Numenera takes place in a post-post apocalyptic. The world has been destroyed several times, but each time humanity perseveres and remakes society, changed with the loss of knowledge and institutions, both great and small. Remnants of these past ages still exist in the Numenera; technologies that can be as big as a building, or small as some spores in a vial. Some Numenera have had their purposes changed, like a weapon in one era being used as a farming tool in another. Others, have been stripped for parts and changed by the researchers of the current era. Others still have their use maintained and rediscovered, millennia after they were created. The game world is weird and mysterious and you should make your players want to explore it.

This is one of the games where GMs do not roll, so your players will roll both their offense and defense rolls in combat, plus all their other skill checks with just a d20. More details in the Gameplay section. Seldom will you need any other dice, but the GM may want to have a couple D6s for determining item levels.

When playing this game, your players should be getting the most common type of Numenera, known as Cyphers, like candy from a pinata. In exchange for this bounty, the players absolutely should be using these items. In fact, holding more Cyphers than your "class"'s limit could open you up to some gnarly effects. Some of them are minor with only narrative effects, others can cause your Cyphers to become inert or even fuse together. Carry too many, and they can become a singularity focused on you and suck you into the micro black hole. Cyphers are single use, but can range from weird to powerful to magnificent in power. Your players should use these to solve all sorts of problems, and use them in ways you may not expect.

A step up from those are Artifacts. These are semi-permanent or permanent items. Some Artifacts never run out of juice, but others may need a roll every day/week/month/year/use to see if it runs out of power. An artifact can be something like a weapon that warps through space when swung, or a bubble that protects whatever's inside from damage, or a little treaded robot that carries your stuff. There are a lot of these, and you can even work with your players to create new ones, if they spend the XP and resources to make one.

In the other direction, we have Oddities. These things are the equivalent of a Hot Topic gag gift, usually. They don't expire, unless they state they have finite uses, but they're often just weird. A steel hemisphere that whispers in an unknown language. A small pot of green paint that refills at dawn. A glass display that shows an overhead map of where you are, but some of the details are wrong. Things like that. Nothing really useful but stuff that's definitely fun.

Characters in Numenera start off as competent adventurers. The power curve in this game is also fairly small, as their are only 6 Tiers (levels) in the game for PCs.

The Players should want to build characters interested in seeing the world in some way. They need a reason to go out into this dangerous world and interact with all the weird mysteries still being discovered, and those newly occurring.

The PCs in this game are build by selecting a Descriptor, a Type, and a Focus to build your sort of custom class. Once you have selected them, every character can be described as "I am a/n [Descriptor] [Type] who [Focus]. Every Descriptor is an adjective, the Types are nouns, and the Focuses are verbs, so one character can have their sentence read "I am a Brave Glaive who Controls Gravity", and another can read "I am a Graceful Nano who Rides the Lightning".

There are many Descriptors and Foci, but only 3 Types. These make up the chassis for the rest of your character, so having a steady frame works well.

• Glaive - Your fighter type characters. They get abilities related to martial prowess, either ranged or melee
• Nano - This game's equivalent of a caster. Gets some various spell-like abilities. Your Focus can change the elements of things like your basic Onslaught spell or your Shield to match your Focus energy type. For example, Rides the Lightning makes your abilities more lightning based.
• Jack - They fit somewhere in between. They have a lot of utility abilities.

By building your characters like this, you can have an entire party of Glaives who do wildly different things. You can mix and match the three parts to build your character in interesting ways. It's not super crunchy though, like a Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons, so there's not a lot of Options outside your Descriptor/Focus/Type.

Your main stats are Might, Speed, and Intellect, and your stat from the combination of Type/Descriptor/Focus gives you your Maximum for each stat. These are your pools. To activate certain abilities, you need to spend points from a pool. For example, to shoot a psychic lance of energy as a Nano, you would need to spend 1 Intellect point. Pools deplete as you take damage (primarily from Might first, but if something would say, attack your mobility, you may take Speed damage, or Intellect damage from a spell), as you use abilities, and as you apply Effort. Effort allows you to spend points to make a target DC easier to hit by 1 stage. Moving a check from say, needing a 12 on a straight d20 roll to a 9 is definitely something that's in your interest to do. Your Effort is capped at 1 level at creation, but can be increased.

Besides those pools, you also have Skills, that are a combination of generic predefinied list of skills, like Climbing, Perception, Deceiving, and so on, but others can be more precise, like "Knowing how to climb snowy mountains" or "Surviving in Swamps". These more specific ones are often the result of spending XP to earn a narrow focus skill, rather than saving up for a more broad skill.

Numenera exists in a weird space between "XP to level up" and "Spend XP to get more ranks in skills and attributes". To advance a Tier, you have to buy 4 advancements. Each advancement costs 4 XP (more on earning XP later), and the advancements are

• Increased Capabilities - Add 4 points to your pools in any combination
• Extra Effort - Allows you to spend more points to achieve an additional level of Effort.
• Skill - Gain training in a skill, either taking something from an Inability to neutral, from Neutral to Trained, or from Trained to Specialized
• Moving Towards Perfection - Gain a point of Edge in one of your 3 pools. Edge decreases the amount of points spent from a given pool when you take actions, including on Effort.
• Other Options - This is a catchall for a bunch of different options you can take if you don't want one of the main ones above. These are things like healing more when you use the recovery roll, or picking new class abilities from your current Tier or lower. Things that may be useful on only some builds.

You can also spend XP in different ways. 1 XP lets any d20 be rerolled, even if it's not your own. You can also spend 1 point to negate a GM Intrusion. 2XP can be spent on narrow skills or rarely, abilities. 3XP can be spent to make an Artifact or confirm joining a group or organization in fiction.

