The versatile Cypher System powers tabletop adventures across genres

polygon.com:

When an internal document from Wizards of the Coast outlining proposed changes to Dungeons & Dragons’ Open Gaming License leaked in January, fan uproar led to record sales of rival tabletop role-playing games. One of the winners was the Cypher System from Monte Cook Games, which earned about three years’ worth of sales in just a few weeks, according to Monte Cook chief operating officer Charles Ryan.

“We saw thousands and thousands of new gamers investigating the Cypher System,” he said. “Now, some of those people made a rage purchase and then they’re just going to go back to their D&D campaign, but others are going to explore. There’s people that weren’t really paying attention to what else was out there, and now they’ve seen that there are other things and they’ll give them a try. In the months to come, we will be paying a lot of attention to how we can get those people that made a purchase to then move on to actually playing a game, because we’re pretty confident once they play that game, they won’t go back.”

The Cypher System was introduced in 2012 with the record-breaking crowdfunding campaign for Numenera, Monte Cook’s science fantasy tabletop role-playing game set billions of years in the future. The game’s success inspired the formation of Monte Cook Games in order to use the mechanics of Numenera in other settings. Its second outing was The Strange, a Quantum Leap-like game where characters hop between dimensions that represent different genres.

“Once we did that, we were like, Well, this system works for everything,” Ryan said.

The Cypher System Rulebook provides guidance for running games and creating characters for settings ranging from post-apocalypses to fairy tales to superheroes. The key to the game’s