The Ninth World is a vast and strange place. When you enter it, you explore a weird and wondrous landscape, meet creatures unlike anything seen in our world, and experience adventures that stretch your imagination. No wonder, then, that if you’re new to Numenera, it can be hard to know where to start. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent portals into the Numenera roleplaying game—the best one for you depends on your experience and what you’re looking for.
New to tabletop RPGs? Or maybe you’ve played plenty, but want a simple, inexpensive way to give the Ninth World a try. In either case, the Numenera Starter Set is a great entry point into the world of Numenera. It gives 3 – 6 players everything you need to get started: rulebook, adventure book, five pre-generated characters, and dice, along with a poster map for the adventure, XP and GM intrusion cards, and a rules quick-reference sheet. You even get a link to download a second adventure for free.
If you’re an experienced tabletop gamer, the Numenera corebook may be a better place to start. This beautifully illustrated 416-page book (with a poster map) gives you a detailed overview of two vast swaths of the Ninth World known as the Steadfast and the Beyond, along with the complete rules and everything you need to create incredible and unique Numenera characters. It also includes four complete adventures, and info on hundreds of creatures, cyphers, artifacts, and other elements of the Ninth World.
No matter which product you start with, you might enjoy this How to Play video. It’s about half an hour long, and in it, Monte, the design team, and friends give you a look at the basics of running Numenera and how to use the Cypher System, Numenera’s game system.
Where do you go from there?
There are loads of great Numenera products, so if you’ve started playing Numenera already and are interested in building your campaign, where should you look next? That depends on your needs.
For starters, if you’ve been playing using the Numenera Starter Set, your first step should definitely be the Numenera corebook.
After that, if you’re a player, you probably want items that give you great options and aids for building your character.
- Numenera Character Options gives you new foci and descriptors to choose from. Numenera Character Options 2 adds even more, plus two new character types.
- Of course, you can download a free, printable character sheet, but our full-color character sheet pad is much nicer—and the character portfolios are nicer still!
- And while you can use regular gaming dice for Numenera, the custom Numenera dice are specially marked for the Cypher System, and they look great!
If you’re a GM, there are loads of great choices:
- The Ninth World Bestiary gives you a ton of new creatures to populate your adventures. It’s a must-have for GMs building their own campaigns.
- Looking for adventures? The Devil’s Spine gives you a mini-campaign of four meaty, linked adventures. The Instant Adventures in Weird Discoveries (there are ten of them!) can be run with just a few minutes’ prep time. And we offer a bunch of individual adventures in our PDF-only “glimmer” format of short products, such as Into the Violet Vale, Beyond all Worlds, and Skein of the Blackbone Bride.
- Books like the Ninth World Guidebook, Into the Deep, and Into the Outside expand on the Ninth World and even take you beyond it. Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior Worlds brings you wild and mysterious locations as well as the tools to generate weird ruins of your own with the Ruin Mapping Engine.
- And items like the Intrusion Deck, Numenera playmat, and XP Deck make prepping and running your games faster and easier.