XP expenditure follows a rough system that is usually narrative focused. 1XP let's you do something Immediately, 2 XP is for something that probably has short or medium term consequences, 3 for Long Term consequences like an item or organization, and 4 is permanent with your Advancement.

The big thing you need to keep in mind when running and prepping this game is that players will absolutely blow shit up in ways you don't expect. This is par for the course for a lot of TTRPGs, but I wanted to just make it more explicit here. If you roll items as player find them, like I do, you can end up with the party getting an item that completely solves the main issue of the adventure in one go, so you need some quick thinking.

If you want to do even more prep, you can pre-roll or handpick what items people find when say, an enemy that drops 1d6 cyphers, and you roll that as part of your prep. I love the chaos of the game though and letting the player roll the d6 to see how many Cyphers they get, then rolling the tables for them in front of them. Going "Well, you guys found a thing that makes you invisible for a minute, an item that lets you remove an object from a matter, and a thing that lets you teleport up to 8 people up to 800 miles..." in the middle of the session is hilarious!

Sorry, got distracted. Back on topic with two points that are related.

The game has very few ways to give you a straight + or - to a dice roll result.

The game uses a Difficulty system to determine how hard things are to accomplish. This is a scale of 0 to 10. Each "step" (a term the game uses a lot), makes the target number players need to roll on the d20 increase by 3. A Difficulty 1 task only requires a 3, while a Difficulty 10 task requires a 30.

This means that Difficulty 7 and up tasks are Impossible with a straight D20 roll, because even on a natural 20, you would still fail (though you would get some major positive effect for rolling a 20.)

The way Numenera works around this is by letting players (and GMs) augment the Difficulty itself. For this example, we're going to use a Difficulty 6 Climbing check up a cliff. A player can roll this as is, and need an 18-20 to succeed. Pretty tough! But, if the player is Trained in Climbing, that lowers the Difficulty from 6 to 5. Furthermore, if they're Specialized in Climbing, it goes from 5 to 4. Now they only need a 12 or higher, much better odds. But what if they brought some climbing gear? Well, that's another point off the Difficulty, down to 3, a 9 or higher. And finally, what if a friend is at the top of the cliff, helping them up with the rope? Now we're down to 2. With a 6 or higher, this difficult climb is succeeded on. Now let's say they just want to remove that chance for failure further. They can spend up to 2 levels of Effort, so they want to get that Difficulty down to 0. They spend the needed amount of points (3 for first level of Effort, 2 for every level thereafter, up to your current max) from their Might pool, since the GM determined this climb is a Might test. Their character, now using all their training, tools, allies, and pushing themselves as hard as they can, have brought this formerly really difficult task down to something trivial.

Steps can work the opposite direction. Same cliff, same Difficulty 6, but now, the wind is blowing hard. Difficulty 7. Let's make it at night... and during a snow storm... Think that might count for another 1 or 2, so we're at an 8 or 9, depending on y our table.

This same sort of thing works for combat. The level of the enemy is it's Difficulty.. Players can work together to get the Glaive or anyone else set up so they can hit it easier. Being Trained in specific combat skills can also help, and being Trained in defenses can help you avoid certain types of attacks.

At any time, the GM can offer a GM Intrusion: a situation or complication that makes things worse. It's offered to one player, even if it might affect everyone. If the player accepts, they get a point of XP, and they get a point of XP to give to another party member, and they have to justify why (even if it's a funny joke out of character, or an in character action, it's a way to compliment another player). As a quick counter to this, there are also Player Intrusions, which are like, a once-a-session instafix for a situation. They are usually related to your character's Type, and cost 1XP to use. The GM has to approve it of course, some situations a Glaive can't brute force their way out of no matter how impressive the feat of strength or agility.

Players earn XP by taking on these Intrusions, and then usually at the end of sessions by GMs based on discoveries made. For one session I gave 2 points for finding a strange location, and then another 4 points for solving the mystery there, because this was a short campaign and I wanted to juice advancement a bit. This may take a bit of feeling out on a table to table basis.

Numenera is a game that has helped me think more flexibily as a GM. I still sometimes get caught in the mindset of D&D encounter building with other games, but this one really forced me to work differently. Fights in this game can be dangerous sure, but there's no real tactical level to this.

It's a game that encourages players to use their resources. This will definitely be a challenge to players who like to hoard healing items only to never use them in a video game. It also doesn't encourage people to spend their pools, which doubles as their health, as well as a game like Blades in the Dark does with the Stress mechanic. It helps that every player can make healing rolls several times a day on themselves, but resistant or hesitant players may look for solutions outside of pushing themselves.

The world of Numenera is weird and mysterious and that's really really cool. The creatures in the book all list their motivation and behaviors and some may just not care about the party unless fucked with. Creatures can range from weird bog creatures with stolen faces on tentacles that try to lure more people in, to living robotics, to lizarddogs that spit venom, and even a glass golem powered by a swarm of psychic beetles living inside.. Likewise, the Numenera are weird. Take advantage of that and do some cool things. Almost any spell in a game like Dungeons and Dragons can be turned into a single use Cypher easily, and some into Artifacts if you want.

This game may not scratch the itch for Character Builder players. Since there is only 6 tiers for each character, your growth is at a slower pace, and the power between Tier 1 and Tier 6 isn't as great as say, the power between Level 1 and Level 20 in D&D. You'll get more abilities that are more potent as you advance, yes, but there isn't the minutia and wealth of small choices that make up those types of games. You pick a Descriptor, you pick a Type, and you pick a Focus, then you're locked into your path. Your skills are up to you as part of your advancement, sure, but once you've got your core character, your remaining choices are those skills and whatever abilities you can choose to take each tier.