Weird little things that can be sold or used for barter or gifts. Not everything is suited for an adventurer. In Numenera these things are called oddities and they serve a number of purposes.įirst, they’re just there for verisimilitude. Not everything the ancients created was a combat device. By that, I mean, they don’t help in combat. Sometimes you find things that are interesting but have no real game value. Over time, characters can develop the know-how to be able to safely carry more and more of these, so they really do end up seeming more like character abilities and less like gear. Cyphers keep the game fresh and interesting. It might be a powerful magnet or an injection that will cure disease. X might be a bomb, a short range teleporter, or a force field. Which leads to really fun game situations where a player gets to say, “well, I’ve got an X that might help in this situation,” and X is always different. This means that in gameplay, they’re less like magic items and more like character abilities that the players don’t choose. However, they are found with such regularity that players can be pretty free with their use. So essentially, characters only carry a few at a time. Collecting cyphers together in one place, or carrying many on your person can potentially have a detrimental effect–from the long term (illness) to the short (explosion!). They’re one-use cool powers that can heal, make attacks, or produce effects like nullify gravity or make something invisible.
A GM, however, can place them intentionally as well. When the PCs come upon an old device, defeat some artificially enhanced or designed creature, or simply sift through the ruins of the past, they can scavenge a handful of new cyphers.īecause the technology of the past is unknowable, cyphers are often determined randomly.
Cyphers are one-use, cobbled together bits of technology that characters frequently discover and use. So much so, that the working title of the game system itself is the Cypher System. In many ways, cyphers are the most important aspect of the numenera. Now, obviously, it helps define the setting, but it also affects the mechanics.įrom the point of view of the people of the Ninth World, technology and its remnants (lumped together with the term “numenera”) can be broadly classified in four categories: cyphers, oddities, artifacts, and discoveries. Specifically, the fact that there are all these amazing technological remnants fill the world around the PCs. Since I keep calling Numenera a post-apocalyptic game, it’s probably worth talking about the effect that has on gameplay.
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