Torchlight Ignited

This month should see the release of some cool new Blade Runner-themed Lumibricks that will enhance my growing city of Vesper. I want the city to look and feel epic in scope before we start the campaign. I'm also not in any great hurry to begin because, well, the new edition of Cypher doesn't include cyberpunk info in the core rulebooks! MCG maintains a cyberpunk campaign setting, however, so I'm hopeful we'll see cyberpunk content in the upcoming player supplement that was part of the Backerkit campaign for the second edition. That book likely won't be in our hands until early in the new year. 

In the meantime, we'll test out Cypher 2 with a return to the Torchlight setting. Nathaniel and Amy will play in person, while Matthew will participate remotely and asynchronously from his distant outpost in Indiana. Torchlight was an easy call because I already have a campaign written for it -- something I drafted back in the days of Covid but never got around to using.

Common Tongue

One building at a time, I'll assembling quite an enormous Lumibricks city to serve as the physical representation of Vesper for our upcoming Cypher campaign. I finished up a corporate skyscraper last night and brought in Amy and Nathaniel to see it light up in the dark. Afterwards, Nathaniel got a cheeky look on his face and asked what language people in Vesper speak. When I replied that English would be the lingua franca, he quipped, "What, not Vesperanto?"

My Bad!

I shouldn't have doubted MCG. Nathaniel found a legacy site where the original Cypher character builder remains intact, with all of our first-edition characters. Huzzah!

Wipeout

I do love Monte Cook Games, but I have to say that I was a bit peeved to find that when the online character builder tool launched for the new edition of Cypher, it seems to have wiped out all the saved characters from the first edition. I wish I'd had a bit of notice so that I could download PDFs of all the characters we've made over the past year or so. We would, of course, need to rebuild them for Cypher 2 anyway, but still...

GM's Guide

The digital version of the GM's Guide for Cypher 2 just dropped!!!

Cypherize

I'm really digging the new Cypher edition. I can't wait to get my hands on all the books and other goodies, but the PDF of the player guide is certainly enough to get my mind racing about the possibilities. I'm not saying that I would or should do this, but after reading that PDF, I feel as though I could convert my last two campaign settings -- Shattered Realm and the venerable Druid Cycle -- from Fifth Edition D&D to Cypher. All campaigns and settings linked by a common ruleset? And all characters, locations, and other elements recorded in a single spreadsheet? It's a tantalizing prospect...

Cypher 2

The universe gives, and takes away, and gives again. Hot on the heels of my Knicks winning the championship, my Golden Knights flamed out in the Stanley Cup Final. Mere moments after their fate was sealed, however, I got the email from Monte Cook Games about the arrival of the digital version of the new Cypher System -- now just "Cypher" -- player's handbook. Nathaniel and I are already poring over the character creation rules in the new edition and looking ahead to the upcoming campaign set in Vesper.

Cypher Musings

With a new edition of the Cypher System on the way this summer, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on how it's worked out in Front Porch campaigns over the past year. The first thing to note, however, is the small sample size. To date, we've done one in-person Cypher campaign (Vanguard Saga, with three players) and two email-based campaigns (another Vanguard Saga storyline and the revamped Torchlight, each with one player); compare those numbers to decades of D&D -- Druid Cycle, Shattered Realm, and so much more. That said, I think I have enough experience with Cypher to make some general observations about the rules and how we're using them. 

The most important point is that I'm very satisfied with Cypher as the default game system for the Front Porch multiverse. It's fast and easy, very flexible across genres, and well suited for narrative games. Long-running campaigns like the Druid Cycle setting will always be D&D, but at this moment I can't really imagine starting a new campaign that didn't use Cypher. My upcoming Vesper project, for example, is going to be our test run for the new Cypher edition.

So what else have I learned about Cypher from a year's worth of gaming? Below are some observations about how the experience at our table differs from the rules as written. 

• Back when I was just getting started with Cypher, Matt suggested a minor house rule to help ensure that ranged attacks at close range were not unequivocally superior to melee attacks. This house rule has worked out very well.
• In our family Vanguard campaign, Nathaniel created an android speedster whose many ways to ease Speed defense rolls has made him virtually untouchable by conventional attacks. Not everyone is out there trying to break the system, of course, but Nathaniel showed that even with a system designed by the best of the best in the gaming industry, it's quite possible to build unbalanced characters. 
• To help address the aforementioned problem, I created a house rule that enables certain low-level characters (such as troops who are part of a unit) to "gang up" on a single target more effectively. Nathaniel's android still runs circles around everyone, but at least now he has to be wary of large groups of foes taking aim at him all at once.
• No one remembers cyphers. I know it's supposed to be a big deal in the Cypher System, and it's right there in the name of the game, but cyphers still feel like a clunky add-on and not a core part of the game mechanics. 
• I love coming up with nasty GM Intrusions when players roll a 1 on their d20 checks, but all other GM Intrusions feel forced. When should something be an Intrusion rather than just a regular challenge for the PCs to overcome? Maybe I should think about Intrusions as "optional" encounters that players can either take on for the XP, or pay XP to avoid? Well, I guess, but that leads me to the final point...
• Players only use XP for advancement. In Cypher, players can spend XP for rerolls, for Player Intrusions, to avoid GM Intrusions, etc., but in practice, I've found that players don't use XP for any of these things. Only once -- and quite memorably -- did a player spend XP on a Player Intrusion, and that was when an NPC's life was at stake. Similarly, I think we've only had one or two instances when a player spent XP on a reroll. I guess it's nice to have these options in your pocket, but our experience is that players hoard XP for advancement. That realization, of course, has changed how I hand out XP; when players don't use it for all these other purposes, I have to slow down the XP rate or the characters will advance too quickly.

