Cypher: Faster. Easier. And Even Better!

Cypher is the popular, award-winning RPG system for the fun, fast-paced campaigns just itching to burst from your imagination and onto your game table. It’s fast, flexible, and incredibly easy on the GM. Players love their vivid, memorable characters that are easy to build, fun to play, and never bogged down in needlessly complex mechanics. GMs love running fun, fast-paced adventures and campaigns that bring their worlds to life without having to kludge the rules to make them fit.

Whether you’re a diehard fan of classic dungeon fantasy games, or want to run sci-fi, superhero, horror, or any other genre, Cypher is about to be your new favorite game. Here are just a few reasons why:

It’s perfect for the story you want to be a part of. Whether you’re delving into a dungeon, hunting gigeresque horrors in the dark corridors of a derelict spaceship, facing the zombie apocalypse, or swashbuckling on the high seas, it’s easy to craft your campaign without kitbashing the rules to make them fit. 

And built-in tools bring your story to life! You don’t have to fudge die rolls or railroad your players to get a great story—the game is made for you to shape the narrative in ways that are fair, fun, and give everyone at the table a great experience. And the players have their own tools to contribute to the story, and incentives to build and follow their character’s motivations and story arcs—as much or as little as they like.
You’re never a slave to some rigid rule or the wrong roll of the dice. The game serves your story!

It’s easy to prep and run. It’s Friday and the players will be here in 15 minutes? If you have a cool idea and a number between 1 and 10, you’ve got an encounter. You can build sophisticated stat blocks in less than five minutes. You can run completely on the fly! The GM’s imagination is freed up to make your game cool, interesting, and fun—you’ll spend almost no time on the mechanics.
And once you’re at the table, Cypher is amazingly easy to GM. If you can decide how hard something is on a scale of 1 to 10, you can resolve anything in Cypher. The GM sets a difficulty, the PCs’ skills, tactics, and choices might reduce that difficulty, and then the player makes a simple die roll.

Gameplay is fast-paced and fun. Things move quickly in Cypher—a typical game session might cover twice as much ground as a more mechanics-heavy RPG. There’s plenty for players to sink their teeth into, but the mechanics are elegant and easy to master.

And it’s not just about fast-paced encounters. Character arcs create subplots while developing PCs’ motives, personal stories, and relationships. The Divination Deck adds inspiration and twists. Your campaign isn’t just faster—it’s more engaging and memorable.

Cypher frees your imagination! Cypher is a “mid-crunch” RPG—it’s not a rules-lite game, but it keeps the mechanics out of your way. And it’s built for flexibility from the ground up, so you’re never trying to figure out how to bend the rules to get the game you want. The GM’s bandwidth is freed up for making the game interesting and fun, rather than managing mechanics. It’s fast, effortless, and keeps your game focused on narrative and choices rather than numbers and math. 

If you can imagine it, Cypher makes it easy!
Download the Cypher Preview and see for yourself!

Two books give everyone at the table what they need. Cypher will now come in two corebooks—one for the GM and the other for players. This makes it easier to use at the table, and gives everyone easy access to the info they need. (More details on the books are in the What We’re Making section.)

The Divination Deck is a creative GM’s aid. Here’s an entirely new aspect to Cypher that allows you to generate all sorts of ideas on the fly with the help of a deck of cards and a booklet based around divinatory images you can use in any campaign as an in-game prop, an aid for the GM, or both at once.

Look forward to comprehensive VTT support. Love to play online? The new Cypher will be fully supported on virtual tabletops, with complete compendia.
And a return to some of our favorite settings. What might those be? Let’s just say we’re looking forward to some pretty exciting stretch goals!

EXCLUSIVE BONUS WITH EVERY PLEDGE: Want to dig deep into your favorite genre, explore a fascinating and imaginative new setting, or grab a standalone adventure and start playing right away? A huge library of existing Cypher supplements—nearly 30 products, totaling around 4000 pages—can be yours, free, with your pledge! The new edition of Cypher is backward-compatible with existing Cypher products, so you’ll be using these excellent PDFs for years.

