There's A New Edition Of The Cypher System Coming

Next year, 2026, Monte Cook Games will be releasing a new edition of its in-house Cypher System rules system.

Originally launched over a decade ago, the Cypher System powers games like Numenera, The Strange, and The Magnus Archives. It's a d20-based multi-genre game system known for its character generation method which has the player filling out the sentence "I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verb]" -- such as "I am a jovial Explorer who howls at the moon". The titular cyphers are one-time use abilities or items. Task resolution involves rolling a d20 against a 1-10 difficulty scale.

This new edition includes a bunch of changes, including genre-specific character creation, character damage and armour, and a greater emphasis on subtle cyphers.

Two new core rulebooks will be published. The Cypher Character Rulebook will delve into creating characters for a variety of different genres, while the Cypher GM's Guide will contain rules, GM advice and resources for creating and running games.

They'll be hitting a crowdfunding platform near you very soon, in late summer, with the books coming out mid-2026.

​

 

[darjr]

It’s live

Jorphdan talks about it at the end of this video and has a link to an interview with Monte Cook in the doobly doo.

 

[The Soloist]

This would be great if I hadn't finally decided to buy Cypher 2e and Numenara 2e only five months ago.

I'll pass on this KS and get it later.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

Sooooooo I want to comment on the last bit of the video = Monte talking about "we will offer clearer types. You want a barbarian here is a baked up barbarian ready to go."

I have been thinking this for ages, and honestly = yeah, people still like and crave and find great use in 'typed classes'. GURPS is neat, but its a huge slog to think of a character with all the options of all the types and all the abilities and all the mix and match... So its way easier to start with off-the-shelf barbarian and then customize from there (if at all). And I find that the majority of players don't like to customize all that much.

When we created our Cypher systems, we actually went out of our way to make each archetype quite distinct, and include rules of "no taking from other types until after tier 6".
We did the same thing for PBTA "pick a playbook, no taking moves from other playbooks till all of yours are activated."

And honestly, this just made the games better and players happier (it's also exposed games like Masks, were the playbooks are not well made, and so we moved on to other system quicker rathe than invest in what would ultimately be a custom game anyway).

So for Cypher we find it has been even better, to curate the lists of options, based on archetype. It makes characters more effective at what they say they can do, and more clear on how to use them.

I am looking forward to the changes, I think they will be good stuff overall.

 

[CleverNickName]

Holy cow. I got the email from Backerkit at 11am this morning as I was heading to the construction site. It passed its $100K goal by lunchtime, and is sitting at $296,751 as I begin my evening commute.

That's an impressive pace for a non-5E game product.

EDIT: I'm sure this helps:

EDIT EDIT: and now I'm the 1,760th backer. I was interested in getting an update to the Cypher rule set that I enjoy, and free PDFs are always good. But the thing that really pushed me over the edge was the inclusion of VTT options, which will make it easier to promote within my gaming group.

 

[Bolongo]

I dunno, calling those supplements "free" seems a little shaky to me.
If, for example, you're backing at the $35 PDF level, you only get the adventures. To get the settings as well, you have to go up to the $70 level. And if you're at the lowest pledge level, $19, you get none of it.
Having a hard time seeing how that qualifies as "free".

 

[CleverNickName]

I dunno, calling those supplements "free" seems a little shaky to me.
If, for example, you're backing at the $35 PDF level, you only get the adventures. To get the settings as well, you have to go up to the $70 level. And if you're at the lowest pledge level, $19, you get none of it.
Having a hard time seeing how that qualifies as "free".

The nature of the "free" material is a popular topic in the discussion forum of the Backerkit page.

 

[Swanosaurus]

I'm so terribly on the fence about this ...
I used to run a long Numenera campaign. Really loved it. A friend of mine is occassionally running Numenera for me now, and I also love it as a player. I own the old Cypher System core book and a few supplements. The supplements are good reads.

Still, I feel like Cypher is a bad fit for a generic system. Mostly because being a "class system" is so deeply ingrained in it. In the end, characters generation is about choosing a development tree to follow - or several, in the case of Cypher (type and focus). And development mainly is about gaining new abilities.

And the whole concept of "gaining new abilities" goes against my genre expectations for pretty much anything that's not some kind of High Fantasy or superhero story. Anything just a little more grounded just doesn't work with it, as far as I am concerned.

