Two mercenaries in battle, E’lara and Caddoc, go searching for a mysterious artifact about which Caddoc had a vision, but events grow out of hand and the companions become wrapped up in a chain of events involving demons, the orclike Wargar, and a suspicious death spirit named Seraphine.

Numenera is set in the distant future, where the rise and fall of countless civilizations have left Earth in a roughly medieval state, with most of humanity living in simple settlements, surrounded by relics of the mysterious past.

The game is set in an alternate history timeline, in which a nuclear holocaust took place in 1998 in relation to an impact event involving a cluster of meteors that sparked a global nuclear war.