Cypher GM's Guide - Monte Cook Games

The resources, advice, and tools you need to bring your awesome Cypher game to life!

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 Cypher GM’s Guide gives you rules, GM advice, and expanded genre details that build upon the Cypher Character Rulebook.

Inside this book, you’ll find:

Advice for running Cypher: using GM intrusions, awarding XP, creating new abilities, designing encounters, making success and failure interesting, and more,plus an additional chapter—“The Art of Gamemastering”—on being the best GM you can be, no matter the system.
Six comprehensive chapters detailing running key genres including Fantasy, Science-Fiction, and Superhero as well as add-ons to genres such as “Horror” and “. . . And There’s Magic.”
Dozens of creature and NPC listings from the deinonychus dinosaur to living statues to shadow elves, killer clowns, omnipredators and dragons…the list goes on! Plus everything you need to create your own awful and amazing encounters.
Weird, wonderful, and wild artifacts broken into handy genre-based lists. Find a detailed listing on bottomless bags inside the list of new dungeon fantasy artifacts, or carbonizers inside space opera artifacts.

The Cypher GM’s Guide helps the GM make the most of this immersive and versatile game system. You need the Cypher Character Rulebook to play Cypher.

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Here are just a few reasons you’re going to love Cypher!

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. It’s that easy—but with Cypher’s many options, that doesn’t mean it’s simplistic.

Speaking of easy: 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! Everything about Cypher is built to ease the GM’s workload. 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—a session might cover twice the 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. 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.

Your adventures and campaign aren’t just faster—they’re more engaging and memorable!

Cypher is perfect for your story. Steampunk dungeon-delving? Swashbuckling on the high seas? Zombie apocalypse? Hunting dimensional horrors through the dark corridors of a derelict spaceship? Cypher is built from the ground up to be customized. Put a little twist on a fantasy setting—or build a whole world unlike anything ever played! You can craft your campaign 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.