An afternoon with Torment: Tides of Numenera's DM

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Colin McComb has a soft-edged voice, which offers a nice contrast to the intense stare his face can't help but settle into. Bald and gaunt and wiry in that peculiarly American way, he is what my grandfather would have called a railway man. But McComb is not a railway man. On the day I meet him at Rezzed, he is a dungeon master: the same preoccupation with nuts and bolts as a guy who rides the rails, perhaps, but these nuts and bolts hold together story and far more exotic materials - and McComb's rails can take you anywhere.
Most of the time, McComb's job offers a strange contemporary twist on the DM role: he is the creative lead on the video game Torment: Tides of Numenera. This is the long-awaited spiritual successor to the beloved Infinity Engine game Planescape Torment - sufficiently long-awaited and beloved that its Kickstarter in 2013 broke records, eventually netting the developer inXile just over four million dollars. It is also more than that, though, and this brings us back to McComb's one-off DM gig at Rezzed. The new game is based on a pen and paper RPG called Numenera, itself a recent Kickstarter success. McComb is going to allow Eurogamer's Bertie Purchese and I to play Numenera with him. Not the video game, which is still in development, but the pen and paper one. We are going to attack things and grab loot. McComb is going to DM.
He is a perfect DM, and not just because he looks like Michael Keaton cast in the role of Professor Hugo Strange. McComb clearly loves Numenera and knows it inside out, but what really elevates him is his ability to describe and shape a story as if he, too, is witnessing it unfold for the first time. To a certain extent he is, of course: before we meet, he delivers a speaker session at Rezzed in which he says that Numenera is providing the basis for a video game that is as reactive to player choices as it is deep and filled with glorious incident. Beyond that, though, he simply has that rare ability to sweep people up in a narrative - and to appear swept up along with them.
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