Monte Cooke Games introduced an innovative adventure format which makes prepping for roleplaying game adventures no more time consuming than setting up a board game.   The company previewed Numenera – Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera at International Tabletop Day to prove its claim before the book goes in to wide release later this month.

The company hopes the simplification of the rules and streamlined presentation will remove the barriers for potential players put off by RPGs excessive time and knowledge commitment.  “And it’s great for retailers, because they can demo RPGs within the same constraints as board games,” Monte Cooke COO Charles Ryan said. “The same space, the same time, the same personnel.  All the barriers that make it hard to demo or run RPGs in a store are suddenly gone.”

The company sent nearly 100 copies of an adventure from the book to Game Masters to run on Tabletop Day, but did not give the GMs the adventure until shortly before they had to run them, so they were unable to spend hours prepping to run the game.  The feedback from the promotion was extremely positive, with most participating GMs stating they only need 10 – 20 minutes of prep time to read through the material while their players created characters, and they ran the complete adventure without issues.

The company plans to incorporate the new “Instant Adventures” format into future releases for the game. “It’s not necessarily right for every adventure,” Ryan said, ”but it’s been so successful we’ll definitely build upon it!”

The 96-page, full color softcover has MSRP of $24.99.

Numenera is currently ranked at #4 on ICv2’s most recent Top 5 Roleplaying Games chart (see “Top 5 Roleplaying Games--Fall/Holiday 2014”).