The Book Reveals Hidden Truths

Once again, I have ventured into the Ninth World of Numenera.

At the Roleplay Club I frequent, we try to be accomodating towards new arrivals so it's fairly easy to get a spot at a game whenever you show up. As my shifts were causing chaos in my schedule, I have had no regular spot so I got to play various characters whenever I had a spare evening to play.

This time I was playing a sneaky character whose main characteristic was being constantly suspicious of others. So while I was drinking and cracking jokes at the table, my character remained observant and silently assessing the situation as it unfolded. When it came to scenes where our group was interacting with NPCs, I didn't have much to do actively without breaking character.

So I reached for the book and perused it while listening to the other players.

I've mentioned before that, as a system, Numenera relies on a specific sentence descriptor as its base for a character concept. Said phrase being: 'I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verb].' I've also mentioned that I have not felt that this sentence was anything more than a conceptual guideline, having very little to do with your character from a mechanical standpoint.

It seems I was wrong.

Within the confines of two covers, I've found a list of adjectives, nouns and verbs (although I feel they were closer to verb phrases at times) that you can combine to create your character. Each of them came with a unique set of traits, backed up by system mechanics, to incorporate them into the game.

I was not aware this was part of the system and a quick comparison of the list to my character showed me that certain descriptors my character had were missing from the list. Maybe they were taken out of some supplementary materials or were simply not used mechanically. Whatever the case may be, I suppose this is what gave me a bad impression of the game initially as I'm quite fond of the modularity inherent in such a character creation system.

This matter requires further investigation...