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. He is a perfect DM, and not just because he looks like Michael Keaton cast in the role of Professor Hugo Strange. We are going to attack things and grab loot. Not the video game, which is still in development, but the pen and paper one. McComb is going to allow Eurogamer's Bertie Purchese and I to play Numenera with him.
The new game is based on a pen and paper RPG called Numenera, itself a recent Kickstarter success. It is also more than that, though, and this brings us back to McComb's one-off DM gig at Rezzed. 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. 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. 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. Bald and gaunt and wiry in that peculiarly American way, he is what my grandfather would have called a railway man. Colin McComb has a soft-edged voice, which offers a nice contrast to the intense stare his face can't help but settle into.
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