You mentioned once that you’d be interested in creating a hard science-fiction RPG. While Numenera can be loosely classified as such, were you ever thinking about different sci-fi settings? What themes would you like to explore?
Yes! Numenera is a lot of fun, but it’s more of a far future, science fantasy setting. I’d be interested in developing a nearer-future setting with technologies that can be realistically predicted by present-day science. I’d also want to get away from Earth – too many science fiction settings today are post-apocalyptic futures. I’d rather visit our solar system in about 300 to 500 years when humanity has expanded beyond the home planet, established dozens of semi-autonomous colonies, and begun to modify ourselves and other life forms to survive on Mars, in the clouds above Venus, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I think that particular future would be a wild and chaotic place with unregulated technology of all kinds and hundreds of competing interests… which is a great, conflict-rich setup for storytelling.
Thematically, one idea that interests me is fragmentation - what will it mean for humanity to branch out into the solar system, gradually forming new societies that are separated by vast distances? The early European colonies in the Americas were founded by all sorts of different groups - what sorts of people from our present-day world would choose to leave the home planet and establish new societies throughout the solar system? How would those nascent societies evolve and grow apart? When we’re no longer stuck on the same planet together, can (and should) humanity still remain a coherent whole?
I’m also interested in the creative instinct – the human drive to change and manipulate everything around us. I think this tendency could become even more pronounced as we move into the future – for example, modifying biological life forms to serve human needs in other worlds and environments… or manipulating the intellectual capacities of other species, as in David Brin’s Uplift series… or even modifying ourselves into entirely new forms, as with the Ousters in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books. Exploring the implications of such major changes could be really interesting.