Numenera: First Impressions

So I finally got a chance to actually play a game for once, and Numenera at that. We spent a good chunk of the night building characters for about half the table (there are seven of us), establishing who knew who, getting fed setting information (since we are not using the "official" Ninth World), and joking around (did I mention there are seven of us?).

Since we did not get a chance to actually play much, this is more of a first impressions from the player's side of things. Once the game got rolling we were in a mostly underground facility owned by Beth's character, a wealthy nano that specialized in dimensional science (and the cause of the incident that pulled my character mostly into the Ninth World).

While we were milling about a group of looters (ie level 2 bandits) broke in and were spotted, and I was surprised at how fast combat started and ran despite seven characters. I think all told it maybe lasted about half an hour, and that is counting six baddies and the time spent explaining Edge, Effort, cyphers, how damage works, and pondering what to do and how many points to spend doing it.

We beat them pretty easily (Randy erred on the side of caution because he had no idea what sort of stuff we could be expected to handle), with Beth's character and possessions taking the brunt of damage due to a natural 1. Once the dust settled and the fires put out we discovered that they had taken some sensitive information from her character's super-secret vault, somehow using said vault's door to make an exit by throwing it through a wall.

Though we had the foresight to detain a few of the looters for interrogation, not even Ort could get anything out of them, and he is a charming fellow with Intellect points to spare. So I guess the next session will involve some legwork, which is fine because he also has legs to spare.

Behind the Scenes
We actually used the Cypher Deck, which gave us some appropriate results for a band of looters: speed pills and a sound dampener, the latter of which they really should have used in hindsight.

I have decided that Ort will sound like Zoidberg, so I need to work on that voice.