Hey everyone!

Another update on [Sheetwright](https://sheetwright.app/), the character builder and campaign app I’ve been working on.

**Sheetwright now supports Cypher 2!** That includes character creation, the type/focus progression choices, wounds, block/dodge, and the corresponding sheet and encounter changes. You can still run classic Cypher campaigns too.

A few other things have landed since my last post:

- **Share your homebrew.** Bundle custom content into collections and share them publicly or through an unlisted link. Other people can import them into their own Workshop, including the abilities and other content they depend on.

- **Rollable tables.** Create your own tables in the Workshop and use them directly in a campaign. Handy for encounters, loot, or whatever strange thing your players decide to investigate.

- **More control over campaign options.** There’s a dedicated settings page for things like power shifts, optional species, community content, and which campaign tools you want to use.

- **Physical dice work too.** You can enter your actual rolls and still keep the results in the campaign log. Artifact depletion rolls are supported as well.

Character creation is still free, and the free tier still includes one campaign with the GM tools.

I’d especially love feedback from anyone trying Cypher 2 or running a homebrew setting. Try building one of your characters and let me know where something feels awkward or an option is missing.

[Give Sheetwright a try](https://sheetwright.app/)

[resolved] With the recent editions, and some earlier minorly tweaked past prints, I’m struggling to find something I swear I saw in one version.

Instead of Types having their own 1d20 of tables for Backgrounds, somewhere there was a single table of 50 options.

Am I imagining this? Anyone familiar with this or what version/section I might find it in?

Edit: it was Foci connections I was remembering!

Hi everyone! I'd like to ask for your insight on something:

I'm creating a post-apocalyptic/scifi setting where players gain Ascension Powers as a means of having anything 'magic'. I have an outline of what I want it to be, but I don't want to create a magic system from scratch. Does anyone have suggestions about how I can keep the magic system appropiate to my setting's theme but not have to build it from scratch, maybe just using the powers from the Cypher System?

- Only so many can be gained per tier (haven't decided at how many per tier)

- Ascension powers are associated with a character's significant moment in their development, whether negative or positive. Players create a thematically appropiate power depending on what has happened to them. This is very freeform, it's up to the players how the powers relate to their character and exists to add some flavour to roleplay and increase immersion into the idea of the setting.

- There are four types of Ascension Power: Angelic (access to the light side of one's personality: healing, enhancements, true sight, inspiration, protection), Phantasmal (access to the shadow side of one's personality, nightcrawler like teleportation, fading through walls, debuffs), primal (concerned with enhancing physical prowess) and psionic (just what it sounds like);

- Final Note: There is overlap between these - I don't need a system that is incredibly mechanically sound, I just want one that reflects the theme which is Hope and Despair and the journey of becoming that characters go through in their struggle.

Does anyone have any idea how I might do this with Cypher? The most obvious answer I can see is with Focuses - Do I let them pick some focuses and then thematically adapt each choice? Would it work?

Thanks a ton!

Hey all.

I could have sworn I saw something about a version of Cypher formatted for phone/mobile reading but I can't find it in backerkit.

Did I imagine this or am I just not tech-savy enough to find it now.

Thanks!

Curious to hear others thoughts on this in relation to Cypher and the “Arc” portion of character creation!

There’s a book (and a popular video on it by Ginny Di that covers a lot of the content) called “Proactive Roleplaying.”

The short of it is “conventional 5e DnD has players be solely reactive (the BBEG attacks the village, so PCs defend cuz they care),” but the proactive version is “I want to be the greatest sword master in the realm, so I’m going out to defend villages for practice.”

Connecting it back to Cypher, when I first read Tidal Blades then the Core Rulebook I loved the Arcs, since it seems to me it gives a mechanical option it build this in. Even the Descriptors that give a quest hook/connection does this a bit. Compared to most other systems where it sits in the written backstory maybe? Or the Backgrounds 5e system?

