Wrights are builders and crafters. When something special is required, a Wright can make it. When strange instructions are found in the ruins of the prior worlds, Wrights can decipher them and, using special components called iotum, craft their own cyphers, artifacts, or installations. In a way, Wrights are especially good at understanding and stealing the fire of creation that burned so brightly in the civilizations that rose to unimaginable heights before the Ninth World. Wrights are the rarest of the already rare numenera scholars; they aren’t afraid of weird or incomprehensible tech—they try to take it apart and learn how to make more.
Wrights are especially skilled in the many tasks related to crafting. They need to be at least a little skilled at a lot of things. They want Intellect to help them decipher and develop numenera plans, identify components, and craft amazing items.
Wrights are not afraid to explore, especially because the iotum they need to make their wondrous items can usually be found only by salvaging it from places where physical danger is certain. They’re happy to don heavy armor to protect themselves from danger, even though it slows them down a little. Though such armor can be restrictive, Wrights can usually rely on allies or followers to help them search out a particularly difficult-to-reach or tight spot.
Wrights in Society: People are usually very accepting of Wrights since the things they craft are often useful or even necessary, whether that means a wagon, a wall, or an installation that can light up a small community. When Wrights begin to dabble in more exotic installations, automatons, or vehicles, public concern can creep in. A Wright with an automaton servant might be seen by some as a sorcerer who has infused a demonic spirit into crude matter, giving it life like the automatons that litter the landscape and that most people have enough sense to avoid.
But a Wright can be a vital part of any community, especially one that has special needs that can’t be met any other way. With enough time and resources, a Wright can provide clean water, nutrition, defense, and of course, comfortable homes for people to live in.
Wrights get along well with Glaives and Delves. They rely on the former to protect them while they focus on creative tasks, and they trust that Delves will find and return fresh plan seeds and iotum that Wrights need to conduct their basic craft. Nanos can be friendly, but Wrights sometimes find themselves in competition with Nanos who want the same iotum, possibly for their own inscrutable tasks or even as an ingredient for their own crafting.
Arkai often come to Wrights asking for the creation of particular structures or installations. As long as they’re asking and not ordering, the alliance remains on good terms. Wrights are friendly with some Jacks and sour on others; it depends on the Jack in question.
Wrights in the Group: While an Arkus might naturally assume some authority in a newly founded settlement or allied community, Wrights can also fulfill that role because they tend to remain in such locations for extended periods of time. On the other hand, a Wright is usually happy to let others make the hard decisions so they can focus on making interesting things. In a straight-up fight, Wrights rely on their creations to aid both themselves and their allies; an established Wright might even have created defensive or offensive installations in the group’s base or newly founded settlement.
Wrights and the Numenera: Wrights wouldn’t exist without the numenera. To craft anything other than mundane objects and structures, Wrights depend on iotum salvaged from scrap found in ruins and other locations, as well as fragments of information encoded in knowledge caches for millions of years or longer. So like Delves and Nanos, Wrights value any and all devices and discoveries related to the numenera and crave more.
Wrights usually craft items that help a larger community, but they can also craft objects to aid themselves, if they can find the plans to do so. Artifacts and cyphers that provide protection, store knowledge, and extend their crafting capabilities further are the kinds of numenera items Wrights are most excited to find or fashion.
Advanced Wrights: As Wrights gain experience and become more skilled and powerful, they develop more plans for building numenera objects and structures, they can drastically reduce the amount of time required to craft complex objects or structures, and they can take direct control of objects and structures they’ve built to create amazing effects.
WRIGHT BACKGROUND
Not everyone that crafts numenera items is a Wright—Wrights are simply those who’ve trained (or otherwise gained) unique abilities related to building wondrous things. Something in your background has put you in this position and is at least partially responsible for your talents. Choose one of the three options described below as the source of your skills, knowledge, and intuitions for craft, or create your own. It will provide the foundation of your background and give you an idea of how you can improve. The GM can use this information to develop adventures and quests that are specific to your character and play a role in your advancement.
UNUSUAL UPBRINGINGFrom a very early age, you had access to machines and tools, and you were encouraged to learn how to use them. Perhaps you were raised by a Nano or an Aeon Priest who thought building was more important than playing. Maybe your parents were obsessed with the numenera. Or perchance you were incubated and trained by machines who needed human ingenuity and creativity to solve a problem they couldn’t overcome. You stacked gears and circuits instead of wooden blocks, and your earliest drawings were schematics for toys you wanted to build. Your bedtime stories were about automatons, nanites, and electronics, and your dreams were filled with the wondrous things you would create with an endless supply of iotum and parts.
