Torment: Tides of Numenera beta coming soon

If you’re a survivor of the 1990’s as I am, you might remember a little RPG named Planescape: Torment.

Released in the last month of 1999, it was built by Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay (also known as the folks who brought you the original Fallout). Some sixteen years later, a spiritual successor to the groundbreaking RPG is now in the works — Torment: Tides of Numenera. Announced on Twitter by Brian Fargo of inXile entertainment is the surprising news that the early access/beta will be coming this month. And yes, it’s that Brian Fargo, the man who started Interplay, created Wasteland and the Fallout series, and inadvertently helped create Blizzard Entertainment.

So what is Torment: Tides of Numenera?

Well, for starters Numenera is an RPG created and published by Monte Cook games, and if you’ve never picked it up I heartily recommend it. Set in the distant future billions of years from now, it’s a setting of what’s called the Ninth World, an Earth rendered almost unrecognizable by the passage of time and littered with technologies from eight previous grand civilizations — some so vast and incomprehensible as to appear almost magical. Alien beings and incomprehensible items dot the landscape, coming together in strange new ways. If you’re a fan of The Dying Earth or Gene Wolfe’s Books of the New Sun, you’ll like Numenera. Monte Cook himself is an industry veteran with years of experience under his belt, including working on the original Planescape setting.

Making a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment is a daunting task, even when you have many of the original designers and creators on board under Brian Fargo, but if any setting is capable of matching the bizarre strangeness of the Planescape setting, Numenera is probably your best bet. (Another MGC setting, The Strange, would have been my second choice anyway.) By making Torment a Numenera game it not only ties into Cook’s own work on the Planescape setting, it also gives it a new home that can hopefully match up to what the original brought to life. And hey, if the fact that babies born when Planescape: Torment came out can drive now fills you with existential ennui, the game itself will likely distract you from that.

With the Kickstarter campaign having gone so well  — over $4 million was pledged to make this game — and the beta coming January 17,  I’m very much looking forward to this project. It looks like we’re in good hands.