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Wɪᴛɴᴇss.
Tracking. On the hunt. Sifting through the black drit for any sense of recent stirring that may lead her to food. Following a trail, she stumbled over a set of steps crossing over. Bootprints. Looking frantically along either side of its path, she found it seemed to move on well past her. A shuddering sigh. She was still alone.
Flecks of greenish-blue were smeared over the foreign tracks in a squishy powder. She looked off to the distance, seeing the one small slice of horizon unblocked by the other mountains, gazing upon the cerulean desert beyond. But there was something more. She heard something. She felt... something. Searching then, she sook the steady noise faintly grasping at her.
Along the stained tracks she saw a dull glow, and a broken clasp of synth, nestled in a patch of grass where the tracks showed some long passed struggle. Pulling away the grass, the glow revealed itself. Some sort of minor numenéra, slightly marked with drit, no greater than the size of her segmented, synth palm. A crystal with many evenly sized, triangular faces, each marked in black with symbols she couldn't understand. It hummed faintly with some mystical force or tiny, whirring mechanics she could not see. Holding it carefully, she could feel its gentle vibration subtly brace against her fingers. It seemed to tickle at first, but soon the feeling started to grow, building violently until the metal of her bones rattled. But it was not the crystal.
Cracking, booming, ear-wrenching noises wracked through the mountainside. The bauble fell to the ground as she pressed her hands do her ears and stumbled to the ground in recoil of this intense wave of sound. Birds fled from their trees as the rumbling tore through the air and shook the very earth. Eyes drew wide in terror as one of the neighboring peaks started to rise, uprooting itself from its mountain. Sickening and gargantuan tentacles sprouted from beneath the seams as the dark cone of mountainous stone floated above its natural seat. As the massive abomination drew ever higher, fading up into the clouds with wriggling tendrils lashing at the air, she could swear she almost saw eyes lining its lower surface.
The cracking noises had ended after its violent break from the land was complete, the horror then filling the air only with a terrifying and omnipresent hum as it rose beyond view. She plucked her prize when the thing vanished into the clouds, herself only briefly noticing how the sky shifted around its mass before she stood and turned away, running. Food could come, but she felt its eyes upon her, and had to flee.
Flecks of greenish-blue were smeared over the foreign tracks in a squishy powder. She looked off to the distance, seeing the one small slice of horizon unblocked by the other mountains, gazing upon the cerulean desert beyond. But there was something more. She heard something. She felt... something. Searching then, she sook the steady noise faintly grasping at her.
Along the stained tracks she saw a dull glow, and a broken clasp of synth, nestled in a patch of grass where the tracks showed some long passed struggle. Pulling away the grass, the glow revealed itself. Some sort of minor numenéra, slightly marked with drit, no greater than the size of her segmented, synth palm. A crystal with many evenly sized, triangular faces, each marked in black with symbols she couldn't understand. It hummed faintly with some mystical force or tiny, whirring mechanics she could not see. Holding it carefully, she could feel its gentle vibration subtly brace against her fingers. It seemed to tickle at first, but soon the feeling started to grow, building violently until the metal of her bones rattled. But it was not the crystal.
Cracking, booming, ear-wrenching noises wracked through the mountainside. The bauble fell to the ground as she pressed her hands do her ears and stumbled to the ground in recoil of this intense wave of sound. Birds fled from their trees as the rumbling tore through the air and shook the very earth. Eyes drew wide in terror as one of the neighboring peaks started to rise, uprooting itself from its mountain. Sickening and gargantuan tentacles sprouted from beneath the seams as the dark cone of mountainous stone floated above its natural seat. As the massive abomination drew ever higher, fading up into the clouds with wriggling tendrils lashing at the air, she could swear she almost saw eyes lining its lower surface.
The cracking noises had ended after its violent break from the land was complete, the horror then filling the air only with a terrifying and omnipresent hum as it rose beyond view. She plucked her prize when the thing vanished into the clouds, herself only briefly noticing how the sky shifted around its mass before she stood and turned away, running. Food could come, but she felt its eyes upon her, and had to flee.
Welcome to my fucked up imagination and, more importantly, to the Ninth World! If you can't tell by the header, I'm setting up a little romp in a game called Numenéra. For those of you that are unfamiliar, let me give you a basic rundown of the setting and what it tries to accomplish.
