Last year I picked up Monte Cook's Numenera book, on a whim. Having enjoyed the Pelgrane Press Dying Earth RPG from a few years earlier, and also being a fan of the concept of, shall we say 'Super-future Sci-fi fantasy', I figured Numenera would be right up my ally.
Of course I have been dimly aware that Mssr. Cook has been rather over hyped as a game designer for some time and I found Numenera to be sadly lacking, with an overly simplistic and oddly unworkable rule set and far too little attention paid to fleshing out the setting that was, in theory, the entire point of the game. To whit, I am still not entirely sure where the weight of the book has gone, since neither the rules, nor the setting information have filled it.
You may, then, be wondering what, exactly, this has to do with 'The Strange', aside from the fact that they are both from Monte Cook?
Quite simply, The Strange is very nearly Numenera with a miniscule number of changes to the setting, such as changing the class names. Mostly changing the Class Names.
Just as in Numenera you have three classes that can best be described as 'Physical Guy', 'Magic Guy', and 'Clever Guy'. And just like in Numenera you can't call them by common sense names, but have strange jargon names like 'vector', 'Spinner' and 'Paradox'. Bonus points if you can tell me which class does what based on the names.
Like Numenera, character design is summed up cleverly, but hollowly, by saying you are a adjective noun who verbs, where the Noun is your class and the adjective and verb come from fairly short lists of options.
This is not unlike saying defining your D&D character by saying 'I am a Sword Fighter who dual wields', really. Its a bit of a gimmick, though it does accurately describe the bulk of character creation. Of course your 'stats' are mostly pre-defined by your class, and your class is essentially a list of powers that are, purely fluff wise, based on your class's theme.
The biggest change comes in the verbing part of character creation, due to the unique setting of The Strange.
Let me pull back a bit so this will make sense.
Numenera is set at the very end of life on Earth, millions or billions of years in the future. The Strange is set now, today.. if that TV show, Fringe, was more true than we'd like to admit. The Strange, from which the game takes its name, is the weird energy that forms the interstistal space between multiversal worlds, and is the source of all your character's cool abilities. Yes, even if you define yourself as a mundane fighter, you still are awesome at mundane shit because you are magically powered by magic. I mean by The Strange.
Implicit in the game design is the idea of trans dimensional hopping, and three dimensions are presented, to include modern earth. Your 'verbing' is specific to which dimension you are presently in.
See: Unlike most dimension hopping settings you don't actually port over your character directly but translate him instead to the new paradigm, which usually means changing your powerering Verb. Modern Earth characters can't have the verb 'Slays Dragons', for example, which is specific to the fantasy dimension.
Fundamentally, however, the concept of your character remains the same, forcing you to redesign your character into three different versions of the same character for three different settings, and presumably more if they release additional books with additional settings. So on earth your Vector might be a former linebacker, while on fantasy-world he is a stone golem, with all that implies.
While the Idea is neat enough, I don't think it works as a game concept, if only because of the amount of work entailed from the players. Forgive me my prejudices, but in my experience most players are lazy gits.
Further, due to the rather rigidly contrained numbers, there isn't really much mechancial difference between worlds. Your former linebacker with an uzi becomes a stone golem with a repeating crossbow, and mechancally is throwing the same numbers down against equally ruthlessly balanced npc/monsters. That same Vector, translated to bio-mechanical future-world becomes a Warrior Caste bio-cyborg with a blaster rifle... and still throws the same mechanics in combat and uses most of the same powers, a blatantly illusory choice at the end.
Further tying this game to Numenera is the idea of cyphers. Since ordinary equipment is so bland and ordinary, your Strange can pick up super awesome magic stuff, either somewhat permanent or limited by uses, called Cyphers. These are identical in practice to the Cyphers in Numenera, except that the Fluff more or less changes them from Super-Science artifacts of previous eras to doo-dads powered by the extra-dimensional energies of The Strange.
To be honest I would have been more impressed with this product if it had been more closely linked with the Numenera stuff... or more probably, if Numenera had been presented simply as one possible Interdimensional Realm of The Strange, and the various facets of character creation tied to trans-dimensional travel had been made more optional. The setting of The Strange lends itself well to an X-Files sort of game play, except for the fact that everything gets paradigm shifted (So nothing is weird at all) and your characters are presumed to already be clued into this whole dimension hopping thing.
On the other hand, the Players Guide, which this review is for, is not a bad purchase at only twenty dollars as it gives you the very complete game without all the bloat of the full book. Sure, you don't really have the bestiary, but having seen the Numenera Bestiary, I can tell you that you aren't really missing much... since critters are almost completely defined by their difficulty ratings. It is possible that the setting information for Fantasy World and Bio-tech world would be worth the extra price, but that is, for me, mere speculation.