Cypher Adventure Library: Eight standalone adventures you can run as one-shots or integrate into an ongoing campaign. You'll find horror, superheroes, science fiction, and more! Titles include The Takings, Heist on Miracle IV, Castaway, Dread Expectations, The Hum, The Infinity Shift, The Cawdor Complex, and Assault on Singularity Base.

Cypher Settings Library: Nine hefty campaign settings, filled with lore, world-building, and adventure. Explore scores of fantasy planes on a unique plane-breaking moon. Find yourself trapped in the Cretaceous era. Discover hidden superpowers in a dark 80s setting, become a real-world-style first responder, or defend a dimension-rent world as a gunslinger knight. Cypher worlds are detailed and imaginative! This library includes: Predation, Unmasked, Gods of the Fall, The Origin, First Responders, Gunslinger Knights, Path of the Planebreaker, Planar Bestiary, and Planar Character Options.

Cypher Genres Library: Got a favorite genre? Or maybe you love to dabble, or even mix? Our hefty genre books explore their topics in both breadth and great depth, giving you options, advice, and insight into the many variations of each genre. Plus each comes with its own campaign setting and adventures. Titles include: Stay Alive! (horror), The Stars Are Fire (science fiction), Godforsaken (fantasy), We Are All Mad Here (fairy tales), Claim the Sky (supers), Rust and Redemption (postapocalyptic), It's Only Magic (modern magic and cozy games), Neon Rain (cyberpunk), and High Noon at Midnight (weird west).
Every pledge also comes with the existing 432-page Cypher System Rulebook in PDF, so you can get started with Cypher right away.

It should go without saying, but we’ll say it anyway: There’s never any AI in MCG’s products. We make great RPGs because we love making great RPGs, and every word and image comes straight from our 100% human imaginations. We won’t insult your creativity, or ours, by delivering purposeless machine-generated drek, especially when we have so many great visions and ideas we’re excited to share with you!

Whether you’re new to Cypher or a player of many years: welcome to the new edition of Cypher! Here’s what you want to get:

Cypher Character Rulebook: The complete rules for building and playing Cypher characters. This book delves into a wide range of genres (dungeon fantasy, epic fantasy, swords and sorcery, hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, gritty postapocalyptic, fantasy postapocalyptic, superheroes, horror, and “real world”), with types, foci, and descriptors (the three components for building your character) for each. It includes all the game rules players need to play and advance their characters. You can pledge for just this book, and if you’re not GMing, it’s all you need.

We’re making an exclusive, upgraded version of this book just for you, our backers, that's more deluxe than the version you’ll see in stores. But the price is the same—it’s a special reward to thank you for helping bring this new edition to life!

Cypher GM’s Guide and Slipcase: Everything a GM needs to run Cypher—additional rules, GM advice, and sections on the key genres detailed in the Cypher Character Rulebook. This book also includes all the resources you need to customize your game to bring your specific vision to life. You can’t run Cypher without the Cypher Character Rulebook, so the GM’s Guide isn’t available as a standalone item—instead, you get it in a special slipcase set with both books.

This elegant slipcase has room for a third key book: the Cypher System Bestiary. More on that just below.

Just like the Cypher Character Rulebook, your version of the Cypher GM Guide and slipcase will be upgraded with deluxe feel and features—at no extra cost!

Exclusive Updated Cypher Bestiary: The existing Cypher System Bestiary (already available for the current edition of the Cypher System) details scores of creatures to encounter in your game. Like all of the over 1700 Cypher creatures already in print, they are easily converted to the new edition of Cypher with a one-step action that takes mere seconds. If you already have the Cypher System Bestiary, you’ll be able to use it in your Cypher games—and fit it into your slipcase right alongside the Cypher Character Rulebook and Cypher GM’s Guide.

