[UPDATED] MCG Has A New Kickstarter Coming

That's Monte Cook Games, not McG the movie director. It looks like they're planning to expand in support for their core Cypher System rule set beyond the directly Numenera and The Strange product lines. What that entails exactly is yet to be seen, but the image below likely gives away a few clues. Monte Cook Games runs a blockbuster Kickstarter every year, and is pretty much near the top of the game when it comes to crowdfunding.

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UPDATE! MCG has sent this email out. The Kickstarter begins on Monday, Feb 29th, and involves three new campaign settings:

We’ve been hinting at it all week, and there’s been a fair bit of speculation about it in social media and gaming sites such as ENworld. If you’re among those people who postulated we’re launching a new Kickstarter campaign, you’re right. Tomorrow we’re announcing the Worlds of the Cypher System campaign, which will launch on Monday, February 29.

Through this campaign we hope to fund a series of titles supporting the Cypher System Rulebook. And not just fund them—make them really awesome. Grow them and add stretch goals and new titles—the sort of things we’ve been fortunate enough to fund in previous Kickstarter campaigns.

Here’s an advance peek at the three campaign settings that make up the initial offering:

Gods of the Fall: Awaken your divine spark, claim a dominion, and become a god in a fantasy world in which the heavens smashed upon the Earth like a vengeful star.

Predation: First figure out how to survive t​he dark and dangerous world of the ​Cretaceous Period using the technology of the future—high-tech weapons, advanced science, and bioengineered dinosaurs—and then worry about the asteroid that history says wipes out all life on earth.

Masks: They say you're insane. Dangerous. That you suffer from Dissociative Mask Disorder. Your parents and the doctors and the press and the military. They can’t believe what’s happening. They can’t believe what you can do.

(There’s more too it, of course, but those three titles are the headliners.)

We at MCG have been playing and running Cypher System games ourselves for a year now, and we’ve come to realize how much cool support the Cypher System Rulebook deserves. That’s why we’re so excited about launching this campaign. We hope you’re excited too, and that you’ll help us spread the word over the week to come—and into the campaign itself.

 

[Desh-Rae-Halra]

I'm kind of in the camp of what Aldarc said, in that I worry that there will be overlapping content from The Strange. That was my biggest disappointment with the CSR, in that I already owned Numenera and The Strange, so when I opened it I realized that I already had most of this content.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm kind of in the camp of what Aldarc said, in that I worry that there will be overlapping content from The Strange. That was my biggest disappointment with the CSR, in that I already owned Numenera and The Strange, so when I opened it I realized that I already had most of this content.

It wouldn't be bad if they just put in more forethought into which supplements they would put their descriptors and foci.

 

[Von Ether]

Commenting on the update:

I think the three settings are a savvy idea just beyond offering non-reprinted content. These settings will help people understand what sort of gaming and power level is a better match for the CSR.

YMMV, but I've think the whole "but what if you want to run a straight modern game with no cyphers" is more of a comment on the setting styles the game can support as compared to actual games played.

In over 30 years of RPGing, I personally played crime noir once and pure modern military twice. Everything else has been either fantasy or science fiction.

 

[Aldarc]

Commenting on the update:

I think the three settings are a savvy idea just beyond offering non-reprinted content. These settings will help people understand what sort of gaming and power level is a better match for the CSR.

YMMV, but I've think the whole "but what if you want to run a straight modern game with no cyphers" is more of a comment on the setting styles the game can support as compared to actual games played.

In over 30 years of RPGing, I personally played crime noir once and pure modern military twice. Everything else has been either fantasy or science fiction.

I'm intrigued by the Gods of the Fall setting.

Predation sounds a LOT like the late '80s Dino-Riders cartoon/toyline, which was precisely that: good guys and bad guys from the far future who time-traveled to a kitchen sink-Mesozoic earth with armor and lasers that they strapped to dinosaurs.

Masks: They may as well have not said anything about this setting given how exceptionally vague the sales pitch overview is.

 

[Desh-Rae-Halra]

Agree with Aldarc again, the Masks teaser is actually kind of a turn off
"Your parents and the doctors and the press and the military." <- Do I need to point out that this sentence doesn't even have a verb?? IDK what else to say here.....

Hopefully they are doing separate releases for each campaign setting. If they are putting all 3 in one, then I suppose the price point must be good in case you only like 1 or 2 of them. This is what kept me from supporting more of the recent Fate: From Bits to Books Kickstarter, in that I liked 1 or 2 of the settings, but paying for a book where I don't care for 25-50% of the material is not realistic.

Again, I hope this does well, and more info will certainly help, but off the bat, I'm not feeling much of the hype.

 

[Von Ether]

I'm intrigued by the Gods of the Fall setting.

Predation sounds a LOT like the late '80s Dino-Riders cartoon/toyline, which was precisely that: good guys and bad guys from the far future who time-traveled to a kitchen sink-Mesozoic earth with armor and lasers that they strapped to dinosaurs.

Masks: They may as well have not said anything about this setting given how exceptionally vague the sales pitch overview is.

It would help if we knew which picture applied to the Masks setting.

The left picture looks like transforming beast from that angle (it might also just be a god's steed that's basking in divine light for all we know.) That picture might suggest a sort of super solider/berserker coming home to civilian life storyline.

While the middle pic might be a godling taking in the view, it's even more vague for a Mask guess. You can hop through dimension? The hop is only astral, hence the incredulity of the military and families?

 

[Dahak]

The first picture seems to be from Gods of the Fall. The rest of the image can be seen on their Facebook page with "Shake the pillars of heaven" and "Command the storm" overlays. The middle, by deduction, will be Masks.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning that one of the Facebook posts led with "Gods, Dinosaurs, Superheroes", so Masks is a supers setting if the blurb didn't immediately make it apparent.

While my preference would have been for a series of genre books that expanded character options and provided a handful of Worlds Numberless style mini-settings for each relevant sub-genre, I'm still pretty excited about the Kickstarter. I'm guessing there will be additional foci in Masks (although some will likely duplicate material from In Translations).

 

[Desh-Rae-Halra]

I hope that they do a little overhaul of the Supers character generation as well as provide setting material.
I dont know if they were trying to be funny with the Dissociative Mask Disorder or if that is actually the basis of the setting.

 

[Dahak]

I think it's the hook for the setting, similar to the perception of Evos in Heroes, or the various mutant/metahuman registration acts in everything else. A negative stigma is being placed on a community that is (mostly) trying to help, or at least peacefully co-exist. Perhaps a bit overplayed, but if it's a source for additional supers creation options in the same way Necessary Evil was for Savage Worlds, then I'm all for it.

 

[Aldarc]

The first picture seems to be from Gods of the Fall. The rest of the image can be seen on their Facebook page with "Shake the pillars of heaven" and "Command the storm" overlays. The middle, by deduction, will be Masks.

Edit: It's also worth mentioning that one of the Facebook posts led with "Gods, Dinosaurs, Superheroes", so Masks is a supers setting if the blurb didn't immediately make it apparent.

While my preference would have been for a series of genre books that expanded character options and provided a handful of Worlds Numberless style mini-settings for each relevant sub-genre, I'm still pretty excited about the Kickstarter. I'm guessing there will be additional foci in Masks (although some will likely duplicate material from In Translations).

Nothing looks particularly "super hero" about the second image, which appears to be something more from the sci-fi pulp exploration genre than anything else. Right now though, I can't say that I'm super-thrilled about the settings for this Kickstarter apart from the Gods of the Fall. The images seem more inspiring than the setting blurbs.