The Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter begins
UPDATE: Already reaches its goal in six hours
Update 2: Torment: Tides of Numenera has already achieved its $900,000 Kickstarter goal in about six hours. That's got to be some kind of record, right?
Update: The Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter is well over halfway towards its funding goal of $900,000 in under three hours. It should easily be funded before the day is out.
It's the perfect chance to share this wonderful video with you.
Original story: The Kickstarter drive to fund Torment: Tides of Numenera - a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment - has begun.
Developer inXile needs $900,000 to embark full-steam on the project.
Torment: Tides of Numenera continues the deep philosophical themes of Planescape: Torment - hence the Torment moniker. "What does one life matter?" the new game asks.
It's to be a single-player isometric RPG built using the Unity engine for PC, Mac and Linux. It's got an estimated release date of December 2014.
Many of the people who worked on Planescape: Torment are back to build this new Torment experience. Colin McComb, PST second in command, leads the project. Writer Adam Heine is there as well. PST lead designer Chris Avellone, who works at Obsidian, has publicly blessed and promoted the project. And of course inXile boss Brian Fargo was the Interplay boss at the time who greenlit Planescape: Torment.
The biggest difference about this Torment game is that it's not based in the weird Dungeons & Dragons setting of Planescape. In fact, D&D rules aren't used at all.
Instead it's out with the old and in with the new: Kickstarted tabletop role-playing game Numenera, made by Monte Cook who, oh, also worked on the Planescape D&D setting. He's even joining in with development of the new Torment game, helping adapt his rules and even lending a writing-hand.
His Numenera is set billions of years into the future after many civilizations have risen and fallen. Remnants of their rule - technological wonders - lie all around, but the general level of civilization in the game's present is medieval.
"And now this assortment of ancient power is there for the taking, ever-present, underfoot," the game's website reads. "The humans of the Ninth World take and use what they can. They call these wonders (and horrors) the numenera.
"One of these humans discovers a way to use the numenera to grow strong, to cheat death, to skip across the face of centuries in a succession of bodies. But he discovers an unexpected side effect: You."
You are the Last Castoff, one of the bodies this Changing God left behind. When he did, you were born. But your birth awakened the Changing God's ancient enemy, the Angel of Entropy, who hunts your sire and you, the sion of its enemy.
InXile describes Torment as a game of "complex and nuanced morality, deep and reactive choice and consequence, and immersion into a new and strange vision".
"You will chart a course through bizarre dimensions, across the face of a vastly different world. You will earn companions along the way, and discover their value - perhaps through their strengths, perhaps more literally by selling them.
"Throughout it all, you will choose a path that will lead inexorably to an ending that stems naturally from your actions, facing adversaries who harness powers beyond your comprehension, and who will ultimately force you to face yourself and answer the question: What does one life matter?"
InXile met with thunderous Kickstarter success when studio boss Brian Fargo Kickstarted Wasteland 2. The artists and writers are finished on that project now and will be put to work on Torment: Tides of Numenera.
The Kickstarter video for Torment: Tides of Numenera is below. The page itself has loads of detail of story and vision.