Overview

Wrights and others with numenera plans can attempt to craft numenera devices by mixing the technology of the past with the ingenuity of contemporary humans.
The next section provides plans for more than 140 numenera objects and structures, including cyphers, artifacts, vehicles, and fixed-in-place devices called installations. Installations are typically built to improve a character’s base or community. As with everything else in the Cypher System, installations have levels, and the higher an installation’s level, the more it can do. A level 1 installation might provide illumination for a few nearby homes, while a mid-level installation might provide automated defenses for a community. And a high-level installation might completely protect a community behind a force dome or a wrinkle in reality. Wrights, with their ability to craft cyphers and artifacts, will likely spend a lot of time in this chapter, which provides guidance for crafting all the cyphers and artifacts found in Numenera Discovery as well as the new cyphers and artifacts described here in Numenera Destiny.

CYPHERS

Destiny Cyphers page

This page expands the cyphers presented in Numenera Discovery. All the cyphers in that page have a connection to building a community, crafting, salvaging, exploration, cooperation, communication, and other familiar themes. Some of these cyphers can also affect a ranked community’s or horde’s statistics.

ARTIFACTS

Destiny Artifacts page

As with the new cyphers, the new artifacts resonate with the themes of this book. They also can sometimes have dramatic effects on a community that finds itself under threat by a natural disaster or an aggressive abhuman horde.

The Ninth World is a strange place filled with the ruins of structures that can seem alien even to natives who move far beyond the small area they’re familiar with. Spires that touch the sky, floating arches, horizon-spanning fortresses, and flashes of cities visible only in the twilight are not uncommon. Many of the amazing structures, weird devices, inscrutable automatons, and broken vehicles that dot the landscape were fashioned using plans from now-vanished civilizations.
These plans, in one form or another, can be found by people of the Ninth World and used to create all-new wonders.

UNDERSTANDING PLANS

The easiest and most straightforward way for a character to craft any numenera object or structure is to use a plan. Seeds of plans can be found potentially anywhere information is encoded, cached, or phased, including with special requests to the datasphere. Seeds of a plan are something that a numenera scholar can develop into an actual plan. Plans are also granted as a tier reward for some types, such as the Wright. Commonplace objects and structures do not require plans, but all numenera objects and structures—including installations, artifacts, cyphers, vehicles, and automatons—require plans. Crafting complex objects and structures, as described in Salvaging and Crafting, is not a simple task, but rather a series of subtasks that escalate in difficulty after each success, until the final assessed difficulty is eventually achieved (if all goes well). The plans provided in this page include the following parameters.
Minimum Crafting Level: Each object or structure has a minimum level that a completed version of it can possess. For instance, a temporal chime has a minimum crafting level of 4, which means it’s impossible to craft a temporal chime installation whose level is less than 4. A lightning turret has a minimum crafting level of 6, which means level 6 is the minimum level at which a crafter can choose to build that installation.
A detonation cypher has a minimum crafting level of 1, a stim cypher has a minimum level of 6, a battle armor artifact has a minimum level of 7, and so on. A crafter could choose to increase the level of the completed crafted object or structure beyond its minimum crafting level but not to craft an object or structure whose final level is less than this minimum level.
The level at which a crafter builds an object or structure is the basis for determining the assessed difficulty of each crafting task. The assessed difficulty for crafting is higher than the level of the finished numenera object or structure itself. Once the object or structure is completed, its level is equal to the minimum crafting level indicated by the plan, unless the crafter chose to craft the object or structure at higher than minimum level.
Kind: Numenera plans are broadly divided into installations, automatons, vehicles, artifacts, and cyphers.

• Installation: A discrete, fixed-in-place artifact that usually provides some kind of service, such as power, water, defense, offense, and so on. Installations crafted by PCs are often deployed to aid a community.
• Automaton: Mechanical entities that range from limited mobile devices created for specialized purposes to fully autonomous and intelligent individual entities with powerful abilities and aspirations.
• Vehicle: Something that can transport passengers or riders more quickly and efficiently than a commonplace vehicle ever could. Exotic vehicles can hover, fly, and swim, as well as move in space, between dimensions, or even in time.
• Artifact or Cypher: Artifacts and cyphers are something most PCs are already well aware of.