So, in the end, I can recommend the players guide as a starting point for the curious, and a decent resource for people willing to try out the 'new' Monte Cook engine on the cheap.
Of course I have been dimly aware that Mssr. Cook has been rather over hyped as a game designer for some time and I found Numenera to be sadly lacking, with an overly simplistic and oddly unworkable rule set and far too little attention paid to fleshing out the setting that was, in theory, the entire point of the game. To whit, I am still not entirely sure where the weight of the book has gone, since neither the rules, nor the setting information have filled it.
You may, then, be wondering what, exactly, this has to do with 'The Strange', aside from the fact that they are both from Monte Cook?
Quite simply, The Strange is very nearly Numenera with a miniscule number of changes to the setting, such as changing the class names. Mostly changing the Class Names.
Just as in Numenera you have three classes that can best be described as 'Physical Guy', 'Magic Guy', and 'Clever Guy'. And just like in Numenera you can't call them by common sense names, but have strange jargon names like 'vector', 'Spinner' and 'Paradox'. Bonus points if you can tell me which class does what based on the names.
Like Numenera, character design is summed up cleverly, but hollowly, by saying you are a adjective noun who verbs, where the Noun is your class and the adjective and verb come from fairly short lists of options.
This is not unlike saying defining your D&D character by saying 'I am a Sword Fighter who dual wields', really. Its a bit of a gimmick, though it does accurately describe the bulk of character creation. Of course your 'stats' are mostly pre-defined by your class, and your class is essentially a list of powers that are, purely fluff wise, based on your class's theme.
The biggest change comes in the verbing part of character creation, due to the unique setting of The Strange.
Let me pull back a bit so this will make sense.
Numenera is set at the very end of life on Earth, millions or billions of years in the future. The Strange is set now, today.. if that TV show, Fringe, was more true than we'd like to admit. The Strange, from which the game takes its name, is the weird energy that forms the interstistal space between multiversal worlds, and is the source of all your character's cool abilities. Yes, even if you define yourself as a mundane fighter, you still are awesome at mundane shit because you are magically powered by magic. I mean by The Strange.
Implicit in the game design is the idea of trans dimensional hopping, and three dimensions are presented, to include modern earth. Your 'verbing' is specific to which dimension you are presently in.
See: Unlike most dimension hopping settings you don't actually port over your character directly but translate him instead to the new paradigm, which usually means changing your powerering Verb. Modern Earth characters can't have the verb 'Slays Dragons', for example, which is specific to the fantasy dimension.
Fundamentally, however, the concept of your character remains the same, forcing you to redesign your character into three different versions of the same character for three different settings, and presumably more if they release additional books with additional settings. So on earth your Vector might be a former linebacker, while on fantasy-world he is a stone golem, with all that implies.
While the Idea is neat enough, I don't think it works as a game concept, if only because of the amount of work entailed from the players. Forgive me my prejudices, but in my experience most players are lazy gits.
Further, due to the rather rigidly contrained numbers, there isn't really much mechancial difference between worlds. Your former linebacker with an uzi becomes a stone golem with a repeating crossbow, and mechancally is throwing the same numbers down against equally ruthlessly balanced npc/monsters. That same Vector, translated to bio-mechanical future-world becomes a Warrior Caste bio-cyborg with a blaster rifle... and still throws the same mechanics in combat and uses most of the same powers, a blatantly illusory choice at the end.
Further tying this game to Numenera is the idea of cyphers. Since ordinary equipment is so bland and ordinary, your Strange can pick up super awesome magic stuff, either somewhat permanent or limited by uses, called Cyphers. These are identical in practice to the Cyphers in Numenera, except that the Fluff more or less changes them from Super-Science artifacts of previous eras to doo-dads powered by the extra-dimensional energies of The Strange.
To be honest I would have been more impressed with this product if it had been more closely linked with the Numenera stuff... or more probably, if Numenera had been presented simply as one possible Interdimensional Realm of The Strange, and the various facets of character creation tied to trans-dimensional travel had been made more optional. The setting of The Strange lends itself well to an X-Files sort of game play, except for the fact that everything gets paradigm shifted (So nothing is weird at all) and your characters are presumed to already be clued into this whole dimension hopping thing.
On the other hand, the Players Guide, which this review is for, is not a bad purchase at only twenty dollars as it gives you the very complete game without all the bloat of the full book. Sure, you don't really have the bestiary, but having seen the Numenera Bestiary, I can tell you that you aren't really missing much... since critters are almost completely defined by their difficulty ratings. It is possible that the setting information for Fantasy World and Bio-tech world would be worth the extra price, but that is, for me, mere speculation.
So, in the end, I can recommend the players guide as a starting point for the curious, and a decent resource for people willing to try out the 'new' Monte Cook engine on the cheap.
The Strange Player's Guide
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