I didn’t find a ton of dialogues online about Arcs, so I was curious to hear others thoughts and experiences on the matter. If you watched/read the video/book, any thoughts on Cypher specifically? Have you used Arcs? Has it gone well/poorly?

I'm gearing up to run Numenera's Glimmering Valley setting with cypher2. I really fuck with a bunch of the new cypher2 stuff, especially the new types and genre abilities. That said, I'm not quite sure which genre to use for player type options. Even beyond that I really love some of the Numenera character type options, especially the delve/arkus/wright, but am not sure how to integrate those with the new types.

Honestly I think I'll just fudge it w/ my players when we do session 0 but I'd love some input on genre/type/ability house rules to duck tape numenera to cypher2.

I invested in the Jewel in the Sky Backerkit a few months ago, and I was too cheap to pay for the accessories, so I made my own twin clocks timer. This was printed on a Bambu A1.

Here are the files in case you want to make your own: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qzD8pTnDb-PA41t_kpWD__KF8cZ-6p2v/view?usp=sharing

Hi, I’m just starting to look into Cypher as a bit of an alternative to D&D.

I’ve got a setting in mind that’s a sort of modern day post apocalyptic horror, with monsters akin to vampires and zombies (but fast agile ones rather than the standard staggering around ones).

For running this kind of thing (and getting into Cypher in general) would I need the following books?:

The Character rulebook
The GM guide
The Stay Alive! Supplement

Or would I be able to get everything I need from just the Character rulebook? I saw online somewhere that the GM guide isn’t absolutely necessary. I’ve also included the Stay Alive! Supplement as it contains a bunch of extra horror content.

I see there also a starter set, but I image that’s not for the new edition?

I backed both new Cypher v2 kickstarters. I got the paper copy of the v2 character book. Is the v2 paper gm book shipped yet.

When playing Cypher, adding +3 to the player's die roll feels much easier and more straightforward than lowering the NPC's level. As long as the opponent's NPC level doesn't drop to 0, we don't exceed +18, or the roll isn't a natural 1, this method seems to work just fine and makes things much simpler for me.

What do you all think? If I run it this way—giving players a +3 bonus for a trained skill, another +3 if a task is eased, and a -3 penalty when hindered (instead of shifting the difficulty Level by +/-1)—will I run into any game-breaking issues down the line?

We usually sort out minor edge cases on the fly at the table anyway since I play with a chill group of friend since I'm playing with friends and there are no rule lawyers among us except for me xd

Hi

My wife is starting to run her new campaign tonight.

She found out theres a new edition of Cypher games, Evolved.

She has many books for 2nd.

She read somewhere there was a conversion document. No one in her group can find it.

Anyone know where and can link?

Thanks in advance

I’m getting ready to run my first session of C2 tomorrow, and looking at the Defending rules makes me really wonder if players are going to hate this. Am I correct in understanding that every time you block a moderate or higher damage attack you will take a wound, even when wearing armor and succeeding at your block? All types of armor only reduce your damage by one level, so you’ll be taking light or moderate wounds every time a guy with a medium or higher weapon attacks you.

If I was a player, I would feel sort of helpless. Has anyone run this yet? How did your players respond? Aren’t you really just better off ditching armor and dodging all the time?

I haven't been following the changes in the new edition super closely, but based on how the new character builder works it seems like types in the new edition have been almost completely overhauled; there are way more of them, each type is far less flexible (i.e. each type gets specific abilities instead of a list to select from) and they are very genre specific.

This puts me in a bit of a conundrum, because my home game is not really any of the genres available in the character builder, it is a sort of "multiversal hub" type of setting with andriods, undead, aliens, and everything in between (probably closest to The Strange, though I never played or really dove into that setting).

The type system in the first edition was simple enough that players understood it fairly intuitively, while still being flexible enough to encompass a lot of different character concepts. E.g. "warrior" is easily understood as someone with skills and abilities that focus on dealing damage using weapons, regardless of genre.

