Description
This is a preorder. The Cypher Character Rulebook will be available in late August. Get it early: preorders ship a few weeks before street date!
Everything you need to play Cypher—whether you’re delving into a dungeon, exploring the dark corridors of a derelict spaceship, facing a supervillain-spawned apocalypse, or chasing a cozy mystery in a modern-day small town!
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 Character Rulebook is your gateway to this engaging, flexible, and narrative-forward system that’s easy to learn and fun to play!
The Cypher Character Rulebook contains everything you need to build and play Cypher characters. Inside this book you’ll find:
- Complete rules for playing Cypher.
- A huge range of genres—dungeon fantasy, epic fantasy, swords & sorcery, hard sci-fi, space opera, postapocalypse, superheroes, real-world subgenres like action or espionage, and more!
- Hundreds of character options, perfect for crafting the hero you want to play. Become a Charming Scoundrel who Masters Telekinesis, a Guarded Swashbuckler who Never Says Die, or a Bookish Mage who Blazes with Fire.
- Equipment, armor, and cyphers for any genre.
- Compelling character arcs—such as Undo a Wrong or Fall From Grace—that easily add depth, motivation, and lore for your character for an amazing story at your game table!
The Cypher Character Rulebook contains everything you need to play Cypher. The forthcoming Cypher GM’s Guide helps the GM make the most of this immersive and versatile game system, but isn’t necessary for play.
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.
