Numenera is a fantasy game set approximately a billion years in the future.

Eight great civilizations have come & gone; Not all of them were human, and they all re-shaped the world to some degree.

It’s now the Ninth World.

Here’s a link to the publisher’s website, which has a section on the setting, and a bit on the characters & the system, and some very pretty art.

I’ve played this once, and it was recommended to me by one of the valets at the Luxor Hotel, and if you can’t trust the word of someone who wrangles cars & taxis outside a giant glass pyramid in a desert, making him, essentially, the Valet at Space Egypt, then I don’t know who you can trust.

It’s a quick (if constrained) system for character gen., and involves no dice rolling at all for the GM.

I have a notion for this one;

A small alpine village in the upper foothills of the Black Riage attracts few visitors.

It’s not on the way to anywhere, not is there, from the perspective of a traveler through The Beyond, any great reason to travel up a river valley indistinguishable from any other, even if that river is unusually warm in winter, and cool in summer.

And for the villagers, this is no bad thing.

The river runs cool enough to take away the heat of summer, and hot enough to push back the ice come winter, and their gardens, though constrained by the valley walls, produce enough to get by, especially when supplemented from the orchard of the Corpse Gardner, who lives further upriver, tends the trees, but has no interest in the harvest. Nor does the giant voiceless creature seem to mind when the herds are driven through the orchard, or wander into it, so long as they don’t chew on the bundle of hoses & cables connecting the Gardner to his towering metal shack, or disturb the plinths over which the motionless figures float.