Iotum: This entry provides a list of components and how many units of each that a PC must have on hand during the crafting process. From these, the entire object or structure can be fabricated, even if it seems like less material goes into the object than what is finally produced—many special components have iterative and self-replication features.
Parts: This entry indicates the units of parts that a character must contribute in order to craft the object or structure.
Specifications: A description of the object or structure created by the plan, including its general appearance, nature, background, and uses. If the created object or structure has more than one possible conformation, that is noted here as well. If the completed object has any specific mechanical effects, they are described here.
Modifications: Some plans can be modified easily to provide additional effects. Such plans have this entry describing the process.
Depletion: Most numenera objects and structures have a rate of depletion. When an object is used or activated, the player rolls the designated die (1d6, 1d10, 1d20, or 1d100). If the die shows the depletion number(s), the object works, but that is its last use unless it is repaired. A depletion entry of “—” means that the object never depletes, and an entry of “automatic” means that it can be used only once. An entry of “cypher” means that it can be used only once and also that it counts against a PC’s cypher limit.

FINDING PLANS AND PLAN SEEDS

Whenever characters are exploring ruins of the prior worlds and have a chance to find iotum, they also have a chance to find the seeds of a plan. Plan seeds are fragments of prior-world knowledge on one or more esoteric subjects. A Wright or other numenera scholar can develop a plan seed into a useable plan over the course of a few days.
As with iotum, finding plan seeds requires that the characters know to look for them in the first place. In addition to finding plan seeds as part of a search through likely sources, these seeds can also be found in integrated machines, among the transcribed notes of an accomplished numenera scholar, or cached within an artifact or oddity. Whenever a plan seed is found randomly, roll on the Plan Seed Result Table to determine the seed’s level and the kind of plan that one might eventually develop with it.
Integrated Machine: Generally speaking, an integrated machine is something found in a ruin or vehicle of the prior world. It usually has some kind of interface, such as a control surface, an activation platform, an arch, a cavity, and so on. An integrated machine can be salvaged for 2d20 shins, one or two cyphers, and maybe an artifact, but this destroys the machine and any possibility of finding plans within it. In addition to any other functions an integrated machine might possess, the machine might also contain a plan seed. Attempting to find a seed requires several minutes of investigating the machine. The difficulty is based on the machine’s level. Unless the machine was designed to hold and display knowledge, however, the task is usually hindered by two steps. A failed attempt to call up plan seeds in the machine has negative consequences, usually inflicting damage equal to the machine’s level.
Artifact: When characters find numenera items, it’s rare that they ever discover that item’s complete purpose and full range of abilities. In fact, characters usually discover a likely use for an artifact and move on. However, additional effects may sometimes be gleaned from these incompletely understood objects, and one of those effects might well be a plan seed. Attempting to find a seed in an artifact requires about a minute of checking. The difficulty is based on the artifact’s level. Unless the artifact was designed to hold and display knowledge, however, the task is usually hindered by at least two steps, or even more at the GM’s discretion.
A failed attempt to call up plan seeds in the artifact causes the artifact to deplete. Once an artifact has been successfully checked for a plan seed, regardless of whether that search was fruitful, additional attempts to pull up cached fragments of knowledge are unsuccessful.
Transcribed Notes: NPC numenera scholars with talent and experience have likely accumulated several plans of their own, either by careful experimentation, trial and error, or directly as a PC might. Such plans are rare and valuable. Even if an NPC possesses some, they probably have only a handful, and even then, the plans are jealously guarded. To grant access to a plan, the scholar would likely require that the PC make some kind of payment, undertake some difficult task, or owe them a large favor. If a full plan crafted by some other wright—rather than a plan seed—is discovered, a PC can add it to the plans they know by spending a few days studying it and making notes.
Discovering a Plan Seed: When a plan seed is discovered, the GM may just decide what it is or determine randomly. For random determination, first roll on the Plan Seed Result Table to determine the seed's level. For random determination, first roll on the Plan Seed Kind Table to determine if the plan seed is for a cypher, installation, artifact, automaton, or vehicle. Then, roll on the associated plan table to identify the exact plan seed found.

