Another bundle - Arcana of the Ancients

[ffutures]

This is a "weird far future" setting for AD&D 5E, previously in the stand-alone Numenera RPG, which looks to owe a lot to Vance's Dying Earth series and Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Arcana

This all-new Arcana of the Ancients Bundle presents Arcana of the Ancients, the Numenera setting from Monte Cook Games adapted for D&D Fifth Edition. Add mysterious technology and weird science-fantasy atmosphere to your existing fantasy campaign – explore incomprehensible ruins and face bizarre creatures of the Ninth World in search of the ancient devices called numenera – or build your own far-future campaign world from the ground up.

In the misty recesses of time – before the elder elves, the dwarven ancestral lords, and even the dragons – civilizations undreamt rose and fell. The Ancients commanded wondrous science most people would liken to divinity. The Ancients traveled to other worlds, reshaped the landscape, built intelligent machines, and harnessed the building blocks of the universe itself. Now they're gone, but they left behind remnants: citadels of metal, glass, and light, now hidden away in the deepest recesses of the world, and crafted wonders and harnessed energies we can only guess at. Those few learned folk who even know about them have a name for these places, objects, and even creatures. They call this Ancient arcana the "numenera."

Funded in a March 2019 Kickstarter campaign, Arcana of the Ancients smoothly translates the concepts introduced in Numenera(2012) to Fifth Edition. Whether these weird gadgets and creatures belong to the distant past or a future aeon, the cyphers are still one-use, the relics have strange quirks, "oddities" have no obvious use ("box with a tiny group of musicians in it who play when it is opened and look horrified when it is closed"), and the monsters are seriously out there, just inimitably strange in the Monte Cook Games mode. (The blood barm has a turkey-shaped body "covered with myriad vesicles rather than feathers, ranging in color from dark green to gray to crimson. These bubbles are filled with liquid and hard seeds. Some seeds have sprouted, and these sacs swell with tiny, unborn barms.")

The Arcana campaign book proper shows how to add these science-fantasy elements to any existing campaign. The Beneath the Monolith supplement translates the original Ninth World setting into D&D terms, making it practical (if not always straightforward) to adapt the many published Numenera adventures to 5E. Above all, the Arcana of the Ancients line brings to traditional game tables the characteristic MCG sensibility of "imponderable weirdness." Yes, the magitech effects of these arcana often duplicate established D&D magic. But their look, the experience of using them, has effects of its own. Sure, a standard fantasy game could easily add one individual force nodule (or spine of gravity, or spherical surgeon automaton, or living armor sheath, or headroom helmet, or mask of machine speaking, or memory goggles, or wood ink pen, or X-ray viewer) without disrupting the usual Tolkienesque fantasyland tone. But add them all, plus hundreds more in this Arcana of the Ancients Bundle, and you can turn a traditional FRPG session into S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.

We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices.

Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) goes to this Arcana of the Ancientsoffer's pandemic-related charity, Direct Relief. Direct Relief sends protective gear and critical care medications to health workers, with emergency deliveries to medical facilities across the US and to regional response agencies across the world.

The total retail value of the titles in this Arcana of the Ancients offer is US$90.Customers who pay just US$17.95 get all six titles in our Arcana Collection (retail value $90) as DRM-free ebooks, including Arcana of the Ancients (retail price $20), Beneath the Monolith (retail $18), Beasts of Flesh and Steel (retail $18), Where the Machines Wait (retail $12), Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior World for Numenera(retail $15), and the Jade Colossus 5E Conversion Guide (retail price $7)

This is another one that looks interesting but probably isn't my cup of tea. Since it's pretty cheap it's probably worth a look if you like the D&D system, or liked the setting but didn't like the Numenera rules.