Not sure how playable this idea would be, but it's been a fun thought experiment for me...
There's been talk of playing the Numenera setting as a recursion existing in The Strange game. The thought I had springs off the idea of conflating the two games.
What if the world of Numenera was the Ninth World because Earth and eight major recursions suffered some sort of collapse, by some error or disturbance of the Strange, where all nine worlds were fused into one.
It could explain the hodgepodge landscape of bizarre and unrelated structures, the massive variety of plant and animal life, and the mash of physics that allow for the magical and the technological to coexist.
Thoughts?