THE BEST LAID PLANS

If PCs borrow a plan or get only a glimpse of a plan developed by another crafter, that could still be enough to use the plan for their purposes. If they can borrow a plan long enough to transcribe it or glimpse it long enough to commit it to memory (or some other storage device), they can still attempt the crafting task. However, transcribing a plan or recalling a plan from memory could introduce errors. One way to handle this is to increase the GM intrusion range for failed tasks from 1 to 1–4.

ARTIFACT AND CYPHER PLANS

The plans provided for artifacts and cyphers in this chapter are more general than those for installations, automatons, and vehicles. The cyphers and artifacts presented in Numenera Discovery, Numenera Destiny, and other sources (such as Technology Compendium: Sir Arthour’s Guide to the Numenera) are not each replicated as separate and discrete plans. Instead, one artifact plan and one cypher plan are provided as bare-bones templates, with notes for additional iotum requirements as the minimum crafting levels advance from 1 to 10.
If a first-tier Wright decides they want a catholicon cypher plan as one of the two plans they gain as a type ability, they get a plan for that cypher only—not a plan for building any and all cyphers (even though the template is the same for all cyphers). On the other hand, with the catholicon cypher plan in hand, the Wright can craft the cypher at any level from 1 to 10. The higher the level, the more iotum is required—as described by the plan—and the higher the assessed difficulty of the crafting task.
Cypher and Artifact Minimum Crafting Level: Some cyphers and artifacts can’t be crafted at lower levels because they’re just too complex. So even if a character has a chemical factory cypher plan, the minimum crafting level of the chemical factory cypher is 5. They can’t try to build that cypher at any level less than 5, though they do have the option to craft that cypher so that the completed object is level 6 or higher.
Determining Cypher and Artifact Minimum Crafting Levels: Cyphers and artifacts in this book are presented with a minimum crafting level in their entries. If a character chooses a plan for an artifact or cypher from Numenera Discovery, refer to the table on the following page. If a character chooses a plan for an artifact or cypher from some other source, the GM can determine the minimum crafting level; refer to the discussion under Setting a Minimum Crafting Level for Other Cyphers and Artifacts

NUMENERA DISCOVERY CYPHER MINIMUM CRAFTING LEVEL TABLE

NUMENERA DISCOVERY ARTIFACT MINIMUM CRAFTING LEVEL TABLE

IMPROVISING PLANS

A character can improvise plans in a few different ways.

CRAFTING AT HIGHER THAN MINIMUM LEVEL

A PC can choose to craft an object or structure at a higher level to gain a greater effect. For instance, a character might want to craft a detonation cypher at level 6 instead of level 1 so that it inflicts 6 points of damage instead of 1 point. The character might want to craft an alarm mech automaton at level 4 instead of level 1 so that it’s tougher and able to withstand more abuse.
Crafting an object or structure at a level higher than its minimum requires additional iotum, which the GM can determine by comparing to plans for objects and structures with similar minimum crafting levels, as well as referring to the discussion under GM Plan Creation. A project created at a higher level than the minimum also requires more parts, whose value equals the level of the completed object or structure. And of course, increasing the minimum level also increases the assessed difficulty of the crafting task, which means it takes more time to finish, among other things.

CRAFTING SOMETHING WITHOUT A PLAN

A character may be so desperate to craft something that they’re willing to try doing so without a plan and, instead, fly by the seat of their pants. Doing so isn’t impossible, but it is difficult, and the crafter suffers from the following factors.

• The assessed difficulty to create an object or structure without a plan is hindered, above and beyond anything else that increases a crafting task’s difficulty.
• GM intrusions automatically trigger on rolls of 1–2 instead of 1 when a PC is attempting crafting tasks.

If the character succeeds in their task to create a custom object or structure without having a plan to go by, they gain the desired object or structure as well as a plan to build the same thing again, which means that the negative factors described above no longer apply in the future.

GM PLAN CREATION

If the GM wants to give the PCs a plan for a custom object or structure that isn’t covered here or elsewhere, it’s a two-step process. Assign a minimum crafting level to the object or structure described by the plan. Refer to the plans presented in this book, which provide a good cross-section of what’s possible as well as templates you can use for your new plan. Also refer to the Effect by Level Table for additional guidance.

EFFECT BY LEVEL

Assigning a minimum crafting level to a numenera object or structure is more art than science. However, the following table provides a rough idea for objects and structures that provide certain effects. Note that this is the minimum crafting level for a short-lived effect. Plans that create objects or structures that grant extended use of a given effect—beyond single-use or a limited number of rounds—should be higher level.

