The new edition of Cypher just launched with the release TODAY of the brand-new Cypher Character Rulebook! To celebrate the new edition and showcase its flexibility, we're holding this FLASH CAMPAIGN for two really cool new Cypher books. Surprise!

As Monte and the team designed the new edition, they had loads of great ideas that could really make your game shine—but weren't quite right for every game. There was no way to stuff all these exciting optional rules and subsystems into the corebooks, but we didn't want them to languish, either. With more in-depth ways of looking at descriptors and species, additional detailed foci, a greater focus on equipment or weapons, the added color from longer character sentences, and dozens of other fun customizations, your Cypher campaign can really soar!

And while we're at it: how about more creatures? The forthcoming Cypher GM's Guide and Cypher Bestiary will give you scores of exciting, memorable encounters—but who couldn't use more? We've published the better part of 2000 creatures for the original edition of Cypher. Let's bring 100 or so creatures—some popular, some brand-new—to your campaign, complete with the same highly detailed, lore-heavy treatment of the forthcoming first Cypher Bestiary.

A bounty of support for Cypher is on the way, including the Cypher GM's Guide and Cypher Bestiary (in the next couple of months); Cypher Character Options (early next year); and the Predation, Numenera, and The Strange campaign settings (in 2027). Now we're bringing you even more Cypher goodness!

Whether you're a veteran player, someone just getting into the game now, or a complete newbie to Cypher, you'll love what we're adding to this fast-paced, super-flexible, easy-to-GM game!

This is a special flash campaign—a surprise to honor the launch of the new Cypher. It's a short campaign, so get in on it now!

If you already know, jump ahead to what we're making.

Cypher is the award-winning RPG system for the fun, fast-paced campaigns just itching to burst from your brain 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. The new edition of Cypher released the same day as this campaign launched!

Here are just a few reasons why:

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.

And it’s easy to prep! Players arriving in 15 minutes? If you have a cool idea and a number between 1 and 10, you’ve got an encounter. Build sophisticated stat blocks in less than five minutes. Run completely on the fly! Focus on making your game cool, interesting, and fun—and spend almost no time fiddling with mechanics.

Gameplay is fast-paced and fun. Things move quickly in Cypher. There’s plenty for players to sink their teeth into, but the mechanics are elegant and easy to master. Your action scenes are dominated by cool twists, ebbs and flows, and dramatic surprises—not waiting for players to crunch a bunch of numbers.

It’s not all about the action, though. Players invest. Character arcs create subplots while developing PCs’ motives, personal stories, and relationships. 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.

Cypher is perfect for your story. Steampunk dungeon-delving? Swashbuckling on the high seas? Zombie apocalypse? Hunting dimensional horrors in a derelict spaceship? Put a little twist on a fantasy setting—or build a whole world unlike anything ever played—without ever having to kitbash the rules to make them fit.

And built-in tools bring your story to life! Say goodbye to fudged dice—Cypher lets you shape the narrative in ways that are fair, fun, and give everyone at the table a great experience. You’re never a slave to some rigid rule or the wrong roll of the dice. The game serves your story!

Cypher frees your imagination! Cypher is a “mid-crunch” RPG—it’s not rules-lite, 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 to make the game awesome and fun. It’s fast, effortless, and built for narrative and choices rather than numbers and math. 

Cypher is fast and easy. Character creation goes quickly, and character abilities are succinct to keep the game moving. The rules likewise are broad and easy to adjudicate. But there are times when you might want more detail. You might want to give elements of your characters more weight, or just want additional meatier, more complex options.

Options is the key term here. You won’t use everything in this book in every Cypher game—but you'll find ideas or choices that might be the perfect fit to take a given game to the next level. If you like to tinker with rules, explore options, and just be inspired to create your own material, Cypher Decoded is for you!

Explore new genres like dark fantasy, steampunk, and several more—which you'll help us pick during this campaign! Plus genre options where you play kids or even monsters. Build characters from new types. Or build your own with genre-agnostic “generic” types that could find a place in any campaign. Plus find templates that help you easily design new types for your own, unique setting.

Give descriptors a bigger role in defining and distinguishing your character with a wider variety of advantages, disadvantages, keyed abilities, and more. Dig deeper into what makes fantasy and sci-fi species unique, and give their role more prominence in your characters. And discover more species options, including some (like dragons, giants, and faeries) that are radically different in size and form. New foci include “elaborate” foci that provide far more options than could be contained in just a few corebook pages. Bathes in Moonlight, for example, lets you change abilities under each phase of the moon, while a character who Collects Identities steals abilities and mannerisms from others.

