Fiction Inspirations - Dancers at the End of Time

    Hello again, and welcome to the second installment of Fiction Inspirations. This time I will tackle another book from the Numenera bibliography:

    Dancers at the End of Time is a trilogy by Michael Moorcock, consisting of An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs. It is set in the distant future where the only inhabitants of Earth are debauched, decadent immortals who can conjure up anything they desire with the use of power rings. They spend all their time constructing elaborate edifices of poorly remembered past events, having wild orgies, and collecting aliens and stranded time travelers like animals in their "menageries."
    The story focuses on one such future inhabitant, Jherek Carnelian, and his relationship with Mrs. Amelia Underwood, an accidental 19th century time traveler. To amuse himself and his peers, Jherek vows to "fall in love," with this woman, romance apparently having fallen out of fashion in favor of wild orgies. What begins as a stunt turns to genuine love, and Amelia learns to forgo much of her 19th century English prudishness and realize Jherek is much nicer than her own awful husband.
    Various time-travelling shenanigans occur; Amelia and Jherek are separated, the other inhabitants of the future play merry hell with the time stream, all the while the universe of the future is collapsing in on itself. The story is not Moorcock's best work, and I found it aimless and maudlin.
    However, the picture of the future that it paints is an excellent model for a prior world in Numenera. The people of the end of time live in a complete material utopia, capable of altering their environment and themselves with little more than a thought. As such, they want for nothing but entertainment, an enterprise to which they devote all of their attention.

How to Use It in Your Game

    The people at the end of time did not make a great many permanent structures, but if they are used as a model of a prior-world society, then a huge and impressive structure made of non-native materials that serves no practical purpose could have been created by just such a society purely for the purposes of entertainment.

    A more interesting idea might be to use the end of time as a model for the future of the Ninth World itself. The debauched society described by Moorcock is the result of humans or human-like creatures having their every whim satisfied, after all. By tampering with some time-related Numenera, the players might find themselves flung into the future and held prisoner in the name of entertainment.

    Time travel in this setting is persnickety, as well. Moorcock's solution to the time paradox dilemma is to endow time itself with a sort of animal sentience, so that it seems to intentionally re-locate time travelers who cause paradoxes. This also means that someone who has visited the future might find themselves brought back at any time, if they spread to much paradox-generating information.

   With that in mind, the end of time, or something like it, might just be one stop on an entire time-travelling campaign or adventure path, with the idea of "You're causing a paradox" as a versatile GM fiat to jump to a new setting if things get too dull.

Ideas

    Future or past, you should be able to use these ideas in your game right away.

Adventure Hooks

1. After tampering with a numenera device, the characters find themselves in a strange place and an item of interest for alien beings. Mercurial and all-powerful, their strange hosts seem to regard the PCs as entertainment. They'll have to find a way to distract them and/or establish contact in order to find a way back to their native time/dimension/planet.
2. A powerful nano requires a numenera device available only in a prior world. His solution? Hire someone to go get it, using his time machine. The only catch is, the people he hires must act exactly as if they were natives of that bygone time. Failure to blend in could cause a paradox, which would result in them being hurled through time to god knows when.
3. The PCs acquire a powerful artifact, only to discover that it is powerless and inert. The only practical means of activating it require them to travel into the ruined city where its energy banks are stored and coax the dilapidated wireless power transmitter back to life.
4. A bizarre alien creature armed with powerful numenera has appeared in a major city, and has begun robbing other stores of numenera. In truth, this creature is a time traveler from a prior world, trapped in the dilapidated future of the Ninth World and desperately seeking a way home.

Weird Details

1. An enormous palace of lapis lazuli and gold stands in the middle of the wilderness. Its doors and windows are purely decorative, and there seems to be no way in. Further, its walls are freakishly tough, despite being paper thin.
2. A wealthy nobleman's estate features enclosures for various human, quasi-human, and alien individuals, all housed in radically different settings and technology levels.
3. A ruined, prior-world city boils with vibrant, multi-hued chemical vapors and pools, all of which are totally harmless to humans despite their noxious appearance.
4. A circus sideshow features a captive alien who does nothing but desperately warn onlookers about the impending doom of the world.

Coming Soon...

