Torment: Tides of Numenera

Torment: Tides of Numenera is set in Numenera, the tabletop RPG world created by Monte Cook. It continues the thematic legacy of Planescape: Torment, the critically acclaimed 1999 role-playing game often praised as a landmark in computer RPG storytelling. Torment: Tides of Numenera aims to deliver a rich RPG experience that explores similarly deep, personal themes.

Numenera is set in the distant future, where countless civilizations have risen and fallen, leaving Earth in a roughly medieval state. Most people live in simple settlements, surrounded by remnants of a mysterious past. Scholars call the current era the Ninth World, believing eight great ages came before it and were destroyed or vanished for unknown reasons, leaving behind ruins, strange phenomena, and powerful artifacts. These artifacts are known as the numenera: the surviving science and technology of those lost civilizations. Many are broken beyond repair, but some still function in ways few can understand. To most people, their effects seem magical. The story follows the Last Castoff, the final vessel created for the consciousness of an ancient man who discovered how to abandon his body and be reborn in a new one—achieving a kind of immortality through relics. Unbeknownst to him, each time he “cast off” a host body, that body awakened with a mind of its own, with no memory of its former master or his actions. This man—known to some as the Changing God—has drawn the hatred of the Angel of Entropy, an entity determined to destroy him and everything he has made. As one of the Changing God’s creations, the Last Castoff is also hunted by the Angel and must find their creator before both are undone. To do so, they explore the Ninth World, encountering other castoffs and forming alliances and rivalries along the way. One tool for this journey is the Meres—artifacts that allow the user to take control of other castoffs’ lives and experience different worlds or dimensions through them. Through these travels, the Last Castoff shapes their Legacy and moves toward the story’s central question: What does one life matter?