Whatever you want to run, Cypher is about to be your new favorite game.
Whatever you want to run, Cypher is about to be your new favorite game.
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.
And once you’re at the table, 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. 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 easy to prep and run. 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! Focus on making your game cool, interesting, and fun and spend almost no time on the mechanics.
The monster's energy blast misses you, but destroys the roof, creating a chasm between you and the helpless child…
I jump for it. How hard is it to reach the other side?
That’s my call as GM, on a scale of 1 to 10. I’ll call it a Challenging reach:
Now — a few things could tip this in your favor. Tell me:
Easy to build, fun to play, and never bogged down in needlessly complex mechanics.
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.
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.
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!
Steampunk dungeon-delving? Swashbuckling on the high seas? Zombie apocalypse? Hunting dimensional horrors on a derelict spaceship? Craft your campaign without ever kitbashing the rules to make them fit.
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.
Everything a player needs to create a character and dive into the second edition.