    This is the second of hopefully many Fiction Inspirations posts. As I will only use those materials I have experienced personally, the next one will come from this list:

At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft

 Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock

The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance

The History of the Runestaff, by Michael Moorcock

Pump Six and Other Stories, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Viriconium, by M. John Harrison

Fiction Inspirations - A Roadside Picnic

    Greetings! This will be the first of hopefully several posts wherein I examine a work of fiction, be it a book, a TV show, a movie, or what have you, and how it can be used to inspire material for a weird RPG.
    Since this is primarily a Numenera blog, I'll be starting with the books in the Numenera corebook bibliography. However, I will limit myself only to those books or series that I have personally read.
    For today's post, I'll be covering one of my favorites:

    Yes, my friends, it's Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. In this book, advanced aliens visited Earth, but only briefly, leaving behind several "Zones," where the laws of physics are in turmoil and the ground is littered with strange alien artifacts. The story follows one Red Schuhart, a stalker, i.e. a person who makes their living sneaking into the UN protected Zones stealing alien artifacts to sell on the black market. As Red's financial, legal, and personal problems mount, he seeks out the artifact known as the Golden Sphere, rumored grants wishes.
    The parallels to Numenera are obvious: advanced aliens, now absent, strange artifacts, physics-defying phenomena, etc. The novel draws its title from the following exchange between two characters, which I find particularly haunting:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

    That is one character's analogy to explain his hypothesis for why the aliens came here and left all of their strange artifacts. The picture it portrays is fairly Lovecraftian, implying the existence of alien beings so vast and incomprehensible that they go about their business without evening noticing humanity. The aliens who made the Zones, just like the progenitors of the previous eight worlds, looked down on us as we look down on birds and insects.

How to Use It in Your Game

    The first and most obvious way to use this book would be as inspiration for a host of new artifacts, cyphers and oddities. This gentleman here was kind enough to compile all of the artifacts and anomalies that are mentioned in the book.

    You could take this concept further, and have your own "Zone" in the Ninth World, perhaps the site of an alien visitation or an interdimensional rift, but either way full of deadly hazards and valuable numenera.

    Another important aspect of Roadside Picnic is how the appearance of the Zones has influenced culture. The protagonist Red is just one of many desperate, hard-boiled men who risk life and limb to make their illicit living. Throughout the novel, Red struggles with despair over the people who have been hurt as a result of his actions.

    This is a pivotal idea in the novel, which is understated in the Ninth World: the idea that the strange artifacts you take out are dangerous and have serious long-term consequences, but so valuable and useful that people hunt for them anyway, contrasted with the general assumption that the numenera described in the game is ubiquitous and fairly safe, if totally enigmatic.

    It also paints the people who search for these artifacts in a very particular light. The only person who would seriously consider trying this would have to be desperate, crazy, stupid, and/or have nothing to lose. I'd say that suits a PC murderhobo to a T.

Ideas

    You can use these ideas in your game right away, and should be applicable however you decide to dress your "Zone."

Adventure Hooks

1. The PCs need a particular piece of numenera, but it is only found in an isolated Zone. Not only is the Zone deadly, but it and all of its numenera are claimed by a powerful gang/consortium/government who execute thieves and trespassers.
2. The PCs need to raise money, fast. Desperate adventurers can always find work prospecting in the Zone. The pay is extravagant, but only because prospectors don't live very long.
3. A rival gang has been sneaking into the Zone and stealing artifacts. The gang that controls the Zone is desperate to find and punish their rivals, but lack the manpower. If the PCs don't mind a little gang violence, they can be hired as mercenaries, and paid in both shins and numenera.
4. An esteemed but eccentric Aeon Priest was utterly convinced that he knew the secret behind the Zone, and led an expedition to its heart, laden down with valuable numenera measuring equipment. That was a week ago, and his clave would pay dearly to have him, his companions, and/or their remains brought back, not to mention the rare devices he carried.

Weird Details

1. Aeon Priests have devised a type of water-driven electrical generator that takes advantage of the gravity differential around graviconcentrates. (This one is particularly dear to my heart, since I actually used this one in-game.)
2. The gang controlling the Zone executes trespassers by slowly submerging them in a pit of witch's jelly.
3. A local cult believes that the Zone is a curse from an evil deity, and take pains to buy or steal artifacts and return them to the Zone, fearing that the curse will doom the world.
4. A showman has rounded up the returned replicas of the unwanted and anonymous deceased and put them in cages. He amuses crowds by using an electrical goad to make them "dance."

Coming Soon...

    I will only ever use books or other media that I have read/consumed personally, and I will prioritize those mentioned in the Numenera bibliography. Once those are exhausted, I have a list at least twice that long, not mentioned in the bibliography. You can expect the next installment of fiction inspirations to be an item from this list:

At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft

Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Moorcock

The Dying Earth, by Jack Vance

The History of the Runestaff, by Michael Moorcock

Pump Six and Other Stories, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Viriconium, by M. John Harrison