Community & Coup D’état

Slaves of the Machine God is not one, but two campaigns for Numenera, the Science Fantasy roleplaying game of exploration and adventure published by Monte Cook Games, set billions of years into the future after multiple, highly technological and advanced civilisations have risen and fallen. It can be played through in one, not two, but three ways. The first is to play each campaign separately. The second is to play the individual parts of either campaign as separate scenarios that the Game Master can drop into her campaign. The second is play both campaigns not separately, but together as an interlocking whole, switching back and forth between the chapters in each campaign. The first campaign is ‘Relics of the Machine’, a more typical adventure campaign for use with Numenera Discovery, the first of the core rules for the second edition of the Numenera, which presents the setting of the Ninth World with everything needed to play including character creation, rules, Cyphers, a bestiary, advice for the Game Master, and some ready-to-pay scenarios. The second campaign is ‘Amber Keep’, a community building, development, and defence campaign for use with Numenera Destiny, the second of the core rules for the second edition of the Numenera, which expands the setting with new Player Character archetypes, salvaging and crafting rules, numenera, scenarios, and more, all designed to facilitate campaign play in which charting the future of the Ninth World is part of that play.

Slaves of the Machine God includes notes for the Game Master on running the campaigns together, separately, piecemeal, or even as a shortened version. A flowchart shows the order in which the parts of the two campaigns should be run together. If run together, the combined campaigns will take the Player Characters from Tier 1 all the way up to Tier 5, and that is without adding any adventures, although there is room between some of the chapters to do that. The setting is the Steadfast of the Ninth Age, the primary settled area, and so either part of Slaves of the Machine God is easy to slot into the Game Master’s own campaign. There are no specific Player Character requirements for either campaign. All three Character Types from Numenera Discovery—the Glaive, the Jack, and the Nano—all have abilities that work with Numenera Destiny and thus with the ‘Amber Keep’ campaign. Of the Character Types that will be useful from Numenera Destiny in the ‘Relics of the Machine’, the Delve is probably the most useful. Lastly, any Player Character able to interface or communicate with machinery, robots, and numenera, will also prove to be an asset.

‘Relics of the Machine’ requires a little set-up in that the Player Characters need to be friends with Radius, a mercenary with a metallic body, and done some work for the Amber Gleaners, a group of scholars and explorers. Radius remembers little of its background, but after an encounter with some mud-birds using a memory-stealing device, begins to recall some previously hidden memories. Following this a few weeks later, he disappears, and when they find him again, a Prophet of the Machine God is torturing him. She states that the Machine God is on the rise and seeks the loyalty of all robots and automata; that she has been instructed to find the Machine God’s ‘fallen angels’, each of whom has a divine key that will fully empower the Machine God; and that Radius is not the only one sought by the Prophet of the Machine God. The focus of the campaign moves to finding the other ‘fallen angels’, discover who or what Radius is and where it is from, and just what the Machine God and its minions are working towards. At the same time, other ‘fallen angels’ take an interest in Radius and Player Characters, but as the campaign progresses, together they will discover a strange society of hidden robots and automata that will be on the frontline when the Machine God does rise and the identities of the remaining ‘fallen angels’. Penultimately, they will learn the identity of the Machine God, Ciszan, and go in search of him on and in the Howling Pyramid.

The Howling Pyramid is where the campaign switches gear. Up until now, the Player Characters, accompanied by an increasingly grumpy Radius, have mostly been travelling back and forth from their base, often to far distant locations, to follow up on rumours and names. The Howling Pyramid is a massive pyramid floating and spinning in a black void, marked with deep, ravine-like striations and inverted natural laws in which sound imparts negative gravity and threatens to thrust anyone on the surface upwards and into the rough windstorms which whip across the upper surface. This is a weird and deadly dungeon—in true Numenera fashion—that will take multiple sessions to fully explore and for Radius to find its siblings before Ciszan can be confronted. There are multiple access points to the Howling Pyramid, but the starting point for the Player Characters’ exploration is likely to be decided randomly and the complete (or near complete) exploration of all five sides is likely to take at least three or four sessions in comparison to the one or two needed for the earlier chapters. Such a change of pace may well need some adjustment upon the part of the players given the speed of the earlier adventures.

One downside to the campaign is that it revolves around the actions of the NPC, Radius, and the Player Characters’ attachment to it. The players need to make that investment in it from the start and although that investment is strongly coupled with the imminent rise and threat of the Machine God as the campaign progresses, that need for investment never really lessens. That said, the campaign comes to close with not one, but two big clashes. Both are surprisingly personal and do not necessarily rely on combat prowess to overcome.

The other campaign, ‘Amber Keep’, also requires some set-up, though this is again, a connection to the explorers and scholars, the Amber Gleaners. It is a community-based campaign and like ‘Relics of the Machine’ before it, it consists of eight chapters. They are shorter than the chapters for ‘Relics of the Machine’ and in some cases, are less immediate, playing out over several months. At the start of ‘Amber Keep’, the Amber Gleaners ask the Player Characters to help set up a new settlement in the wilds. The campaign presents the Player Characters with opportunities to defend it—potentially against those who come looking for Radius if it settles in Amber Keep, deal with disasters natural and unnatural, confront ambition and nativism, and ultimately develop it, adding new facilities and buildings. One of the chapters specifically deals with the Player Characters getting involved in the development of the settlement over the course of several months. It would have been useful perhaps to be given some sign as what the settlement’s leaders want to see done or built, as that would added further opportunity for roleplaying. This being a campaign for Numenera, the threats to the settlement do get weirder as the campaign progresses, including needing to explore a mile-long tree floating freely in a pocket dimension and discovering a dangerous cloud chamber under the settlement site.

Of the two campaigns, ‘Amber Keep’ is the more flexible. In between its shorter chapters and the months-long when the Player Characters are engaged in long term problems, there is space for the Game Master to add her own content, whether that is to add short adventures or develop content based on what one or more of the Player Characters might want to do outside of either of the two campaigns. It also serves as change of pace from ‘Relics of the Machine’ campaign, not always necessarily relaxing, but different nonetheless and when the Game Master can show the effects of their actions in ‘Relics of the Machine’—one aspect of the campaign which could have been stronger. In addition, ‘Amber Keep’ gives the Game Master the opportunity to showcase the rules from Numenera Destiny and the players to try out the Character Types from that rulebook.

Physically, Slaves of the Machine God is generally well done, as you would for a book from Monte Cook Games. It does need a slight edit in places, though otherwise it is well organised and bookmarked, with references in the sidebars not only to other sections of the book, also Numenera Discovery and Numenera Destiny. The maps are in general, easy to use and read. The map of the Howling Pyramid is a notable exception, being murky and indistinct. Fortunately, a poster map is included of both it and another location, though not one of the Amber Keep settlement and its potential growth. In the long term, that would have been useful.

Although Slaves of the Machine God can be run piecemeal, it would be a shame to pull it apart, and to be honest, it would be almost as bad to run ‘Relics of the Machine’ and ‘Amber Keep’ separately. Both stand on their own as serviceable campaigns for the two modes of play in the second edition of Numenera, but together they are simply better, providing contrast in terms of both roleplaying and what the Player Characters are expected to do. Overall, Slaves of the Machine God is a solid combination of adventure and community roleplaying, showcasing the core play of both Numenera Discovery and Numenera Destiny.