What changes will the new edition bring? I'm eager to find out. Here's to another year of Cypher gaming!

Another Torment Ended

I finished up Torment: Tides of Numenera, and found it to be...pretty fun! I'm still not a huge fan of the Numenera setting, and the game's voluminous text was a lot to get through (even just skimming it!), but I greatly enjoyed Torment as an example of the Cypher System translated into video game format. Spending points from your pools, applying levels of Effort, getting a "discount" from your Edge -- all that stuff felt very true to the paper-and-pencil game. I would love to see another video game make use of the Cypher System at some point.

A Novel Approach to Video Games

Torment: Tides of Numenera is great at world-building and presenting unique, complex NPC characters. It does, however, share a drawback of its spiritual predecessor, Planescape: Torment, in that there's a lot of text to read. As with the prior game, I find myself skimming the dialogue until something triggers an update to the Journal, where I can get a more concise version of what's going on. It's still fun, but man, it's like reading a novel.

A New Torment

Once upon a time, I played through the highly regarded Planescape: Torment, although I have little recolleciton of having done so. (It's referenced on this blog, however, so it must be true!) Since it's a kind of spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, and since I'm a big fan of the Cypher System, I've had my eye on Torment: Tides of Numera for a while. The game was massively discounted on Steam, so I decided to pick it up. It's pretty cool to see Cypher represented in a computer game! I'm only about an hour into the campaign, but I'm enjoying it so far. 

Numenera

I'm not a huge fan of the Numenera setting, but I backed the Numenera: The Amber Archive crowdfunding campaign at the lowest level so that I could pick up some of the intriguing add-ons. There's still another week or so before the campaign ends.

Welcome to the Funwhole

Hoping a new project would give me a bit of a distraction from real life, I picked up some building sets from Lumibricks, the company formerly known as...Funwhole. (Yes, really.) Lumibricks has a cool cyberpunk line, so I'm now in the process of building a pretty bad-ass near-future city (called Vesper) that looks awesome when lit up. I'll share some photos when I get a diorama finalized -- first I need to figure out a good way to create a road system between the various buildings. I've already got some ideas for how I can incorporate a city like this into my gaming multiverse using the Cypher System.

Waiting Game

Cypher seems to have moved into the fulfillment stage of the Backerkit campaign. Really, really looking forward to the new edition. How much longer now...?

Torchlight 3.5

As I've probably shared in the past, the Torchlight campaign setting -- originally known by the more evocative title Woden's Gallows -- was my submission to Wizards for their big contest to create a new D&D setting. (Ultimately, the winner was Eberron. How could anyone top magic robots?!) I'll call that one Torchlight 1.0. 

A few years later, I ended up using Torchlight as the setting for a couple of early 4e campaigns, one in-person and one chat-based. This world was not a great fit for 4e, however, because of the new dragonborn and tiefling PC races introduced in the PHB for that edition. Incorporating those races and their cultures into the world resulted in Torchlight 2.0, which I felt was a pretty boring place. It had lost much of its unique Anglo-Saxon flavor. I didn't use Torchlight at all in the early days of 5e, since by that time my kids were  already playing in the Shattered Realm setting. 

In 2020, when we were all spending a lot of time by ourselves for some reason, I decided to resurrect Torchlight. I did a lot of world-building, but it was not system-specific. I scrapped all the D&D 4e nonsense and got back to the setting's roots in Anglo-Saxon poems like The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, and, of course, Beowulf. Now I had a great setting again -- Torchlight 3.0 -- but with no real plans to use it in a campaign, primarily because it still just didn't feel right as a D&D setting.

Enter the Cypher System. That was really the (Torch)light bulb moment in which I realized that Cypher was a far better system for this world. It quickly became the default fantasy setting in my growing Front Porch Multiverse spreadsheet that brings together all the (non-Druid Cycle and non-Shattered Realm) campaigns of my gamemastering career. Recently, I felt inspired to flesh out the world even more, adding a whole new continent and hundreds of new characters and locations. It's not a revamp of what preceded it, but there are some pretty big geographical and historical changes, so I'm calling it Torchlight 3.5. I can't wait for an opportunity to bring it to life with players!

Cypher Is Backed!

The new edition of the Cypher System -- now just "Cypher" -- racked up over ten times its funding goal. Can't wait to see the finished products in 2026!

Last Day

It's the last day of the crowdfunding campaign for the new edition of the Cypher System. The link to the campaign is here.

UPDATE

Okay, so the latest stretch goal for the Cypher campaign is a GM Screen!

Why No GM Screen?

I've backed the crowdfunding campaign for the new edition of the Cypher System, needless to say, and ended up splurging a bit. But as I was looking down the long list of items I'll receive, I was a bit miffed at first that there was no GM screen. And then -- duh! -- I realized why. IYKYK.

Cypher Campaign Underway!

The campaign for the new edition of the Cypher System is now live! Click here to check it out. I got an email saying the game was fully funded before I even learned that it had gone live!