CHOOSING IOTUM

As with assigning a minimum crafting level based on effects, you have leeway when choosing iotum required by any plans you create. You could even create some iotum of your own, if an interesting idea strikes you. However, you should also keep the following information in mind.
Basic Building Materials: Most numenera plans rely on a foundation of basic building materials like io, responsive synth, and parts. These materials provide a framework for more advanced materials, as needed, such as psiranium, mimetic gel, or even data orbs.
Unit Quantity: Something large like a tower requires a lot more basic building material than something small. On the other hand, mimetic gel, smart tissue, virtuon particles, and other components with a capacity for self-replication and augmentation can keep overall unit amounts under control, especially if they’re part of a plan in the first place (rather than being added as an additional crafting ingredient).
Iotum by Minimum Crafting Level: At minimum, a plan should include at least one iotum whose level is equal to the minimum crafting level of the final object or structure being built. For instance, if you are devising a plan for a new kind of automaton that can teleport very long distances (minimum crafting level of 6, according to the Effect by Level Table), the components should include a level 6 iotum such as amber crystal or thaum dust.
Iotum by Effect: If a particular effect is required from the object or structure, the plan will often require one or two iotum of a specific kind, even if the iotum’s level is much higher than the minimum crafting level.
Sense Environment: Responsive synth is required to monitor surroundings in even the most basic fashion.
Automation: Responsive synth or, better yet, apt clay are required to instill behavior that can vary, even in a limited fashion, based on a changing environment. The more apt clay involved, the better the automaton’s adaptable behavior, though rarely is apt clay enough to bridge the divide to true automatons; that likely requires the installation of oraculum and one or more data orbs.
Partially Alive: If the creation is partly living, bio-circuitry should be included, though other components like smart tissue can sometimes similarly foster life.
Telepathy: If the creation involves any sort of mind-to-mind contact, psiranium should be included to ensure the best connection.
Self-Assembly: Almost any plan of level 5 or higher requires that a portion of the actual crafting work be handled by specialized iotum themselves. Mimetic gel is a workhorse in this regard, but quantium, smart tissue, virtuon particles, and tamed iron can accomplish similar functions for more complex objects.
Breaking Rules: The void matter found in midnight stones is useful for creating a wide range of effects that don’t have any other corollaries. At the very least, midnight stones are a powerful energy source.
Unfettered Destruction: Tamed iron, which is distilled from the iron wind, is used to create a variety of weapon systems and other destructive applications of energy.
Self-Repair: Structures that are meant to last for hundreds or thousands of years should include a large quantity of amber crystal.
Deep Knowledge: Data orbs either maintain connections to the datasphere or actually are nodes in the datasphere (depending on which Aeon Priest you believe). Objects or structures that rely on knowing secrets, navigating to distant locations, solving transdimensional equations, and so on should include at least one data orb.
Transcendence: Cosmic foam allows a crafted item to reach past the edges of the known universe into parallel planes and states of being. It is necessary for objects or structures that truly transcend the world.
Force Fields: Quantium is useful for ordering and sustaining invisible force that can provide protection.

SECONDARY EFFECTS

Secondary effects are additional effects an object or structure might possess due to an accident in the crafting process. Accidents can occur because a component is flawed, because a crafter fails on a crafting subtask, because a plan is based on a seed containing completely alien and inexplicable knowledge, or simply due to misfortune (and GM intrusion). Secondary effects usually (but not always) manifest after the object or structure is completed. It’s up the GM to determine if a secondary effect is minor or major. Major secondary effects probably occur only if there is a confluence of misfortune, but the GM may simply decide that a major secondary effect is appropriate for the situation. All secondary effects come into play when the primary effect of the object or structure is used. For example, an oblivion tower might erase the location of a hidden community from memory (primary effect), but everyone in the community suffers mild insomnia for a night or two afterward (secondary effect).

CRAFTING SETBACKS

Some crafting failures or damage accrued after an object or structure is crafted are so severe that a setback occurs. Setbacks tend to affect the crafter more than other creatures, but not always. Unlike secondary effects, setbacks are usually one-time effects.

INSTALLATION PLANS

Details for each Installation can be found in Installation Plan Details

ARTIFACT PLANS