When you grew older and prepared to set out on your own, you asked those who raised you what great work you could build for them as thanks for what they taught you—something contributing to their research, a device to overcome an infirmity, or even a new self-willed automaton to join them. Now you search for a suitable plan, the iotum to craft it, or both.
Advancement: You’re always looking for new plans and, to the extent you can do so, researching new ones on your own. You have to push yourself, because researching new plans doesn’t come easy. You’re not even sure a limited mind like yours can do so without hurting itself. But you press on anyway, hoping for a breakthrough. Eventually, you hope to find a plan that will allow you to bring into this world something truly amazing so you can honor your caregivers and prove that you were worthy of their work and attention.
UNEXPECTED BRILLIANCEYour mind developed early, way before your peers. Your parents realized it and delighted in challenging you with puzzles and projects. You could fix household items, and eventually you found your true passion: taking apart oddities, scrap, and depleted cyphers. You figured out how to make broken machines work again, and honed your ability to recognize what a jumble of parts could do if you put them together in just the right configuration. Most people respected and appreciated your talent, some tried to exploit you, and a few feared you, but your incredible mind made sure you always came out ahead—or gave you enough of a head start to get away from serious trouble.
Whence did your brilliance spring? Just an accident of nurture and nature? Did you have a great-grandparent who was equally skilled? Or is your facility with objects and structures something inherent in you, such as a mutation in your brain that gives you insights that others can’t imagine? It’s a mystery, and one you’d like to solve one day. But only after you finish your current list of crafting projects.
Advancement: Even your amazing talents have their limits. Even when you have the perfect plan for creating an amazing new installation, you’ve had setbacks and failures. This means you’re always looking for others like you, people with whom you can share your knowledge and they with you, so that perhaps together you’ll all progress to new heights. That’s not always possible, so usually your stats improve and you gain new abilities because you’ve taken the gifts you were born with and pushed them to the next level.
MECHANICAL INDOCTRINATIONThe Prophecy was clear. If the machine that squatted at the center of town could not be awoken by midnight during the next eclipse, the Spear of God would strike like a burning sword from the void and blast everyone and everything to drit. You were one of the ones selected to awaken the Red Cube. You were schooled, drilled, and cypher-fed all manner of information, plans, knowledge, and even some physical know-how dripped into your blood by strange machines the city elders kept in dark basements. Others who were selected weakened and eventually died under the brutal regime of learning. It was rough on you, too, but where so many others failed, you succeeded. You learned. And with that knowledge, you repaired the machine and saved the city. But in the aftermath, you were different, both physically and psychologically.
You weren’t taught how to craft things— it was programmed into you, hard-coded into your flesh and mind with drugs and technology, conditioned into your psyche with repetitive drills. You don’t know if the motivations of your captors/doctors/ instructors were noble or nefarious, but the end result is that building things is as natural for you as breathing. You can assemble basic components when you’re half asleep just by using muscle memory. You may even have subdermal implants that convert nutrition and bodily wastes into components you need. You might feel like you were robbed of a normal childhood, or you might celebrate your strange education and embrace opportunities to learn and experience childish things with adult senses and intellect. In some ways, you are an organic machine built to create and repair other machines, but your skills are what allow you to survive and thrive in the Ninth World. Your goal may be to destroy those who created you, better understand their motives, or push forward their agenda.
Advancement: You’re not sure if you learned because of, or despite, the many odd substances and cyphers used to make you what you are now, so you continue to try both. Learning and, whenever possible, using machines that promise to unlock new avenues of thought and creativity within you. You’re constantly on the lookout for new injections, energies, concoctions, and devices to improve your abilities and stats.
WRIGHT PLAYER INTRUSIONS
As a Wright, you can spend 1 XP to use one of the following player intrusions, provided the situation is appropriate and the GM agrees.
Device Perfection: A device or installation works even better than you expected it would, at least in this instance. Maybe the range is twice as long, the duration is 100% longer, or the effect itself is 50% stronger.
Crafting Insight: You are inspired, and you finish crafting the object or structure earlier than was expected (maybe even halving the total time).
Tinkering Vision: When using your Always Tinkering special ability, you discover that the materials you’re using are of unexpectedly high quality, giving you specific options to choose from. So instead of gaining a random cypher, you gain the cypher of your choice (though it’s still a temperamental cypher, so it’s 2 levels lower than normal and you can’t give it to someone else without destroying it).