Numeneralance: An Introduction

It all started with a box of books.

I don’t know who the previous owner was. Mom said it was a coworker whose son had gone off to college and didn’t want them anymore. I also can’t remember why they thought to give them to me, since I can’t recall having read any fantasy novels prior to this (I was pretty much a through-and-through Sci-Fi kid.) But, for whatever reason, when I was in fifth or sixth grade I received a cardboard treasure chest full of paperback novels from  the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Sword of Shannara series. The Realms stuff I could give and take over the years to come. I never actually read the Shannara stuff. But man, did I fall headlong into Dragonlance. Whoever this kid was, he had managed to collect pretty much the whole run up to that point in time and, being the child I was, I decided to start with them in chronological order in the storyline, rather than which books were published first.

Meaning I read this first. I do not recommend this strategy to others.

Miraculously, a novel about Sturm and Kitiara flying to the moon in a gnomish airship didn’t scare me off (though I can remember seriously wondering what the hell was going on as I read it.) I went on through Kendermore and the novel with Caramon and Raistlin (this series is now considered apocryphal, which is probably a good thing) before finally coming to the Dragonlance chronicles, the story of the War of the Lance that really launched the whole series and created a franchise, and that was all she wrote. I was a goner, committed to life to this setting and the characters therein. I endured the Summer Flame years. I bought the 10^th Anniversary rerelease of the modules in second edition, wondering what this Saga card game nonsense was. I hung on through the War of Souls, wondering why Weiss and Hickman couldn’t come up with a new ultimate antagonist rather than just having it be Takhissis over and over again. And when the Age of Mortals came around and Weiss put together a publishing company to do a brand-new series of modules set in the current era, I was at the front of the line to get them and run them with my group. That campaign is, to this day, the greatest I’ve ever had the privilege to play a role in, and the stories from those games still come up around the table just as often as the old gems about Orc and Pie or Paladins vs. Gazebos.

I’m a Dragonlance fan, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, one of the things that never quite landed for me from the beginning was the idea that this setting, as initially conceived, was to have two main themes. One was the idea that Krynn was supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world. The Cataclysm happened some 350 years prior to the start of the Chronicles, ushering in an era of darkness that was to have disrupted society and torn down civilization, opening the door for the Dragon Armies to attempt to conquer the known world while mankind was scattered and defenseless. This never felt very true to me. Now, admittedly, part of the failing came from the fact that I didn’t read Autumn Twilight until much later (strangely, it was missing from the box) which means I didn’t get the discovery of the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth or the stories with the plainsmen or the tree village of Solace. But still it almost felt like, as the authors passed into the greater storyline, it felt like they set that aside and focused more on the romanticism and the epic storytelling, which certainly seems to have worked out for them. Strangely, Weiss and Hickman would go on to basically perform two more cataclysms (three, if you count the death of Paladine and Takhissis at the end of the War of Souls,) and it still just felt like that particular theme was never fully explored.

Enter Numenera.

Most of you haven’t heard of this game, I’m going to go ahead and guess. Numenera was released by Monte Cook games last year, and is a campaign set in a very distant future (the Ninth World) where civilization has basically risen and fallen eight times previously. The current humans live among the leftovers of these previous ages in a world that has literally been shaped from the molecular level by ancient technology. They have basically become a medieval society, and this creates one of the major features of the campaign setting since, as the Arthur C. Clarke puts it, any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic. Adventurers in Numenera wander through ruins of the bygone ages, exploring weird tech and bizarre creatures that are so alien they seem like they can only have been the result of magic.

There’s a lot of things I enjoy about the Numenera game. The system is simple, light, and intuitive, which is a breath of fresh air from the last several years of rules heavy Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, and various iterations of D&D. I played it for the first time shortly after the release in a campaign run by an enthusiast who had jumped on early and convinced the rest of us to give it a try. I was a bit skeptical at first, to be honest, but I knew Monte Cook games from back in the day and his name carries a lot of cache and value with me. The campaign was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the “weirdness” of the story and the feeling of discovering ancient, mysterious leftovers from a previous age.

This particular game was played over Google +, and one of the problems with this format is that, when your character isn’t currently involved in the action, your attention can tend to drift. It happened that my bookshelf was right next to my computer desk, and as I would sit there waiting for my turn in initiative I would see my unused Dragons of Autumn, Winter, and Spring modules from Margaret Weiss publishing sitting there. I thumbed through them, feeling some sort of odd draw pulling me back into the story. I started rereading the novels, and suddenly one day things clicked for me. I could bring that post-apocalyptic feeling back to Dragonlance by putting it in the Ninth World!

Since then, we’ve played through the first chapter, with the heroes recovering knowledge of the true gods from Xak Tsaroth (prior to their flooding it) and have been arrested in the destroyed ruins of their hometown prior to being sent to an enemy fortress for slavery. The adaptation process, to be honest, has been even simpler than I anticipated, assisted by the fact that I’m so inspired right now that it doesn’t feel like work when I have to sit down and do the GM prep ahead of time.

Really, the secret is just to work in a hint of mysterious tech in place of “magic” at various significant points. The blue crystal staff was replaced with a gem that emitted a hardlight staff at will. The elves and dwarves are replaced with the Varjellen and Lattimoor, respectively, while the other races are the result of mutations that occurred from radioactive fallout after the fiery mountain fell on Istar. When the PCs are thrown into prison cells that were on wheels and pulled by horses in the books, in this the cages have mechanical arachnid legs to walk there. The Cataclysm needed to have happened within recent enough history that people knew of it, and some of the abandoned ruins needed to have been built within known history (like the aforementioned Xak Tsaroth,) so I guess the Numeneralance world is sort of a “Nine and a half-th world,” with some of the ruins and mysteries left over from before the Cataclysm while others are from much further back.

And then, of course, there’s the dragons. On one hand, dragons actually kind of fit with Numenera. They’re clearly the result of some pretty unnatural evolution, since a giant reptilian winged monster that breathes fire is not something that comes about through nature. On the other hand, with experienced roleplayers the word dragon immediately pulls up images of Smaug, or at least that one red dragon that ate your whole D&D party when you were 14. They make a lair on piles of coins. They kidnap princesses. All the usual tropes come flooding back, and things that have that kind of preconceived baggage attached are the enemy of creating the sense of wonder and mystery it requires for a game to work. For a time, I struggled as to just how to get the point across that, rather than being classical dragons, these guys are bio-engineered horrors from a bygone age that are like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Then Michael Bay came along and gave me an assist.

The big robot dinosaur is the important bit. Not Optimus Prime. Though if I could find a way to work him in, I think I would ascend to some sort of Geek nirvana.

I posted this picture to my PCs, and I think it got the point across. These ain’t your daddy’s dragons. These don’t belong in the world, and when you discover that they don’t really care about treasure, and might have been around for even longer than the gods, it shouldn’t fly in the face of your preconceived notions. You shouldn’t have preconceived notions. Furthermore, their minions, the Draconians, could frankly be run as written since they’re so bizarre that they fit pretty well with the general weirdness of the ninth-world anyways. After all, what's stranger than bipedal man-sized lizard men that have been modified so that, when they die, some of their bodies turn to stone while others become a pool of acid or flat-out explode?

The game is well underway at this point, and I’m excited to share some details of it as we go along. I’ve got a few other ideas for pieces of the story to look at in detail, so I’ll put together articles on the subject down the line. For now, I welcome your comments. Every week I’m excited for Thursday night, and I’m glad to share.