Welcome, backers, to our surprise Cypher—Advanced! campaign! Thank you for jumping in so quickly; for a campaign that was not announced ahead of time, and had no signups, you’ve funded us in amazing time!

As you’ve undoubtedly noted, Cypher—Advanced! is a little different from the typical crowdfunding campaign. And not just because of its surprise appearance! It’s quite short—only about half the length of our usual campaigns. That means there’s limited time to spread the word and draw in new backers.

And here’s an even bigger difference: we are maxxing out the books from day 1. As of right now, these books are as big as we’d normally shoot for through stretch goals. Monte, Bruce, Sean, and Shanna (and the rest of us here at MCG) are super excited about what we’re doing with Cypher Decoded and the new bestiary, and we’re cutting straight to the chase with as much content as we can reasonably squeeze into the books. We will not be expanding them through stretch goals.

And because this flash campaign is adding new products to a planned pipeline full of Cypher supplements, we packed everything we can reasonably make into this campaign up front—so we won’t have stretch goals at all. 

But we still need your involvement, because. . .

The ideas for Cypher Decoded’s many options came up during the design process for the new edition of Cypher. Along the way, the team identified dozens of potential genres that make for great Cypher games—far more than we could fit into the Cypher Character Rulebook and even the forthcoming Cypher Character Options. Genres and types are just one aspect of Cypher Decoded, but they’re a pretty big part.

Likewise, over the years we’ve designed hundreds of creatures for Cypher System—well over 1500, in fact. Cypher Bestiary II will detail many new creatures, along with a selection of creatures from older Cypher System products, which will not only be updated to Cypher, but be given the full Cypher Bestiary treatment with loads of new lore, variants, and more.

How do we pick from among so many options? That’s where you come in. We’re going to hold polls every weekday throughout this campaign and get your thoughts on the genres and creatures to include in these books. So while we won’t be making them bigger through stretch goals, the hefty content we’re including will be shaped by your preferences!

Backers (and the MCG team!) loved the sticker polls we held during the campaign that funded the new Cypher edition. So let’s make a few more! Our daily polls will also include a few sticker choices, and every backer of this campaign will get the chosen sticker, for free, as a bonus reward.

We may have a few more fun things to reveal over the course of this campaign. And it’s an exciting time for Cypher in general, with the launch of the Datasphere Deck Tool today, the StartPlaying Games event (announced yesterday), and other cool announcements on the way. Stay tuned!

This is a unique campaign, and we think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Thanks so much for your support!
—Team MCG

Here's our first daily poll of the campaign: