Despite a tumultuous year, Monte Cook Games seems more stable than ever
Is Cypher’s crowdfunding success the cipher to crack their secret?
“2025 was a pretty challenging year,” said Charles Ryan, chief operating officer of Monte Cook Games (MCG), in an interview with Rascal. “There's an awful lot going on in the world and in the world of game production… and in the lives of the people who spend money on games. Definitely not like any previous year in our 13 years in business.” That said, the company finds itself as steady as it's ever been, if not doing better than ever. The secret seems to be investing in their full-time staff, synergy between their licensed games and existing lines, and, of course, crowdfunding.
In September of last year, they raised over a million dollars for the new edition of the Cypher system. Going into 2026, they’ve got a new edition of Numenera on the cards as well as Jewel in the Sky, a floating megadungeon that will launch as a part of Backerkit’s megadungeon month. Looking at just those three projects, it might seem like MCG hasn't changed at all. When the company was founded in 2012 by the eponymous Monte Cook and Shanna Germain, Numenera was their first creation. The campaign page is a time capsule, with the text written in the first person as Cook describes what could be just his latest personal project. But the excitement for it took everyone by surprise. The campaign ended up raising more than $500,000, which set them on the course that they follow to this day.
“It was a massive record,” said Ryan. “There had been very few, or maybe even zero, six-figure crowdfunding campaigns for RPGs... It was also relatively early in the crowdfunding era, right? So for something to break out like that was its own big news and it drew in people.” But the Cypher campaign felt different. It didn’t feel driven by hype, according to Ryan, but rather a genuine demand for the system’s promise of a flexible, multi-genre system for adventure stories.
