Your focus is the gift (and the curse) that you have inherited or created, one defined through your relationship with the numenera and your years of training. Your descriptor helps paint what kind of person you are and modifies some of your abilities.īut your focus is where things get most interesting. The jack blends the two, mastering no trades but understanding them all, making use of the abundant numenera to her own benefit.ĭescriptors are adjectives like tough, intelligent, and cautious. The nano studies the secrets of the lost ages, hoping to harness a fraction of the power of the relics she finds, and channeling inherent abilities to devastating effect. The glaive is a warrior, improving himself through intense physical training and the application of the numenera to his body and mind. The types are the three character classes: the glaive, the nano, and the jack. You could also say it like this: I'm a who. For instance: I'm a strong-willed jack who exists out of phase. Numenera explorers are defined with a descriptor, a class (called a type), and a focus. The numenera are equally a source of aid and horror, ineffable and inexplicable. Others harness power from invisible energies left in the very air and soil.

Some Ninth Worlders scavenge the ruins of the prior worlds, seeking ancient artifacts and relics to sell or use. The people of the Ninth World call all these things, collectively, the numenera. The Earth itself is surrounded by the datasphere: an invisible network that constantly transmits information across the globe to some unknown purpose, but that the very clever (or very lucky) can sometimes tap into for their own purposes.

Automaton soldiers march across desolated fields, fighting a war that no one remembers or could even understand. Abandoned clouds of nanites wander the scrublands, horrifically twisting whatever they come across according to some warped, unknowable design. All that remains is the detritus they left behind in vast profusion: crumbling ruins, floating monoliths, the descendants of their engineered or imported creatures. There are no records of the prior worlds, who they were, or what happened to them. The Ninth World is exceedingly young-not even 1,000 years in recorded history. The present world is called the Ninth World, not because there were eight worlds before it, but just because that is what they have called themselves. The prior worlds are gone now they died out, transcended, or otherwise moved on. Their abilities are far beyond ours even if our civilization were to survive another 10,000 years, we would barely have begun to accumulate the strength and knowledge that could place us in the histories of what Ninth Worlders call the “prior worlds”. Among them were civilizations that mastered space and time, people who could halt the death of the sun or shape the continents as they wished, or beings who could shape life itself to suit their needs and whims. The powers of these civilizations beggar description. Many great and powerful civilizations have arisen and disappeared in that time, not all of them human.

The Ninth World is Earth, one billion years in the future.

Tides of numenera characters