A science fantasy roleplaying game set in the far distant future, where humanity lives amid the remnants of eight great civilizations that have risen and fallen. This new world is filled with remnants of all the former worlds: bits of nanotechnology, the dataweb threaded among still-orbiting satellites, bio-engineered creatures, and myriad strange and wondrous devices. These remnants have become known as the numenera.
In the youth of an age, people use the resources they have on hand, coupled with whatever understanding of their world they can master, to carve out a life for themselves. In the Ninth World, the resources are the Numenera - the detritus of the prior eras - and the people's understanding of these resources is crude and incomplete.