Was Numenera really all that huge of a smash hit?
By all accounts, no. It's honestly odd that someone keeps funding these Kickstarters for Monty Cuck Gayms, considering that the interest in the Cypher system games seems to be extremely shallow. None of my regular RPG hangouts discuss it, I hear a ton of trash-talk about it whenever it comes up (honestly more than i'd expect), and there's generally just very little buzz. Even forums dedicated entirely to the games often seem to be pretty much entirely dead.
And still the Kickstarters keep getting funded, and while I can take shits on the games all day, make no mistake; the production values on these books is
high. The cost of art is staggering when it comes to these sort of products, yet I don't think anyone could say that it's not top-notch in the Cypher-system books (whether we're talking Numenera, The Strange, The Cypher System Core, or the Gods of the Fall setting). There's also quite a bit of original writing in each book, and I can't complain about the style of anything. And the settings are actually pretty cool, generally speaking. Each scenario/campaign seems to have at least some high-resolution well-drawn maps, too, and I love the fact that even though the offical .pdf:s could've downscaled that shit, they haven't, which isn't just amazingly rare, but absolutely stellar for those of us that enjoy to rip stuff out of books and use it ourselves.
It's simply well-made, high-quality products, which I don't think people should deny, no matter how shit they think that the actual game and it's mechanics are, or other issues, such as accusations of SJW:ness, uninteresting adventures, flat combat, or whatever. Compared to this, Pathfinder books, for example, can go fuck themselves with a rake. They're useless hack-jobs by comparison. I just wish that the Cypher System itself didn't seem objectively terrible.
So while it makes me happy that they get funded, because some of these I enjoy just for the quality of the art and the books themselves, I have no idea who does it. I would never actually pay for entire books just because they look pretty. I mean, look at the
A Strange Box Kickstarter. It's literally just a fucking box, and it's over three times it's goal, with 20 days to go. It's not even a reprint of The Strange as a setting for the Cypher Systems Core, no; it's just a fucking boxed set.