An introductory adventure by Sean K. Reynolds For Numenera (Cypher System RPG) What the heck is this doing on itch.io? Ashes of the Sea is a slick, high-gloss 35-page production released for 2018’s Free RPG Day, consisting of a 15-page adventure, a little bestiary, and a quick start guide for the Numenera RPG system itself. It’s not at all what I’m used to for itch, with all the extremely high production values I’d expect from Monte Cook Games. I saw Numenera listed, and I’ve played Cypher System games before, so I figured I’d check it out, not suspecting it was a big boy publisher slumming it down with the amateurs. It’s not something I’d review for this, but it is free and on itch.io, so here we go. A brief mention on the system/setting…Cypher System is the Monte Cook d20(ish) system he designed after leaving D&D, first introduced as Numenera. The world of Numenera is Earth a billion+ years in the future, with strange technical, magical, and just plain weird artifacts (Numenera) scattered throughout a vast and shattered landscape. Adventurers are typically looking to discover ancient artifacts, repair ancient artifacts, use ancient artifacts, and then attempt to stop disasters caused by activated ancient artifacts. It’s a pretty adventure-ready setup, and the art for the game is gorgeous, but it’s also allergic to maps and solid diagrams. The system embraces theater of the mind in its interactions and descriptions, ensuring a vague, almost dreamlike imagination state in players. The adventure itself is a pretty standard plot, with the one-shot party of pregens (or PCs) stumbling upon a teleporter and getting sent to a random village in the midst of cold snowy lands. The players are prodded by harsh cold-weather rules to rapidly head down to the village, where they bumble around doing village things until it’s just assumed that they catch the hint that they need to go to “the Icon”, the weird thing depicted on the cover. Some side quests are offered to go kill stuff in the valley if the players are someone the most efficient players in the world and the GM needs more to kill more time. Hoping aboard the railroad they enter a cavern beneath the statue, they mess around in some weird domes, and are given enough plot coupons to fix the teleporter they arrive at to in turn leave. Simple enough. All of this is written in nicely laid-out long paragraphs in two-column layout with neat art sometimes tangentially related to what’s being described. Very traditional. I’ll grant that what I liked here is going to be ephemeral. The format will irritate some but I do like the generous sidebars communicating GM suggestions and tips, and often the sidebars have helpful illustrations as well. The adventure plot is pretty standard for Numenera but it shows what the world is about, so that’s a success there. Despite the linear nature of the adventure things aren’t exactly a railroad…the players can definitely screw up and make it harder on themselves, and there’s even an allowance for the PCs being so obnoxious they fight the entire village and murder a significant proportion of them. Resolution is also admirably open-ended, which is a lot better than the standard Pathfinder or D&D Free RPG Day offering. There’s a lot that can be improved though. The biggest would be to have a map. I know your system is extremely allergic to tactical combat, but it’s still a good idea to have map(s) if you’re going to be travelling and exploring. As a possible side-effect of the wordiness of the adventure’s prose, the objectives of the adventure are also rather obscured, both in the MacGuffin-needer (broken teleporter) and the MacGuffin-mine (the Icon). As it is, I imagine the players being a little confused about what they have to do as they bumble around. It’s also slightly overstuffed for its one-shot scope, but that’s something a canny GM can get around. Most objectionable: There are no ashes of any sea. The best use case for this thing is to introduce players and game masters into the Numenera system and world, but probably not exactly like Sean and Monte intended…not only does this introduce the system decently well, it also shows the cracks and deficiencies of the adventure writing in the system, and honestly the more basic problem that while Numenera on the outset seems rife with almost infinite possibilities, it tends to wear thin when writers try to actually grasp at consistency. It’s a pretty dream, but there’s no map here, making the whole system a little…shallow. There’s also not much to mine for broader use, again because of that ephemeral nature. Final Rating? **/***** You can have fun with this but it won’t have a long-lasting impact.
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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