Whatever you want to run, Cypher is about to be your new favorite game.
Cypher is the award-winning tabletop 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. Everyone loves campaigns and adventures that become the stuff of legend in your gaming group!
Cypher is built from the ground up to be easy on the GM. Mechanics push the bulk of the “work” out to the players, keeping the GM’s imagination and bandwidth free to focus on keeping the game cool, fun, and interesting.
And if you can decide how hard something is on a scale of 1 to 10, you can resolve anything in Cypher. The GM sets the difficulty, and the player rolls three times that number on a d20. No modifiers, no math—it’s really that easy. But, just like in real life, that PC is going to want the task to be easier. Imagine you’re trying to fix a broken lawnmower. Do you have the right tools? Can you look up a YouTube video with instructions? Maybe a friend will help you? Did you ever take a class in mechanical repair? In the game, things like this make the task easier, reducing the difficulty.
So if repairing the star drive is a difficulty 6 task, the player might call out their skills, special equipment, or aid from another PC. If the GM agrees they apply, each of those reduces the difficulty by a step—so the task difficulty drops to 3, and the player only needs to roll a 9 to succeed.
So task resolution is a conversation between the players and GM—not a calculation of numbers on a character sheet. And that’s how everything is resolved in Cypher!
Even creatures work that way. Every creature has a level (between 1 and 10). It may have special abilities or weird attacks, or be especially bad or good at certain things. But you want to hide from it? Negotiate with it? Trick it? Outrun it? You can resolve anything using the creature’s level.
Which makes Cypher so 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 a viable 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 assets could tip this in your favor. Tell me:
Cypher is made for great stories. 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. Tools like the GM intrusion let you inject a twist into a scene, adventure, or campaign to make things more interesting, keep the pace where you want it, or nudge the story in a cool direction. Intrusions reward the players in a way that enhances a spirit of storytelling so the players never feel that the GM is working against them.
You’re never a slave to some rigid rule or the wrong roll of the dice. The game serves your story!
A Cypher character is more than a collection of numbers and powers. You build a character by combining a descriptor, type, and focus to form a sentence that breathes life into the character—a Bookish Noble who Solves Mysteries, a Rugged Barbarian who Strikes with Mythic Might, a Charming Starpilot who Fights with Panache, or perhaps a Mysterious Necromancer who Consorts with the Dead. It’s not just color, though: each component defines some of the abilities, skills, and stats on the character sheet.
Character creation is fast and intuitive, and builds characters that jump into adventure already full of personality. The process takes minutes on paper—and the free online Cypher Tools makes it even easier!
But that’s just the beginning, of course! Cypher is full of tools that engage players and deepen characters. 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.
Cypher’s mechanics are elegant, intuitive, and easy to master. You’ll be playing in no time!
Things move quickly in Cypher—a session might cover twice the ground as a more mechanics-heavy RPG. 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.
Cyphers. They’re so fundamental, it’s right there in the name!
A cypher is a one-use special ability. In some genres, cyphers may be physical items the PCs come across—potions or scrolls, or bits of inscrutable alien technology. In other genres, they may be less tangible—blessings, inspiration, or simply a meta-game benefit for the player’s use. Either way, a cypher gives the PC a one-time, often unusual, boost—easing a roll, or enabling a cool and dramatic character action!
Depending on your game, a cypher might be something that lets a character shoot a blast of fire, or gives them added defense for an hour, or teleports them to a location they can see, or heals them, or adds damage to their attacks, or changes one roll to a natural 20. Regardless, cyphers come and go, meaning players always have dynamic options to keep the game lively.
Cypher is thoughtfully designed to make it easy to run and play—and not just through the rules. The design and layout of the books and other products make them easy to use and keep the pace lively at the game table.
And that’s not all: the Cypher Tools suite of free online tools makes the game even easier! The Character Builder takes you through character creation in minutes—you can generate a character sheet in PDF, export your character to a VTT, or simply store, play, and advance your character right in the Character Builder. Other tools, such as the Datasphere Deck Tool, support online play. New features are added regularly, helping make Cypher easy to use so you can focus on fun, engaging game sessions!
Got a cool idea for a new campaign? Cypher will run in it—no kludging rules or messing about to make it work. Aliens-inspired space horror? Sure! Whimsical light fantasy, a la The Princess Bride? Yeah, that works. An old-West zombie apocalypse? Swashbuckling pirates on the high seas? Reality-hopping dimensional travelers? Classic fantasy? Hard sci-fi? Superheroes? You got it! (You can even publish your own material, through the Cypher Open License!)
And it’s not just about mechanical compatibility. Cypher is built to make your world—any world—come to life with vivid tools and vibrant, engaged characters.
Any genre. Any campaign. Any character. If you can imagine it, Cypher makes it easy.
Everything you need to create a character and play Cypher!
