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You won’t find the kind of creatures featured in the Ninth World Bestiary 2 anywhere else. The Earth of Numenera is a billion years in our future, and in a world littered with the detritus of prior civilizations that achieved amazing heights of technology, exploration, and understanding before they fell, the creatures are weird.
Many RPGs have strange creatures, to be sure, but in my experience Numenera gives a GM (and game writer) unique liberties to create beings that don’t have to simply be scary or terrifying — they can also be inexplicable. That sense of not knowing, of characters realizing they might never know the full story behind a creature’s existence, lies at the heart of the “weird of Numenera.” It’s also why the game is not a straight-up science fiction RPG, but rather science fantasy. Because what the past forged from science, new civilizations building on the ruins of yesterday call magic.
For instance, characters — startled by the inscrutable, many-eyed entity that seems focused on creating some kind of unknown mechanism — won’t know if the creature will perceive them as a threat, or if, instead, it’ll help them if they ask (nicely!), or whether the ultimate purpose of the complex object it’s building is something they should be concerned about. All they know is that the creature must be dealt with. Their choice might be to flee, use force, apply a weird object or artifact they’ve looted from some previous enigmatic ruin, or attempt negotiation. If the latter succeeds, they might even learn that the entity that surprised them is called a rythcallocer.
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RYTHCALLOCER 7 (21)
Large as a small house, a rythcallocer’s most arresting feature is its dozens of staring eyes. Though variously sized, all of them study the world with fierce intensity, many gleaming with a bluish light all their own.
When encountered, a rythcallocer is usually hard at work “repairing” strange machines in some forgotten cache or ruin. And while it’s true that a rythcallocer can get what seems like a useless piece of refuse to function, it probably isn’t the function for which the item was created. Rythcallocers are instead adept at repurposing items of the numenera (even previously working items) to create objects that provide the ability to look backward seconds, minutes, or rarely, even longer in time. But no matter how far back their constructs peer, a rythcallocer never seems satisfied.
- Motive: Look (and perhaps travel) backward in time
- Environment: Anywhere away from other intelligent creatures
- Health: 33
- Damage Inflicted: 7 points
- Armor: 3
- Movement: Short, short when swimming
- Modifications: Knowledge of the numenera and crafting as level 8.
Combat: Rythcallocers prefer not to fight, unless forced to do so. When they do, they draw forth one of their orb-like eyes, revealing it to be artificial. Each orb is essentially a cypher that can kick a target (or the rythcallocer) through time by a few minutes, which absents the target from the current conflict. Other orbs act like detonations or ray emitters that inflict damage, and also kick a target through time. In most cases, the direction is into the future, which means that the target seems to disappear then reappear a few minutes later, with no time having passed for it.
If killed, a rythcallocer phases away (to where isn’t clear — it’s possible their body becomes unmoored in time), leaving only a few glass orbs behind.
Interaction: Rythcallocers can communicate in a variety of languages, and if communication can be opened, the creature is revealed as a frantic, driven being obsessed with finding new items of prior world technology to experiment on. It won’t reveal why it wants to peer back in time, only that it is essential. A rythcallocer could be assuaged with the gift of a few cyphers.
Use: The PCs find an orb-shaped cypher. Later, they are tracked down by a rythcallocer who misplaced it and wants it back.
Loot: A rythcallocer usually has about six cyphers with it.
[CALLOUT: GM Intrusion: The characters uses a cypher formed from a disembodied rythcallocer eye, and learns something unsettling about the future, a future which might never come to pass.]
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The Ninth World Bestiary 2 features 170 creatures, each one as creative and unusual as the rythcallocer. Bring the world of Numenera to life when the Ninth World Bestiary 2 hits store shelves in May!
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