Numenéra is a science fantasy game set roughly one billion years in the future. This is such a monstrously long amount of time that the Earth and humanity --which surprisingly hasn't yet been obliterated within the depths of space-- are unrecognizeable from the modern day. The game's primary concept is that the society of the setting is rather young, perhaps only a few thousand years old. The hyper-advanced technology that has warped the world to what it is now was conceived by ancient, and not always human, civilizations that have long since passed. The term 'Ninth World' is derived from the belief that there were eight great civilizations before now, and that the current humans will inherit their greatness and some day become great like they were. Thus, they are the children of the Ninth World. Whether they're correct or if they'll merely be an insignificant speck to their coming overlords or to the inevitable doom of all things is up to me to decide. Isn't that fun?
It is definitely worth noting that the game's mechanics are very lenient and easy to pick up. It shouldn't take much time at all to learn, and all of the rules were built to take a back seat to storytelling while still providing an engine for that very purpose. The system for character creation in particular is very fascinating in particular, and I believe it is a terrific way to build a character. The main idea behind it is that you can easily describe how the character works in a single phrase. This phrase is structured like so, "I am an adjective noun who verbs," or, "I am a blank blank who blanks." Each of these blanks are your primary character choices such as your 'class', how you channel that 'class', and what the context is that's behind it all. I will not get into the minutiae of how this all works, since this is not a rules tutorial, but if you're interested and curious I can give a more detailed explanation.
Now, the goal of this game is to capitalize on the weird. When technology advances well beyond the point where one can distinguish it from magic, and has done so over numerous different stages, normalcy becomes a difficult thing to grasp. 'Weird' can mean a lot of things. It could be something quirky and fun like a talking, intelligent fish with a dry wit swimming through the air. Or something unfathomably mysterious like a tall, cloaked figure with a dark mirror for a face, speaks only in seemingly unrelated phrases and questions, and bears an uncanny knowledge of all things no matter how obscure or private. Or perhaps something as deeply unsettling as a parasitic creature, a skinless thing no larger than your thumb, which burrows beneath your skin unnoticed and breeds within you until a litter of them bursts from your flesh days later. All of which are things provided within the game's text. How lovely.
As your humble game master, I hope to play into every kind of weird within the course of play. However, as you may have noticed by the flavor text, I tend to enjoy a decently terrifying atmosphere. I feel like it's a natural emotion to experience when faced with the awe of such unknowable phenomena. Depending on the run time of the roleplay, I'd like to show anything from levity to intrigue to mystery, not just horror.
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If you've not been scared off yet, then I'll go over some goals and expectations for a bit.
If this opening post looks like a massive wall of text to you, that's fine! I kinda got a bit excited and carried away while typing this, since this is a setting that I've been wanting to dig into for a couple of years. I'm not a stickler for post length at all, whether too small or too large. Just as long as you're making interesting storytelling decisions and playing along fine with everyone else, I'll be very okay. This isn't going to be a place where anyone judges your performance, which is something that I see a lot of roleplayers (abso-fucking-lutely including myself) worry too much about.
I'm looking for a group of players numbering from four to five, and I may include a player character of my own. A smaller group size than some of the other roleplays I'm involved in will be a better fit for the pacing that I'd like to go with. If you see more than this amount interested, which I'm not very well expecting, don't worry about it and claim your interest anyway. I'll be keeping the interest check open for a week and will filter through everyone as I like, if it comes to it. I invite you to hang out in the meantime.
Numenéra doesn't have any representation on sites like Myth-Weavers or Dicecloud, which have been the usual platforms for tabletop character sheets in this forum. Luckily, because the rules are quite laid back, it is very simple to make a sheet within the confines of this very site. I have a form for it ready that I can provide when the OOC is up, and it should be fine enough to work with in lieu of other options.
Because the setting is very different than typical fantasy or sci-fi (both being categories that it can handily fit into), the speech of the world can be rather atypical as well. As an example, the flavor text above mentions drit and synth, which, respectively, are terms for the fabricated soil that currently coats the earth, and a Ninth World term for plastic. There are a bunch of terms like this that can be made up, and I hope to provide a fairly simple list of appropriate words after the OOC comes up. But, in the spirit of the game's flexibility, you can be free to invent any terms that you deem fitting, as will I. This way we can build our own lexicon of Ninth World jargon as we play, which should be fun.
If you're still interested, but are wondering at how to get at these rules, then I can supply the core rulebook and the first installment of Character Options. If asked, I will also give a link to the dev team's site and store if you want a little of the plethora of other material that they have developed for this game, or if you just want to give them some support. I'm not advertising for them, so I won't provide that link in this opening post.
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