Futher define your characters with specialties, which add to the character sentence with things like While at Sea, In the Saddle, and Among the Living Dead. So you might build a character who's an Charming Swashbuckler who Quells Evil With an Enchanted Blade, for example!

Add another pool to your character with the Luck stat—an optional ability score (with a Pool and an Edge) for when a character can’t rely on training but the player still wants narrative influence on a result that, in-game, is random.

More finely distinguish the effects of equipment and weapons, giving them a more robust role in your game. Plus more sophisticated rules for things like medkits, climbing kits, toolsets, and so on—and expanded equipment lists in general!

Plus loads of additional optional rules for task resolution options, very large and very small characters, initiative, partial successes, and even a new kind of (beneficial) GM Intrusion!

The new Cypher Bestiary comes out this fall; the book is at the printer now. It details roughly 125 cool creatures—but did you know that well over 1500 creatures have been published for the original edition of Cypher System over the years? All of these beasties are interesting, many are creepy, and most are very dangerous. And every one of them makes for a great encounter.

So we've had one, yes. But what about second bestiary?

Like the Cypher Bestiary, Cypher Bestiary II will bring another 100+ creatures to life in an amazing presentation packed with inspiration and awe. Many will be picked from among the hundreds and hundreds of popular original-edition creatures, while others will be all-new.

Every listing puts tons of useful and inspiring info at the GM’s fingertips. A streamlined stat block makes it easy to run the creature at the table—but delve deeper, and each entry is chock-full of lore, fascinating info, and options. Variant names, alternate special abilities and traits, interesting looks, distinct motivations, companions or pets, lair designs, unique mechanics, and more give you an infinite range of options and ensure that every encounter is fresh and memorable.

The Cypher Character Rulebook gives you all the rules you need to play Cypher. It also gives you the descriptors, types, foci, genre abilities, and so on you need to build and advance characters in the many genres it covers. It's a hefty hardcover, and not the most portable reference—especially for games where you don't need all that character information.

That's where Pocket Cypher comes in. This will be a lightweight, smaller-format book with just the core game rules. (Essentially, just chapters 1, 12, and 13 from the Cypher Character Rulebook.) It does not replace the CCR—you'll need a corebook at your game table to play most Cypher games. But it gives you an inexpensive second copy of the core rules, and will be especially handy if you're playing a campaign that doesn't call upon the character elements in the CCR—like a game run using the genres in Cypher Decoded, or a forthcoming campaign setting like Numenera or The Strange, with its own types and foci.

A lot can happen in a campaign. Your character is more than a collection of numbers—they have a story to tell, details to record, and friends (and adversaries!) to note.

There's a standard Cypher Character Portfolio coming soon. But what about characters taking advantage of the many cool optional rules and systems detailed in Cypher Decoded? This Advanced Character Portfolio contains everything in the standard version, but also includes:

Just like the standard Cypher Character Portfolio, it'll be 24 pages and record all your character’s pools, abilities, skills, cyphers, and everything else you find on a regular character sheet. And it also gives you room for notes, sketches, character arcs, and details about those abilities. You can jot down thoughts about your character’s appearance and mannerisms. There’s plenty of room for details about the other PCs in your party along with people, creatures, objects, and locations you meet in your adventures. You can keep a campaign journal, or make maps and sketches of places you’ve been.

I'll be perfectly sized to give you plenty of space within, but without taking up too much space on the gaming table, and printed in full color on heavy matte paper that takes pencil and eraser easily.

The print version will come in a pack of five—enough for the whole party. The PDF will includes two versions: One optimized for printing out, and the other form-fillable for use on your computer or device. You get both versions with your PDF purchase.

Build encounters quickly and easily, or create them randomly on the fly. Then give your players a look at their foes before plunging into combat. We're making two new creature decks to put hundreds of foes at your fingertips—and your convenience.

Each deck will contain 100 creatures for your Cypher game. Pick the creatures you want when you're prepping for your game, or draw a card randomly (or a few cards, and pick the best fit) when you need an encounter on the fly. Each card has a table-ready stat block (with a reference to the book, for full stats and info) on one side, and an image to easily share with your players on the reverse.

We've been making creature decks for our games for years, and they are handy and popular. They save you time and effort, and give your players a more immersive experience.

The Cypher Creature Deck will be populated with creatures from the Cypher GM's Guide and Cypher Bestiary. The Cypher Creature Deck II will draw from the Cypher Bestiary II.

We make a lot of decks. They're easy to use, save you time in prep and at the table, and are loaded with inspiration. We’ve traditionally offered them, like our books, in PDF as well as print format. PDFs of cards are fine if you want to print your own, but we want our decks, in the digital space, to match the time-saving and inspirational utility of a print deck.

