Book excerpt: "There have been eight previous worlds ... Each left behind remnants. People of the new world, the Ninth World, sometimes call these remnants magic, and who are we to say they're wrong? But most give a unique name to the legacies of the nigh-unimaginable past. They call them Numenera. The Ninth World is built on the bones of the previous eight. The game of Numenera is about discovering the wonders of the worlds that came before, not for their own sake, but as the means to improve the present and build a future."--Page 4 of cover.