In February 2023 we presented the all-new Arcana of the Ancients Bundle featuring 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. With the hundreds of cyphers, artifacts, creatures, and locations in this Arcana of the Ancients Bundle, you can take your D&D players on adventures they’ve never imagined, all for an unbeatable bargain price.
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.
There were six titles in our Arcana Collection (retail value $90) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the Arcana of the Ancients campaign sourcebook, the Ninth World setting guide Beneath the Monolith, the Beasts of Flesh and Steel bestiary, the mega-adventure Where the Machines Wait, and the Numenera campaign sourcebook Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior World along with its accompanying Jade Colossus 5E Conversion Guide.
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this Arcana of the Ancients offer’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.