I mean, sure people gain new abilities in real life. But mostly, that's about incrementally learning to do stuff they already know the basics of better. That's what skills are for in many RPGs. But "From now on, I can catch arrows out of the air?" Yes, it works in certain types of stories, but mostly, these are superhero stories to a degree. It's not really something you'd find in The Lord of the Rings, or The Expanse, or Alien ... even in Star Wars, it made sense for Luke, but certainly not for Han.

The whole "Look, I reached a new Tier, now I can XY!" just takes me out of it in most genres.

With Numenera, I accept that it is kind of a weird sci-fantasy superhero RPG. But I don't want all of my RPGs to me superhero RPGs. To me, the applicability of Cypher is very narrow. As shiny as the new kickstarter looks, I should probably give it a pass, because even though I'd love to have these books, I suspect I'd never be using them ...

 

[Ghost2020]

I'm so terribly on the fence about this ...
I used to run a long Numenera campaign. Really loved it. A friend of mine is occassionally running Numenera for me now, and I also love it as a player. I own the old Cypher System core book and a few supplements. The supplements are good reads.

Still, I feel like Cypher is a bad fit for a generic system. Mostly because being a "class system" is so deeply ingrained in it. In the end, characters generation is about choosing a development tree to follow - or several, in the case of Cypher (type and focus). And development mainly is about gaining new abilities.

And the whole concept of "gaining new abilities" goes against my genre expectations for pretty much anything that's not some kind of High Fantasy or superhero story. Anything just a little more grounded just doesn't work with it, as far as I am concerned.

I mean, sure people gain new abilities in real life. But mostly, that's about incrementally learning to do stuff they already know the basics of better. That's what skills are for in many RPGs. But "From now on, I can catch arrows out of the air?" Yes, it works in certain types of stories, but mostly, these are superhero stories to a degree. It's not really something you'd find in The Lord of the Rings, or The Expanse, or Alien ... even in Star Wars, it made sense for Luke, but certainly not for Han.

The whole "Look, I reached a new Tier, now I can XY!" just takes me out of it in most genres.

With Numenera, I accept that it is kind of a weird sci-fantasy superhero RPG. But I don't want all of my RPGs to me superhero RPGs. To me, the applicability of Cypher is very narrow. As shiny as the new kickstarter looks, I should probably give it a pass, because even though I'd love to have these books, I suspect I'd never be using them ...

I'm struggling too. I backed it but having second thoughts.
I have a shelves full of it, but never played it, and only have run numenera a few times.

 

[Von Ether]

I'm so terribly on the fence about this ...
I used to run a long Numenera campaign. Really loved it. A friend of mine is occassionally running Numenera for me now, and I also love it as a player. I own the old Cypher System core book and a few supplements. The supplements are good reads.

Still, I feel like Cypher is a bad fit for a generic system. Mostly because being a "class system" is so deeply ingrained in it. In the end, characters generation is about choosing a development tree to follow - or several, in the case of Cypher (type and focus). And development mainly is about gaining new abilities.

And the whole concept of "gaining new abilities" goes against my genre expectations for pretty much anything that's not some kind of High Fantasy or superhero story. Anything just a little more grounded just doesn't work with it, as far as I am concerned.

I mean, sure people gain new abilities in real life. But mostly, that's about incrementally learning to do stuff they already know the basics of better. That's what skills are for in many RPGs. But "From now on, I can catch arrows out of the air?" Yes, it works in certain types of stories, but mostly, these are superhero stories to a degree. It's not really something you'd find in The Lord of the Rings, or The Expanse, or Alien ... even in Star Wars, it made sense for Luke, but certainly not for Han.

The whole "Look, I reached a new Tier, now I can XY!" just takes me out of it in most genres.

With Numenera, I accept that it is kind of a weird sci-fantasy superhero RPG. But I don't want all of my RPGs to me superhero RPGs. To me, the applicability of Cypher is very narrow. As shiny as the new kickstarter looks, I should probably give it a pass, because even though I'd love to have these books, I suspect I'd never be using them ...

I hear you. When ever someone on social media being a try-hard with "realism" in their OSR/D&D adjacent game, I stop myself from writing "Not only do you have magic and dragons, you are also using XP and levels. Drop those and we can talk."

OTH:: GMs have been using their homebrew D&D games to dabble in other genres since nearly the beginning. It's whatever the table is comfortable with when it comes to reskinning. Using some the genre rules, I could totally do a more realist version of a Scanners/Firestarter campaign.

 

[Bolongo]

I'm struggling too. I backed it but having second thoughts.
I have a shelves full of it, but never played it, and only have run numenera a few times.

Learn to resist the lure of the shiny!

Also, learn to see through the sunk cost fallacy...