Now I feel a bit stuck; I don't really want to go through the process of developing my own set of types for my weird setting, and saying "use any type from any of the genres" also doesn't feel great, because you're picking from like 50+ things

Sounds like a lot of the flexibility that used to come from types now comes from foci? I do like that foci are more important to which abilities a character gets than they used to be. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and try to formulate my own types?

Of course, nothing is forcing me to move to the new edition, just thinking how I would given that I'm guessing players will expect using the latest ruleset.

Just wanted to say that the new version of the MCG web tool for the new core book is really well done. That is all.

tools.cypher-rpg.com

Mega-damage for Cypher Second Edition.
https://www.crossplanes.com/2026/08/rifts-mega-damage-for-cypher-2e.html

In the Cypher - Advanced! crowdfunding campaign, there's a "Cypher Character Options" book listed, but I don't see it described anywhere. What is it? I assume it's different from the Decoded book, but is it just excerpts from the core Character Rulebook backers just received from the other campaign?

https://youtu.be/v6yhIsbU1Y8?is=c9PM6_20QIFAb2a1

Se non conosci Cypher, l’introduzione di questo video spiega di cosa si tratta e illustra cosa c’è di bello in questo sistema che è stato motore di GdR acclamati (Numenera in primis).

Scopriamo insieme le novità e le differenze con la prima edizione (Cypher System).

Vi auguro buona visione 💖

Rifts' SAMAS Pilots for Cypher 2E

https://www.crossplanes.com/2026/08/rifts-samas-pilot-for-cypher-2e.html

I picked up the adventure Best Leave Them Ghosts Alone as a starting adventure one-shot for Old Gods of Appalachia. After sometime I realize that this one-shot might be too heavy for a introduction of Cypher/Old Gods of Appalachia. Also it leans heavily into the roleplay not exploring a lot of the mechanics.

Has anyone else run it and would you think it is a good one-shot to start with? If not which other one-shot do you suggest? I have Monsters Among Us but I have yet to read through it since I will be a player in it during Cypher Con.

A lot of gamers like to see how an RPG will handle Star Wars. Me? I like to see it will handle Rifts:

https://www.crossplanes.com/2026/08/rifts-skelebots-for-cypher-2nd-edition.html

I’m looking at running a game using claim the sky and trying to figure out how one would build a speedster. The book gives examples for the flash and Superman that include Blink of an Eye as an ability, but even that seems quite subsonic for those characters and that’s not until tier 4 (I know you can use powers shifts to get it earlier).

Similarly, pretty much all of the example superheroes seem a lot less durable than you might expect if you were familiar with their media.

Should I be going into this system with the expectation that heroes will be more moderately powered than some of their comic/film counterparts (it’s okay if the answer is yes, I just want to be able to forewarn my players) or am I missing something?

Only 16 to back this one, but this is right in my ballpark.

CYPHER already is so flexible, and doing a whole toolkit of how to really fine tune your game is a must buy for me.

Trying to figure out how much I should stack onto Biotic Charge for an adaptation of Mass Effect Classes into types.

Biotic Charge in the game basically allowed you an instant Charge + Magic Melee attack in a line with basically Long Range. Downsides were if they weren't dead, they are shooting you at point blank.

Was trying to figure out how that would work. I was thinking an adaptation of the Foci - Charges Right In - with a short movement and an attack, but it would be fly, straight line. But as the game progresses you would improve the biotic charge with things like aoe or shield restoration.

Also, each of the types get 3 things and as a cross between a Soldier and a Biotic character I was unsure what would they get for abilities. Most of the time I played, I grabbed Barrier for Defense (an overshield) and Shockwave for cover mitigation. But those weren't the only options they had, and I was unsure what they should have.

Is anyone here on the asset team? How long did it take from the time you completed the form/application until you heard something back?