We here at Monte Cook Games make a fair number of decks to support our roleplaying games—decks full of cyphers, of creatures, and of other often-randomized items such as intrusions, artifacts, NPC details, and so on. They’re handy and time-saving at the game table, allowing the GM to quickly generate results without looking up tables in a game book. And they’re great prompts, providing inspiration and ideas on the fly or during game prep.
Like most of our products, we also offer our decks in PDF format. But PDFs are, frankly, just not as useful in the digital space as the physical decks are at your in-person game table.
So today we’re pleased to take the wraps off a solution to that disparity with the announcement of the Datasphere Deck Tool, a new digital format for our deck products that makes them just as handy, time-saving, inspirational, and easy to use in online play as our print decks are in the physical space.
Part of the Cypher Tools suite of handy online tools, the free Datasphere Deck Tool is accessed via your web browser. When logged in, you have access to all decks you’ve purchased from Monte Cook Games.
With the Datasphere Deck Tool, you’ll be able to draw random cards or pick cards of your choosing from any deck you own. Copy the front, back, or text of the card with a single click, then “hand” the card to your players through a DM, a VTT chat, your Discord channel, or however you run your game online, just like you would at a physical game table. You can peruse your decks easily, sort them, or organize them as you see fit, and even build custom decks with cards from a variety of sources. And if you want the old-fashioned PDF of your deck, you can download it from the Datasphere Deck Tool—so standard PDFs remain part (but now just one part) of the digital offering.
Once the Datasphere Deck Tool is live, any deck you purchase—or have ever purchased—in PDF format from the MCG Shop (or have received as a crowdfunding reward) will automatically be available to you, no additional purchase required, simply by logging in using the same account as you use on the MCG Shop. So, for example, if you backed the original Numenera crowdfunding campaign back in 2012, and your rewards included the PDF of the first Numenera Creature Deck, you’ll find that deck waiting for you when you log into the Datasphere Deck Tool. New purchases will automatically be added to your available decks on the Deck Tool.
Here’s a look at a prototype version, showing off a few of these features:
The Datasphere Deck Tool will launch with decks from the Numenera and Cypher RPGs in late 2026. Decks from our other game lines will be integrated into the tool in the months that follow, and all future deck products will launch on the Deck Tool as part of their initial release.
