Same as with the Cypher collection, this supplement gives you more Artifacts and additional oddities to expand your core collection. I love Artifacts and my players love them even more, so it is great to have more options to choose from. Unfortunately you only get a few pages of artifacts, but every bit counts when you are hungry for more.

This supplement brings a few interesting options to your game and it is great to have more oddities to choose from.

Originally posted on www.throatpunchgames.com, a new idea everyday!

Product: Artifacts and Oddities Collection 1 Producer: Monte Cook Games Price: ~$3 System: Numenera TL;DR- Want some more random items for Numenera? Here you go? 100%

Basics: Need a bunch more powerful, random items and random, strange items for your Numenera game? Here you go? This book give you 50 artifacts, powerful items that may not deplete after use, and 50 oddities, not powerful items that may give much smaller effects like on the scale of a flashlight.

Theme: Again, there is a suppressing amount of story in this item book. Much like all other Numenera books, the authors add side notes in the margin that add to the Numenera world. Also, the items have great descriptions to help you visualize the objects in question. 5/5

Mechanics: This is basically a mechanics book since it's dedicated to items. What's more, this book has TWICE as many items as the last one with both artifacts and oddities. The items are all fresh and interesting, so its value for money in my opinion. And RANDOM TABLES! FOR BOTH ARIFACTS AND ODDITIES! That is amazing! Why is that not in more item books?! 5/5

Art: I've only started writing these reviews, but in this book the authors look like the listened to my comments. This book has fewer reuses of pictures and less random pictures. There is a semi-random welding mask, but I like the art here. Much better! 5/5

Execution: This book follows the Cypher collection 1 book and follows a similar layout and text arrangement. I loved it there, and I love it here. And for $3, you get 100 things. That's a good value. 5/5

Summary: Again, a simple, well done item book that add to the world of Numenera. You will only need one at the table, but it's something that any Numenera table needs one of at their table. 100%

A useful variety of extensions to the artifacts and oddities provided in the core rulebook. Good when you need some inspiration. My one qualm is I'm starting to get suspicious of that Visixtru person. There's something going on there.

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/12/30/tabletop-review-artifacts-and-oddities-collection-i-numenera/

Similar to the Cipher Collection I, Artifacts and Oddities Collection I is a list of objects that a GM can throw into their Ninth World campaign for players to find and use. Where Ciphers tend to be items good for only a single use, Artifacts are longer lasting items, and thus can have a more powerful effect on a adventure, or even a campaign. As such, it’s harder to design one without risking the balance of a game. Oddities, meanwhile, are just super strange things that have no real use or benefit to players, save for being weird and puzzling reminders of the previous worlds that came before. To help GMs out, Monte Cook Games has created this ten page collection.

There are thirty-three Artifacts and fifty Oddities to be had in this piece. That’s a lot of new items to pack into ten pages, isn’t it? Well, the Oddities only take up two pages in this supplement, and one of those pages is merely descriptor text about the concept of Oddities. The last page is the Oddities in a single list, each getting only a sentence of description. I was a bit disappointed in that respect, but the Oddities do live up to their names, with the level of weirdness I keeping hoping to find on every page of a Numenera release. These include things like a piece of cloth that is oddly pleasing to touch, a small jar that fills with one ounce of green paint every morning at dawn, a glove that makes your voice extremely high pitched and a metal rod that makes anyone who touches it sneeze. These are great and really showcase the billion years of history that came before the Ninth World. Just drop one of these into an adventure and players will agonize over the original purpose and how it can help them on their quest du jour. It has to have a purpose, right? WRONG! It’s flavor, pure and simple.

The thirty-three artifacts are far less weird, unfortunately. Each of the thirty-three items gets a paragraph of text to describe their use, so they are pretty fleshed out. Like many of the Ciphers, though, these items seem to be more run of the mill dungeon crawl loot than things that truly help to define Numenera as something new and different. Indeed, many of the items merely feel like scientific versions of Dungeons & Dragons mainstay magical items. The Handy Hollow is a Portable Hole variant, for example. The Interceptor is simply a Protection Against Missiles spell, but in tech form. The Spider Harness is a more literal version of Spider Climb, and the Skin of Water Breathing is like any magical item that gives you a water breathing effect. I was a bit disappointed that the team behind Artifacts and Oddities Collection didn’t get more creative or bizarre with their artifacts, as too many of these items feel too similar to your standard hack and slash fantasy loot – which is not what I (nor really anyone) wants from Numenera.

That’s not to say that all the Artifacts fall into fantasy loot trope town. Some are pretty innovative and outside the box. Take the Foldable Coach for example. This is an interesting little vehicle that is sure to make characters stand out wherever they go. There’s also the Obedient Rope, which is a semi-intelligent (perhaps sentient) piece of cable. The Yesterglass is perhaps the most out there item. When held before a user’s face, this glass panel will show the last major event to happen in the general vicinity, even if it happened hundreds of years in the past. That’s pretty crazy and can, in and of itself, set off many an adventure.

All in all, the Artifacts and Oddities Collection I is a nice little collection. At $2.99 I’d say it’s probably one or two dollars overpriced, especially if you’re good at homebrewing your own items for PCs to find. If, however, you like to stick to only published material, you’ll probably get your money’s worth out of this collection. Again, I’d personally like to see some weirder and more nebulous items in these collections, but opinion may vary on that one.