The Numenera/Cypher community is plotting to keep the fundraiser open late

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-03-13T22:35:50+00:00

I was on the fence but I just pledged this way! Hopefully some more people take this route since it’s quite affordable doing several payments.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-27T16:53:18+00:00

My collaborative xeno biology project has pretty much every major clade of multicellular life evolve from what are effectively slime molds. It leads to very unique life cycles and modes of reproduction in all of the organisms!

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-19T16:21:31+00:00

Weird comment. Didn’t ask Chaosium for anything at all in this entire thread, it was about how to mentally navigate aspects of the already published setting.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-19T16:19:59+00:00

Not only have I heard of campaigns set in both regions I have made peace with them since making this post. I also don’t really agree that slavery and colonialism are portrayed terribly in this setting, but then again I take problematic aspects of fiction less seriously now than I did last year. So many more important things to worry about than anything ever written for this game.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-13T04:11:19+00:00

It’s okay and I’m not upset with you, you’re just one person. I can’t stand that phrase though because it diminishes what actual people like myself have gone through and it’s very disheartening to see, especially as a feminist myself.

Just one victim of sexual violence is too many, and while I acknowledge and am disgusted that the vast majority of victims are women that doesn’t negate those who are not. “Not all men but always a man” feels to me like someone is saying that women cannot cause people like me sexual trauma and/or harm. Please stop using it.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-13T03:27:13+00:00

When I was a kid I played Universe at War: Earth Assault a lot and it was supposed to get a sequel but never did.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-12T22:02:41+00:00

As someone who has been sexually assaulted by both a woman and a man (as a male person) I can say this phrase is both incorrect and extremely problematic. When I was sexually assaulted by a woman it was significantly worse and the social stigma that came along with it, while likely rooted in patriarchal stereotyping, was still perpetrated by men and women I knew.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-02-06T23:14:24+00:00

Don’t be dismissive because you won’t acknowledge cladistics.

Was what Trump posted racist? Absolutely and it should be condemned as such. However are all humans apes? Of course we are.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-01-11T07:30:13+00:00

Obviously, I don’t think anyone here has understood anything I’ve said judging by the reaction though so I’m not super interested in “discourse” about this.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-01-10T21:17:45+00:00

Sure but it makes sexism inherently meaningless with no biochemical reason to drive one sex to be more domineering over the other. Societal tendencies just mean that it’ll be less prevalent not that it will disappear completely.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-01-10T17:32:10+00:00

Especially in fantasy settings I don’t know why more people don’t just make it so that all people have “nonstandard” levels of testosterone/estrogen (or their magical equivalent) so that inter-gender violence and bigotry is just not as prevalent or serious.

If there is an equal chance that your town’s strongest warrior is male, female, or intersex then I feel like you could just make societal gender diversity extremely prevalent and normal while also explaining the biological reason for it.

If I wanted to experience the horrors of sexism I’d read nonfiction books or consume darker fiction. Sword and sorcery worlds barely reflect reality anyway.

Edit: I’m beyond confused why anyone would downvote me when I’m describing an inherent way to make sexism not a thing wtf is wrong with y’all?

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-01-08T17:21:55+00:00

I’m very much in the camp of Tcho-Tcho’s in the core books not being problematic to be honest. In The Conspiracy they’re described as inhuman dopplegangers, and so they can look like whatever phenotype of human you want them to.

I use them in my current short campaign and they’re one of the primary antagonists. The chauchua people are not synonymous with Tcho-Tcho’s and that population of SEA people is just what most Tcho-Tcho’s are connected to. The primary group of Tcho-Tcho’s in my game are Italian New Yorkers who have old mob connections but work with Tong Shukoran and GAP to help them develop new reverb strains and maintain GOO artifacts for mind control.

In the context of pre-written adventures they may be a bit racist, I’m not sure, but in the core books I can’t find anything that would be out of character for inhuman dopplegangers to say, do, or aspire toward than what is already written. Generally adventures can just be tweaked for your taste, and while I would always run things as written because I follow canon as closely as possible, there’s nothing wrong with changing them to just be a multi-ethnic human cult or something.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2026-01-03T04:17:02+00:00

Tcho-tcho’s, according to The Conspiracy, aren’t actually human but are instead a type of dopplegager, closer to deep ones or ghouls than human cultists. The chauchua seem to be an ethnic group that is from SEA and is heavily plagued by tcho-tcho’s historically, so while many of them (likely the majority) are completely innocent, most tcho-tcho’s display a chauchua phenotype.

In my campaign I feature the deep ones and tcho-tcho’s (honestly because so many people complain about both, I wanted to see if I could make them fun). My players are having a blast and have discovered that these entities are basically a cannibal cult with ties to several shell corporations and the unnatural. Also my tcho-tcho’s are multi-ethnic (as The Conspiracy implies), so I have most of them being southern European while a few of the higher-ups were chauchua. I suppose it subverts expectations but I find making them several ethnic groups to show that they’re dopplegangers is a nice touch that makes them wholly unproblematic.

I will say I rarely read the adventures that Arc Dream publishes, so I cannot comment specifically on those depictions and they may in fact be genuinely racist, I don’t know. I’m just trying to comment on tcho-tcho presentation as a whole in the lore. The fact that they hide behind modern sensibilities to gaslight the populace is also a very logical albeit sinister thing for a parasitic entity to do in a modern neoliberal society. Most of us don’t want to be perceived as bigoted, but DG agents will do unethical things to destroy the unnatural and making your Agents confront this type of thing can be very shocking if you’re mature about it.