So we’ve just rolled out the new Datasphere Deck Tool! This unique new product format makes our digital decks as useful for online play as the print decks are in at the physical game table. Draw random cards, “hand” them to your players in the form of card images, or copy the card text with the click of a button. Peruse them easily, sort them, or organize your cards as you see fit. And you can still download a PDF from the tool—so if you love the old-fashioned PDFs, that’s still part of the deal! If you back at a level that includes the Cypher Creature Deck or Cypher Creature Deck II, your digital reward will give you access to the deck on the Datasphere Deck Tool, including the downloadable PDF of the deck.

The Datasphere Deck Tool is live now, and you can check it out for free! (It launched with two existing decks, but over the weeks to come we'll be adding our entire deck backlist.) You can try out its many features using the free sample decks. You can learn more and try out the Datasphere Deck Tool now!

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!

Most of this campaign’s key rewards are not subject to tariffs, and we’ve planned for tariffs on the items that are or might be. Although we can’t predict every possibility, to the best of our ability we’ve ensured that you will not be charged extra for tariffs, and future changes to tariffs won’t stop us from delivering your rewards to you. Here’s how:

The key products funded by this campaign are books. We’ve been publishing RPG books for fourteen years, and throughout that time we’ve worked with a reliable, high-quality partner in Canada. They will be our vendor for the majority of products funded by this campaign. Books printed in Canada are not subject to tariffs.

A few items, including card decks, may be subject to tariffs. Traditionally, we’ve printed such items in China, but we also have good options in Europe, Canada, and the United States. When it’s time for these items to go into production, we’ll choose the best option based on the costs and tariffs at that time. Regardless, we’ve ensured we can produce and deliver these rewards even if tariffs create higher costs.

We’re a nimble team with fantastic production skills, a wealth of resources, and a proven history of delivering complex rewards. We can't guarantee with absolute certainty that unpredictable tariff policy will not impact the manufacturing of your rewards. But we've built a production plan designed to limit impacts to, at worst, delays, and ensure we can deliver everything you pledge for.

You must receive email from us to claim your rewards! Modern mail clients and AI systems filter your email before you even get a chance to see it. Ensure that our emails are reaching you by marking any email from Monte Cook Games or BackerKit as a safe, trusted, or preferred sender, and adding us to your contacts. Simply replying to an email, or starring it, also helps train your email platform to let you see our emails. These steps help ensure that our emails reach your inbox. (We do send promotional emails, but we promise not to bury you in them. We average fifteen or twenty promo emails per year.)

Your PDFs will be delivered using BackerKit’s Digital Distribution feature. When a PDF is ready for you, you will receive a message via BackerKit with a download link. We will also deliver digital rewards through our online store and on DriveThruRPG, since many backers prefer to maintain their libraries of PDFs on one of those platforms. (You can use any or all of these platforms to download your PDFs; the files will be identical.)

Digital Decks are delivered through the Datasphere Deck Tool. You must claim your reward through our online store, the MCG Shop; once you've done that, the deck will automatically appear on the Datasphere Deck Tool when you log in. You can download the PDF of the deck through the Datasphere Deck Tool.

Your physical rewards and add-ons will be delivered through our online store, the MCG Shop. When a physical reward is ready for you, you will receive a message sent through BackerKit with a link that will take you to the MCG Shop to pay for shipping and redeem your reward for free.

We offer a variety of domestic and international shipping methods from which you can choose. As of this writing, basic domestic shipping is $9 per shipment, but we do not control future postal rates, so that cost is subject to change. International shipping is calculated by destination and shipment weight.

We operate our own warehouse in the U.S. and work with trusted global fulfillment partners in Europe and Australia. We do everything in our power to get your rewards into your hands as quickly, reliably, and affordably as possible.

United States: Your rewards will be fulfilled by our shipping center in the United States.

Canada: Your rewards will be fulfilled by our shipping center in the United States. You will be responsible for import duties, taxes, and brokerage fees (if applicable). Please note that our books are printed in Canada, and thus they are not subject to import duties; however, they are subject to GST. Items not manufactured in Canada, such as dice and decks of cards, are subject to import duties and GST.

Central America, South America, the South Pacific, and Asia: Your rewards will ship from our shipping center in the United States. You will be responsible for import duties, taxes, and brokerage fees (if applicable).

The EU and UK: Your rewards will be filled by our shipping center in England and will ship DDP (Deliver Duty Paid). UK and EU backers will not pay import duties, but will pay VAT where applicable.

Australia and New Zealand: Your rewards will be filled by our shipping center in Australia. Backers in Australia and New Zealand will not pay import duties and taxes.

For detailed information on shipping and our fulfillment process, visit our Crowdfunding Reward Fulfillment page.