Monte, our design team, and all of us here at Monte Cook Games are excited to announce the 2026 launch of a new edition of our popular, award-winning tabletop roleplaying game system Cypher. This evolution builds on the strengths of the existing version—its fast pace, ease of GMing, flexibility, narrative focus, and just plain fun—and makes it even easier to use and faster to jump into.
Fans of the Cypher System are going to love this how new edition makes their favorite game even more accessible. And the power, flexibility, and customization they love isn’t going anywhere—in fact, it’s getting even better.
Players new to Cypher will find it even easier to get into, with vivid, memorable characters that are easy to build, fun to play, and never bogged down in needlessly complex mechanics. GMs will find themselves running fun, fast-paced adventures and campaigns that are easy to GM and which bring their worlds to life without having to kludge the rules to make them fit.
What’s Changing—and Why
Over twelve years since it first saw publication, the Cypher System has seen hundreds of thousands of hours of play. Its core mechanics have delivered great experiences in games as diverse as Numenera, the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, Tidal Blades: the Roleplaying Game, Shotguns & Sorcery, The Strange, and The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game (to name just a few)—plus thousands of individual campaigns created and run by RPG gamers. Mechanically, this robust, flexible, and enjoyable game system continues to deliver fun, character- and narrative-driven RPG adventure. For that reason, the core mechanics of the system aren’t changing.
But years of internal gameplay and feedback from fans have shown us opportunities to streamline the game, make it even easier to jump into, and further improve the joy of creating and running Cypher characters.
Some of the changes include:
- Genre-specific character generation, speeding character creation for 90% of games and making it even easier for new players to jump into Cypher. (The same high level of customization remains for GMs crafting games with a unique vision.)
- Player character damage, freeing up pools to support greater use of character abilities.
- Player character armor, making defensive actions more interesting.
- A greater emphasis on character abilities that are unique and enable interesting play.
- A greater emphasis on subtle cyphers, the default form of cypher for a greater number of genres, along with a streamlining of how cyphers work.
Things that aren’t changing include:
- Character sentences: characters are still built with the descriptor-type-focus sentence players know and love.
- Task resolution: tasks continue to have a difficulty on a 1-10 scale, with Effort, assets, and skills reducing the difficulty. Players still make task rolls in the same manner.
- How creatures work: stat blocks, with the minor exception of the damage a creature deals, remain unchanged. The damage value is easily converted with a one-sentence instruction.
The changes in the new edition primarily affect character generation, corebook organization, and a few specific mechanical systems. Because of this, existing Cypher System supplements remain largely compatible with the new edition!
(Complete RPGs powered by the Cypher System, such as The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game, aren’t affected by these changes, as their mechanics are fully self-contained. In fact, some of these games include mechanics that have influenced or been rolled into the new edition of Cypher.)
Two New Corebooks
Cypher will take form in two corebooks:
Cypher Character Rulebook, containing the complete rules for building and playing Cypher characters. This book delves into a wide range of genres (dungeon fantasy, epic fantasy, swords and sorcery, hard sci-fi, space opera, cyberpunk, gritty postapocalyptic, fantasy postapocalyptic, superheroes, horror, and “real world”), with types, foci, and descriptors (the three components for building your character) for each. It includes all the game rules players need to play and advance their characters.
Cypher GM’s Guide, with everything else a GM needs to run Cypher—additional rules, GM advice, and sections on the key genres detailed in the Cypher Character Rulebook. This book also includes all the resources needed to customize a game to bring any specific vision to life.
These two titles will be offered individually, and in a slipcase set.
Crowdfunding Soon
A crowdfunding campaign for the new edition of Cypher will launch in late summer, with the release of the game slated for mid-2026.
The campaign will offer the corebooks in a special upgraded finish made available only to backers, along with accessories and other items that, like many of MCG’s products, further speed gameplay, inspire the GM and players, and make GMing Cypher even easier.
It may also feature a few surprises that will delight existing fans and intrigue gamers new to MCG’s offerings!
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!
The Cypher System first saw publication in 2013 as the game engine of the Numenera roleplaying game, which received critical acclaim and multiple awards, including eight ENnies and the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game.
The following year MCG released the second RPG powered by the Cypher System—The Strange, a dimension-hopping game that demonstrated Cypher’s ability to power adventures and characters in virtually any genre.
Not long after that MCG published the Cypher System Rulebook, which presented Cypher as a toolbox allowing GMs to create any game world they imagined and power it with the Cypher System. The CSR went through multiple printings, including an updated, reorganized version that replaced the original in 2019.
In addition to Numenera and The Strange, the Cypher System has powered numerous standalone RPGs including the Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, Tidal Blades: the Roleplaying Game, Shotguns & Sorcery, The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game, and Monte Cook’s Diamond Throne. The Cypher System Open License allows anyone to create and publish RPGs using the Cypher System.
Existing Cypher System products include dozens of supplements, settings, and adventures. MCG’s hefty genre books, such as Claim the Sky, Stay Alive!, Rust and Redemption, and The Stars Are Fire, explore genres such as superheroes, horror, postapocalyptic, and science fiction in both depth and breadth, with guidance, genre-specific mechanics, character options, creatures, adventures and more. Campaign settings, such as Predation and Gunslinger Knights, present entire worlds in which GMs can set adventures and campaigns. All of these books remain largely compatible with the new Cypher.
