The Weird by Monte Cook Games

The Weird helps you make every encounter, adventure, and even campaign more engaging, memorable, and fun—no matter what game you’re playing.

An oracle that stands upon a floating fragment of the moon. A castle to be explored at the bottom of a mug of ale. A monstrous creature that feeds upon the ghosts of children. Roses that grow where the tears of a queen fall. A sword that inflicts wounds that scream. A gun that fires intelligent bullets.

From interesting to surprising to over-the-top gonzo—and even whimsical—these sorts of details fill your games with color and life. They engage the players, make encounters vivid and fun, and create moments your group will never forget.

And The Weird is full of them—literally thousands and thousands of specific suggestions you can pull straight from the book and inject into your adventures, encounters, and campaigns. Every chapter gives you advice on how to make a particular topic more interesting, then gives you literally hundreds of actionable ideas to run with. NPCs, creatures, places, magic items, gear, spells, abilities, names, appearances, backgrounds, plots, structures, vehicles—and yes, even player characters—each get a chapter. Make anything in your game more interesting!

Roll randomly or pick one you like. The ideas are sorted by level of weirdness (interesting, surprising, gonzo, and whimsical) so you can find just the right suggestion, and they’re organized by setting or genre type. Use these lists to make something normal into something weird, or build it weird from the very start. And of course the book provides guidelines and suggestions on how to insert the ideas into a campaign, a PC’s backstory, an adventure, or just a scene. Build a freewheeling campaign that’s totally over the top. Or add loads of interesting details to your down-to-earth adventures. Whatever your style of play, The Weirdwill help you make your game better.

And that’s not all: Journey into The Glimmering Valley!

We can’t really talk about “the weird” without bringing up our award-winning game Numenera. Numenera started it all for us ten years ago and is still going strong. It is, and always has been, weird. It’s full of surprising and even sometimes gonzo creatures, locations, characters, and more. But ten years of weird content can make the Ninth World a bit daunting. We’re often asked: how, with all this great material, do you choose where to start a Numenera campaign?

The Glimmering Valley brings you a fascinating and beautifully fleshed-out region from which to launch your Numenera campaign. It details an area designed specifically as the origin point of a group of eager explorers (you can set it almost anywhere in the Ninth World). It brings Numenera back to its roots and gives players a place to call home. A place to defend if and when it becomes threatened—and a springboard into the many splendors and dimensions of the broader Ninth World setting. And, being Numenera, the Glimmering Valley is weird.

The book unfolds like a campaign would, with a small village as a starting point—giving the PCs plenty of backstory material and potential friends, relatives, and rivals. The village is surrounded with prior-world ruins, mysteries, and places to explore as you establish your campaign—and a looming threat, affecting everyone who lives in the valley, provides growing tension. And PCs who make their way to the far end of the valley find a city where they can experience more adventures or that they can use as a gateway to the larger Ninth World beyond the valley itself.

The Glimmering Valley is purpose-built for launching Ninth World campaigns, but you don’t have to play Numenera to plunder this book for scores of interesting locales, peoples, events, and items for your fantasy campaign, no matter what game you’re playing.

Keep gaming weird. Get The Weird!