But if you really want it to match (and want to save yourself a few seconds of conversion time), we’re making a revised edition especially for backers of this campaign. This version will include revised stats that require no conversion, and feature beautiful new cover art that makes it a handsome match for the new corebooks. To be clear: this is an updated reissue of the existing bestiary, with the same creatures, art, and text (except for minor stat block conversions)—not an entirely new book.

This special printing will be for backers only—we don’t have any plans, at this time, to make this version available through other channels. Like the other books, this will feature upgraded and deluxe elements, but is priced like a standard edition.

Divination Deck: The 50 oversized cards of this deck each feature a divinatory image that inspires all sorts of ideas on the fly. Draw the Raven? It's a bad omen in the game, but the accompanying booklet also ties it to a cypher, a manifest cypher, a GM intrusion idea, an NPC, a creature, an asset for a player, a trait for an NPC, an interesting event, and even the upcoming weather. Tarot-sized and packaged in a durable, attractive box, this deck can be used as an in-game prop, an aid for the GM, or both at once. It's an awesome source of inspiration and ideas while running or in prep—yet another way Cypher helps you make the most of your imagination!

Cypher Decks: Cyphers are single-use special abilities. In some genres, they may be physical items the PCs come across—potions or scrolls, or bits of inscrutable alien technology. But in most they're less tangible—blessings, inspiration, a moment of unexpected advantage, or simply a meta-game benefit for the player’s use. Either way, a cypher gives the PC a one-time, often unusual, boost—easing a roll, or enabling a cool and dramatic player action.

Because they are frequently encountered and quickly used, writing them out on a character sheet (only to erase it half a session later) can be be a bit of a drag. And pulling out the corebook to roll on a big random table can slow things down a bit.

A deck of cyphers eases both problems—draw a card to generate the cypher randomly, then simply hand it to the player to be kept until used. We’re making two decks: one for standard (intangible) cyphers, and another for manifest cyphers (actual objects characters find).

In an ideal world, every player would own the corebook for every RPG they play. Few GMs find that happens in the real world, though—ammiright, GMs? So to speed character generation, give players a taste of what your campaign is going to be like, and save your precious books from the grubby hands of your players, we’re excerpting key information into three inexpensive zine-format titles—one each for fantasy, sci-fi, and games set in the world as we know it (including horror and superheroes). Simply hand these out, and your players will have a big chunk of what they need from the corebook, cutting down on the time spent passing your books around the table.

Did you know that, over the years, MCG has published eighteen different campaign settings for Cypher? (Maybe more, depending on how you define them.) Some have devoted followings. Most haven’t had the sort of support and development we’d love to give them—there’s only so much our small team can put out!
We’d love to bring at least a couple of out-of-print settings back to life, with new editions built from the ground up for the new Cypher. We’re looking forward to some exciting stretch goals!

Play entirely online? Prefer to access the game and its rules through your favorite VTT?

The VTT implementation of Cypher includes everything you need to take advantage of Cypher’s speed, flexibility, and ease of play on Roll20 or Alchemy. It includes complete compendium access to Cypher Character Rulebook and Cypher GM’s Guide along with interactive character sheets, the Divination Deck, and other assets.

There are two ways to get Cypher on VTT:

• If that's all you want, there's a pledge level just for you. Pledge at the CYPHER ON VTT level.
• If you want other items from this campaign, including deluxe, print editions of the Cypher books, pledge at the level that includes those items. Then add the Cypher on VTT add-on.

The add-on price gives you a substantial discount, so it's a better deal to add VTT support to other rewards. And for the best deal, back at the ALL-IN (print and PDF) pledge level for a massive 50% discount when you add on the VTT.

Regardless of how you pledge for it, you can get the VTT package for either Roll20 or Alchemy. You'll tell us which one you want in the pledge manager after the campaign ends. (If you want both, simply purchase the add-on again.)