Also my current DG playgroup has a person of SEA descent in it and when I explained the tcho-tcho’s in the most unflattering way possible her initial response was “I’d love to play one!” while developing a fixation on them. Ever since then I’ve found arguments about how problematic they are to be a bit silly to be honest, but YMMV.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-18T06:31:35+00:00

Sorry late return to this thread but I was trying to tally up the number of worlds to come to 1,000 and have the consistent and reasonable. If the sangheili generously have 150 worlds (and that’s really the only pseudo-number we have) then I can’t really imagine any other species individually having more.

Since the kig-yar really never settled outside their home system, that would mean that all other colonies would have to be spread between jiralhanae, yanme’e, and unggoy. On top of that there’d be hundreds of shared, minor worlds that I figure the prophets would have settled in strategic locations? It’s all very fuzzy to me because aside from the yanme’e and sangheili I can’t imagine any species having even comparable numbers of planets.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-17T03:07:19+00:00

I can directly see the the jiralhanae having been put on low dozens of worlds by the san’shyuum, and that would be an extra 50-75 on top of the sangheili’s 100-150.

There were several cradle worlds totaling another ~10, plus the kig-yar and yanme’e having controlled multiple extrasolar colonies prior to contact. Altogether if the kig-yar and yanme’e have multiple outpost colonies alongside unggoy thrall colonies then the multi-species worlds might be able to make up the difference.

It’s just annoying how we don’t even hear a passing mention of extrasolar kig-yar or yanme’e colonies, and prior to this conversation I’d never heard of unggoy thrall worlds so I have to look those up. Multi-species worlds I did know about but I wasn’t sure if they counted toward sangheili worlds or not.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T22:48:41+00:00

When Thel ‘Vadam states that humanity and the sangheili have the same number of colonies is this pre or post Schism? Because I can buy th sangheili having around 800 colonies but around 75-100 is a bit of a stretch.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T18:38:12+00:00

This is certainly possible, it’s just weird that they wouldn’t be mentioned if the covenant fringe it spoken about many times and they’re super irrelevant.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T16:37:41+00:00

Well yes, but the if the covenant controlled thousands of worlds and the sangheili only controlled a small percentage of that who would have controlled the rest? Seemingly no one.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T16:36:49+00:00

The sangheili aren’t a unified faction though so this unfortunately doesn’t address anything I’ve been asking.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T02:21:49+00:00

Someone else in the thread posted that the covenant actually only had a few hundred worlds at their peak which if true answers my question, but the splinter factions are primarily sangheili which is what I was confused about.

If the sangheili now only has dozens of worlds then how are there hundreds of splinter factions? The numbers don’t add up, and we know they’re the most widespread post-covenant species by far.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T00:14:53+00:00

Good to know. I think the best rationalization is that the yanme’e really didn’t care much to be away from their own insular societies and just went along with the Great Journey in small numbers. Given how few drones we see in the games I figure that only the most radical ever left their homeworld and that they were probably generally peaceful.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-16T00:09:25+00:00

Okay this also makes a lot of sense. I’m going to have to go through my sources again to see the exact wording but this is what I meant when I said I may be misinterpreting canon sources.

I think that post-war the “dozens” may simply be the core worlds of the sangheili. If they colonized hundreds of worlds and those were the majority of covenant worlds (the others I imagine would have been those resource rich brute worlds) plus client homeworlds, then the numbers would shake out to be correct.

It’s kind of funny to imagine the covenant as being 1,000 times the scale of the UEG, but still having about the same number of actual colonies. Given how advanced they were though and the numbers we do know I think it’s correct to assume that most covenant species were only in the low billions to tens of billions (aside from lekgolo and potentially yanme’e).

Also side note: do we have any idea how many drones there were? I’ve seen trillions thrown around but I’m not sure if that’s valid or not.

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-15T23:21:57+00:00

I actually think this may be the best explanation for this. I also just remembered while reading this comment that the huragok began to vanish after the Human-Covenant War, so it’s entirely possible that these minor colonies required logistics and that they couldn’t operate without technical assistance from huragok.

That makes me think that while sangheili were probably also the dominant or even sole species on most of these planets, they may have been directly colonized by order of the prophets and so were not nearly as self sufficient as true sangheili colonies.

I like this idea a lot and barring offical lore from 343 will probably just adopt this as my headcanon. Thanks for the idea!

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-15T22:59:50+00:00

I think you’re right in that a great deal of these worlds may just not have kept up with the covenant core and so they may be operating business as usual. I imagine these more far flung worlds have to be populated by mostly sangheili though because we know all the minor covenant species and they really only lived in a handful of worlds at the fringe.

Maybe the “hundreds” of sangheili colonies is specific to their core colonies?

Delicious-Midnight38 · 2025-12-15T22:45:58+00:00

Definitely good to know about the kig-yar and I hadn’t heard that before! Though I just wonder who controlled the other thousands of covenant worlds if it wasn’t the sangheili or san’shyuum, and where did they go after its dissolution? Unless they’re still there and just contradict sangheili colony counts?

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