Numenera - What's it for, how does it play, and general questions

[Kaun]

If anything, Numenera made me realize the huge mistake I've long been making, by treating hunts for ancient magic treasures as normal dungeons with some monsters and obstacles, and one or two nice magic items in the very back. The whole place should be a discovery, even if you only find two small pieces that seem practical to take back to your village to share with your people.

Yeah i have been thinking along similar lines lately. I'm doing a west march/hex crawler using SW's at the moment. I have never been a fan of "dungeons" but i am trying to get better at them.

I have found now that every dungeon should tell a story. Not just be a series of rooms that stand between the players and something interesting.

EDIT: with regards to there not being much on discoveries.

Numenera is written with the idea of everything being a mystery. I think Monte decided that if he populated the world full of these discoveries they wouldn't be a mystery they would just become part of the meta as players read the info and discussed them online. So he decided to supply the tools for making them and some inspiration, then leave it to GM's to make their own.

I get his reasoning but i'm not sure he conveyed his intentions well enough.

When making up my own discoveries, to keep them inline with the weirdness of the world. what i would do is try and come up with a random Thing, then i would come up with a random use completely unrelated. Then i would take that combination and try and make some sense of it.

for example;

Thing = A synthetic tree
Use = Reduces the pull of gravity.

Then with that combination i would try to come up with a little story as to why such a thing would exist; It's a machine of alien design, its resemblance to a leafless willow tree is coincidental. It was originally part of a space elevator system used to convey freight into orbit. A secondary unit would be installed within space craft, the two would sink up and open a channel of inverse gravity would appear between them. The machine is old and only semi-functional, sporadically opening up gravity wells within a 2 mile radius.

From there you slot it into the world and try to figure out how the locals would interact with it. Like maybe there is some local merchant king who was converted the area around the tree into a unconventional fighting arena and has made a fortune charging admission.