Numenera Jade Colossus Hardcover – August 9, 2017

First of all - this is NOT a campaign / adventure module book. Read ahead for detailed breakdown of the main things this book DOES offer.This book primarily contains:- GM campaign tools to start constructing campaigns in the setting- PC options directly tied to the setting- The setting itself- Ruin mapping engineCampaign Tools:The first chunk of the book is dedicated to general overview of the setting, and then offers a set of tools to efficiently generate the framework / foundation of a campaign set around the Jade Colossus. You can find: player connections to the setting / important characters, ideas for what the people in the setting believe the Colossus to be, story threads big and small that can be side quests or major through lines of a campaign, opening scenes for a campaign.The possibilities offered by the content in this section are fantastic, my imagination very quickly started running off with several different ideas for campaigns - and this is before actually reading the setting section.You can easily use these tools to come up with a foundation for a campaign that is really solid, compelling, and has the potential for various interweaving elements. This is really the hardest and most important part of creating a campaign, so it saves you lots of time, and with a compelling frame plus the rest of the book, you will have a much easier time fleshing out the rest of it.PC Options:Four new Foci specifically tied to the Colossus are included. They are really cool and unique, and importantly can give a character more connections to the setting and opportunities for related storylines. These options are really here to help further in creating a compelling foundation for a Jade Colossus campaign.For that reason, they are very deeply tied to the setting - I would not recommend for general use.The Setting:This section fleshes out the Jade Colossus superstructure itself and the adjacent ninth world city that has been partially uprooted by it. There are some other points of interest as well.The city is great because it is inhabited by some interesting characters and factions, and there is a strong sense of uniqueness and identity to the city. Things like moon stones, moon stone dust (drug), theories about the colossus, foreign interests in the ruin, coming and going of explorers, unique geography due to Colossus emergence, ambient phenomena due to the Colossus - all of these things allow the city and its people to be unique / have a distinct culture and feel. Additionally, the various interests and competing ideologies of the two local factions are believable and have reasonable basis behind them. It is easy to imagine players choosing to side with either faction, or to help / oppose various individual characters. This is a really strong feature for a setting.The Colossus is presented as a collection of key sites of interest. These sites are genuinely interesting and cool, and this part of the setting offers great exploration and opportunities for crazy discoveries.To really use it in a campaign though, you're gonna have to flesh out the interior much more thoroughly. Adding content to the Colossus will be easy due to the 'ruin mapping engine' in the book.However this tool will NOT help you with establishing a climactic discovery / event / revelation within the Colossus that can really serve as the goal or climax of a campaign. If you want the campaign to focus on the Colossus itself, you're going to have to think about what the 'end game' is of exploring it - this doesn't have to mean the players ever come to understand what it is, only that there should be some source of mystery / discovery / threat within the Colossus that can thread through a whole campaign and enable an exciting ending. I don't think the book as it is quite offers this.Ruin Mapping Engine:This is basically a tool full of various randomizable components of a ruin / section of a ruin that you can use to very efficiently generate interiors of Numenera. I tried using it a couple times and it is enjoyable to use. The content contained is also good, and almost all the ideas feel very usable.The tool actually contains so much information and detail that I would NOT recommend using it in the middle of a session. This is much better used to quickly pre generate some ruin maps before playing. For example, you can use this between sessions of a Jade Colossus campaign to generate the next few sections of the ruin the players will inevitably explore.Generally, you're probably going to want to do a little work in giving the generated maps some uniqueness / backstory / flavor / wear & tear / etc. so you can really bring them to life and tie them into the specific setting you're using them in, including the Colossus.Other things:The book also offers one page descriptions of various random ruins that could be found across the ninth world. These are basically just seed ideas, definitely not fully realized and usable settings. That said, some of the ideas are cool, and I think the intention is to utilize the mapping engine to bring them to life without too much time investment.Finally there are some creature entries specific to the Jade Colossus setting.OVERALL:Fantastic book for GM's, great setting, and beautiful as always!

The ruin mapping engine is pretty cool, and almost worth the cost just for that. It's very similar to the random dungeon creator in the back of the 5e DMG, if you're familiar with that, just a lot more realized. This could be fun to use for inspiration for designing ruins.However, I don't know how satisfying it would be to just design a ruin using the ruin mapper. It's going to be very random, unconnected, lacking theme or rhyme or reason. I know in Numenera we're supposed to be ok with random weird things that don't make any sense, but I think there's a big, qualitative difference between something mysterious that you can learn something about if you dig a little deeper and something mysterious with nothing more to it than random "weird" things. So I don't think just using the ruin mapper on the fly during play is going to work so great, unless you're really good at improvising additional details, themes for the technology, etc.However, I think if you use the ruin mapper as a source of inspiration while designing a ruin in preparation for a game, it will be very useful to you and give you a lot of ideas.Unfortunately, the "adventure" in the book isn't that great. It isn't really an adventure at all, there's no real story to speak of. Rather it's a location (the titular Jade Colossus) that isn't even detailed that well because it relies a lot on the GM using the random ruin generator. There are a few locations in the site that are detailed somewhat, but that's it. Even the spaces connecting those sites aren't all detailed. This can be used as fodder to help you create an adventure, or series of adventures, in and around the Jade Colossus, but it will take some work. I don't think it can be run very successfully as-is.So if you're getting this book for the ruin generator, you'll probably be satisfied with it. If you're getting the book for a well-realized adventure or campaign, you'll likely be disappointed.I'd give the ruin mapper 3 or 4 stars and the adventure 1 or 2 stars.

Outside of the realm of D&D, this is easily the most useful non-core supplement that I have ever purchased (The top spot goes to AEG's Ultimate Toolbox). While the detail of the Jade Colossus Ninth World ruin is fantastic along with additional character creation options, where this book really shines is in the random ruin generation tables. Easy to use and packed with enough weird goodness to keep players interested for years, this is EXACTLY the kind of material I need as a GM to inject into my games. Kudos to the MCG team for releasing another winner.

Jade Colossus has great material ready to drop into your game as well as a whole section devoted to helping you make new caverns, ruins, and dungeons. Whether you are running a cypher system game, working with another setting, or building your own. This is a great tool to add to your kit.

Not a traditional adventure book, but this fits beautifully with the Cypher system ideals and should be able to be used as a resource for literally dozens of adventures.

A tad confusing. There are lots of good things in here to mine for your campaigns. However, the adventure portion was bit confusing to me. It didn't quite understand how these little adventures fit together, or how to parse them - which is a shame, because it's a beautiful book.

Really love Numenera, the content of this book is going be great to add to my current story.