Numenera – The Nightmare Switch Gameplay – Part 4/4 – Wrap Up

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Lessons Learned

• If you are playing a one-off session, the party has no incentive to hoard their XP, and so will use it to reroll or stop your GM Intrusion, so take that into account.
• We rolled no 1s during our game, so no free intrusions this time.
• Combat is fast and quick. By not making it a focus of the game, and by explicitly not paying XP out for combat, you as GM won’t feel the need to make combat pivotal to your session. Sessions don’t lead up to and climax with combat. If the players massacre your monsters, you don’t lose hours of preparation, they just get on with their adventure. Had combat been more of a focus, I might not have let the players talk their way out of the entire adventure by convincing the margr chieftain to release the replacement part.
• This entire adventure played out the way it did entirely because of a lucky combination of 4 random cyphers (semi-random: I vetted the card combinations before handing them out, but only for whether or not I thought it was a cool power or not) as well as Gabriel’s oddity and focus: a pill to let the characters negotiate with the margr, which they could get back after leaving it in town by using an injectable teleporter and a remote tracking device, with a fourth cypher that let them move the Giant Metal Cross around in the air for extra impressiveness. Added to that was a single power wielded by one of the characters, who also happened to be trained in persuasive speech. Very specific combination!
• Don’t fret if the characters break right through one of your obstacles, be it combat or by skipping a huge chunk of the adventure. They’re having fun, you can always throw a spanner in the works using GM intrusion, and eventually the tables will turn against them.

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Numenera – The Nightmare Switch Gameplay – Part 3/4 – The Adventure Continues

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The Adventure Continues

The party had some downtime while the quarry mistress headed off to organise the travel arrangements, and so Gabriel, Acrophelia and Arrowtail went for a walk through town, respectively healing, guarding and pickpocketing the tired townsfolk. Chronus went back to the ship where he convinced Deymish to walk up to the tower and again try to make entry. Hataniah refused them again, saying they should come back in the morning. Chronus apologised to Deymish for dragging him all the way to the tower, then returned to his friends to report the news that the tower was still inaccessible.

By this time the town’s steeds were ready. The party gathered their equipment, mounted the aneen and headed north out of the city. They were told the margr would roam the deserts at night, and they would be travelling at night, but this didn’t dissuade them. I suspect the nightmare visions scared them so much they didn’t want to attempt to sleep in the city and surrounds even once.

Numenera – The Nightmare Switch Gameplay – Part 2/4 – The Adventure Begins

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The Adventure Begins

And so our party found itself on Deymish’s ship, with 3 crewmen, passing through the Seshar region, which consists of huge artificial canals cut in straight lines through burning desert terrain patrolled by roaming margr tribes. Deymish was urgently shipping three crates to the Redstone clave of Aeon Priests, for reasons unknown.

It’s important to note that as part of character creation I handed out mostly random cyphers to each of the characters, to their limit. Although I can’t remember the specifics of each, the important cyphers will rear their heads in this adventure, I promise you.

Numenera – The Nightmare Switch Gameplay – Part 1/4 – Overview

Heads Up

This post will contain spoilers for players wanting to play the Nightmare Switch adventure. It also assumes a basic understanding of the Numenera game system, which is called the Cypher System. If you are going to play the Nightmare Switch intro adventure, you should probably read this afterwards to avoid any spoilers. If you don’t know anything about Numenera or the game system it runs on, you can probably still get something out of these posts, although a quick overview at that last link will prime you.

The total article is almost 8,000 words long, so I’ve split it into 4 parts, the Overview and Introduction, The Adventure Begins, The Adventure Continues, and Wrap Up.