rolled. And the effect can be wildly different from a roll of 5-10 to a roll of as high as 30 or more. There are many ways in which you can tweak your narrative positioning to get bonuses to a spell roll (components, helpers, magic foci, whatever), but when the die is cast and the result is just not good enough you still have a last chance: to sacrifice your own atribute values to get one last push that might be the difference between a proper spell and a fiasco. This is the main cause of withering of elder wizards: they have sacrificed too much in order to achieve the power they sought.
And then, there's Trophy. Both Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold have excellent effort mechanics baked directly into their ADN thanks to the masterful procedure that is the Risk Roll. These are games in which you are tempted first and consumed later by an evil forest. You have a really small ruin pool and once it is filled, you are lost to injury or its dark influence. You are also a destitute adventurer that needs to get any gold or face almost certain death. So you need to get shit done, you need to amass enough successes as to bring bread home and you need to survive the process (or try to, at least). And that's when the Risk Roll comes and lures your with the most satisfying effort mechanic I've ever seen. You can always make a reroll, adding an extra die to your pool to boot. But if those extra dice, dark dice, ever become the highest ones, you automatically mark ruin. You get your success, yes. But you become closer to losing yourself. It exactly hits the spot between actually worth it and inescapably dooming the character.
Obviously not all games need to be about losing oneself to fate or circumstance, but I feel an effort mechanic very much pushes the narrative in that direction. You are sacrificing yourself, in order to achieve your goals.
And I think that's a quite powerful narrative device.
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beefsen · 6 months
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probably the last picture i'll do of this guy for a long while. i miss him... he still may be my profile pic for ages to come, though.
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undergroundoracle · 4 months
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Numenera - Golden Evening by Bruce Brenneise
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blogfanreborn777 · 1 year
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Numenera by Biagio D'Alessandro
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tabletopresources · 6 months
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The Door Beneath the Ocean By butterfrog
Check out Tabletop Gaming Resources for more art, tips, and tools for your game!
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Numenera: Discovery interior art by Guido Kuip
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trupowieszcz · 2 months
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i love it when other ttrpgs subtly diss d&d
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acestories · 5 months
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Treat or trick!
You receive: psychic damage
In the ttrpg Numenera, there is a village that suffered a Plague some years ago. It wiped out most of the women in the town, and to ensure the town didn't die, the survivors turned to a Numenera device they found. The device plants a fetus in the Man and makes him carry it to term, and they had to use it for so long that it became part of the town's culture, and so the men CHOOSE TO DO IT, THERE IS A MPREG VILLAGE SOMEWHERE IN THE WORLD!
I HAVE BEEN CURSED WITH THIS KNOWLEDGE FOR 8 YEARS AND NOW I CAN SHARE IT!!!
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markdrummondj · 14 days
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Swarm Burrow - Acid. Download the map and the alternate variants here! - https://www.patreon.com/posts/99405232
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honourablejester · 3 months
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Numenera Character Foci That Make Me Giddy
I’m really liking the Numenera character construction. You have your character type, which is basically your class, but then you have your character focus, which is a whole extra set of cool abilities on top of that. You can control metal. Cast illusions. Be a werewolf. Skulk in alleyways. Go berserk. Forever wear a halo of fire. You can be a sneaky rogue who turns into a ravening beast five nights a month (a stealthy jack who howls at the moon). You can be a scholarly mage who also happens to be a professional assassin (a learned nano who murders). You can be a daring ruin-spelunker with ESP (a risk-taking delve who sees beyond). Are some of those advisable? Possibly not. But you can be them. Heh.
So. Some of the foci that make me excited, just from my first skim through:
Controls Gravity. Because if there is any power that’s guaranteed to make you feel like a minor god, it’s the ability to control what’s up and what’s down. You can (eventually) fly. You can smash people into the ground. You can make people/things so heavy they can’t move. And then there’s this:
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I’m putting it here because the second I read this, I found myself making the gesture. One hand palm up in front of my chest, the other palm down, moving sharply apart, like an orchestra conductor telling one section to get loud and another to quiet down. And if a game ability immediately has you physically acting it out, then it’s a cool ability.
Explores Dark Places. You’re so used to digging around in the dark that you’ve adapted to it. This is a mix of relatively mundane and relatively less mundane abilities, varying from making you better at sneaking and physical exploration and finding stuff, to giving you darkvision, to letting you partially become a shadow. And I just like that mix of practicality and edginess, and I also like the idea of someone who was just so good and went out of their way to become so good at spelunking and exploring dark, inaccessible places that they sort of absorbed the darkness and got comfortable there. I wanna make a stinky mole-man jack or delve who hasn’t seen daylight in three years because they were too busy rooting around in ancient sewers.
Fuses Flesh and Steel. You’re just straight up a cyborg. One who can tinker with themselves to try and improve their form/abilities. Your initial artificial components might have been done to you, or you might have done them to yourself. And. Sometimes you just want to play the nano/wright scientist who tried to make themselves that bit more durable the old-fashioned, mad-science way?
Howls at the Moon. You are a werewolf. And by that I don’t mean any old shapeshifter, I mean you involuntarily change five nights a month, you can only transform at night (for an hour), and you have to level your character to gain the control to shift voluntarily (and you never lose those five involuntary nights). And while you’re in your beast form, involuntarily or otherwise, you can’t use Intellect, you involuntarily attack anything close to you, and if you didn’t kill and eat anything as a beast, recovering after the transformation is harder. You are full on roleplaying the werewolf curse. But hey, you do a shit tonne of damage and you can tank a lot as that beast. And! You get the option to pick one of the other PCs to be your special person, who soothes your beast and is safe from them, and can let you transform back easier. Is this necessarily the best focus to pick in a team game? Possibly not, depending on how willing the rest of the party is to work around the ravening indestructible monster that guaranteed WILL erupt in their midst at least five nights a month, but if you’ve always wanted to roleplay the struggle against your inner beast, Numenera does go all in.
Emerged from the Obelisk. You got eaten by a hovering crystal obelisk and spat back out a year later with no memory of what happened in there and, oh yeah, turned into crystal yourself. Because these are the sorts of things that happen in the Ninth World. I just. I love that this is a thing. You don’t even have to have been spat back out as a humanoid crystal, there’s a note that if you want to be differently shaped, like, say, a levitating crystal shard, you just have to work it out with your GM how you, you know, touch and see and manipulate things, etc. One of the suggestions is ‘crystalline tendrils’. So, yeah. You can get hoovered up by a giant floating crystal and spat back out as a crystalline tentacle monster, if you so choose. This is excellent. You do get boosts to physical stats for being crystalline, and later on you get levitation, laser beams and teleportation through known crystals/obelisks, which are definitely all cool, but if I’m fully honest I’m taking this to be an amber crystalline fish creature with tendrils, whose driving quest is to figure out how the fuck this happened. Obelisk! Get back here! I have so many questions.
Never Says Die. What it says on the tin. You are doggedly determined not to die. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. You’re just not going down. Health boosts, recovery boosts, later abilities to stay up a round after you should be dead. For when you just want to be stubborn about this. I’m gonna be immortal by sheer dint of just not dying. I just. I always enjoy abilities that are just raw bloodymindedness.
In general, the Foci are just cool. Pick the fantasy you want to live out, and go for it. Heh.
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