Big changes are coming to the Cypher System! You can learn more here—and sign up to be among the first to get advance information and details (and be notified when the campaign launches). In this series of design diaries, Monte talks about the changes we’re making and why we’re making them.
Here’s a secret: I don’t really like dividing stories (or anything, like music) into categories. I don’t like walking into a bookstore and seeing that they have a fantasy section and a sci-fi section, because now I have to second-guess what store employees consider sci-fi and what is fantasy. Their definitions might be different than mine. Plus, categories can begin to feel restrictive when you set out to create something new—they immediately encourage people to compare your new thing to some already existing thing, so they can put it into a category, rather than just taking it for what it is.
That said, categories are important. If I went into a bookstore that just had all of its books together in a single section, it would be hard to find the book I wanted, and almost impossible to browse to discover books that were similar to one another.
Working on Cypher makes me think about genre a lot. And genre is important to this game because we all (designers, GMs, and players) need some common ground to talk about the games being played. And that means drawing similarities and distinctions between settings and stories. Conan is pretty different from Lord of the Rings, but they both have more in common than either share with, say, Star Trek.
So we have genres in the game for sword and sorcery and epic fantasy. Still, they’re both really subgenres of fantasy, quite different from the subgenres within science fiction like space opera or postapocalyptic. This exercise, eventually, produces some interesting observations. Fantasy and science fiction can be (perhaps crudely) categorized by their trappings: magic and technology. But what makes horror its own genre isn’t the trappings at all. In fact, you can have both horror fantasy and horror sci-fi. And of course, modern horror, historical horror, and so on. Horror is a genre, but not in the same way as fantasy and sci-fi.
So we decided not to pretend they were the same. Horror in Cypher is more what you might call a genre template that can be used as an overlay on any setting or genre. Horror doesn’t have its own descriptors, types, or foci (the big pieces of the game that make up a character). Instead, when we present horror, it’s got optional mechanics for stress, rising tension (which we call horror mode), and so on. For GMs, the section on horror has lots of advice for establishing and maintaining mood, and discussion of what makes something scary, rather than, say, the fantasy section’s discussion of world-building with magic and monsters.
Once we’d established this approach for horror, I quickly realized there was a similar sort of template of a different kind. I call it “…and there’s magic.” Because you can use any setting, time period, or genre, and just add magic to create a new and interesting genre. Detective noir and there’s magic. Far future space opera and there’s magic. Basically, adding magic turns anything into a sort of fantasy setting, but mages crafting spells within a Dyson swarm orbiting a neutron star is a lot different from soldiers in WWI trenches hurling spells at each other from across the battlefield or witches looking for terrorists in modern-day Paris. Any of these settings is possible with Cypher.
And of course, you could have a horror version of pirates on the high seas… and there’s magic.se You can combine these templates.
I’d be remiss in not mentioning superheroes. Supers, as a genre, aren’t really a template so much as a melting pot. Classic superheroes are really every genre thrown together, with a wizard and his companion wearing a suit of high-tech armor, fighting an alien menace. In many ways, I feel like this is where Cypher really excels, because you can use anything and everything from any book or supplement all at once.
Designing toward genres and settings of any kind is the whole point of Cypher, and I’m proud of what we have accomplished in that regard.
Sign up and be among the first to get advance information and details about the new edition of Cypher (and be notified when the campaign launches).
If you love game design, you might also be interested in Monte’s Substack, RPG Design Theories!
