A Retrospective on My Cypher System Campaign

    Very recently, I finished my first campaign as a DM. It was run in Monte Cook's Cypher System, using their Unmasked campaign/setting/splat-book. The campaign lasted 26 sessions, not counting our session 0, and told a fairly complete story. There is a lot to dive into, so lets get going.

The Cypher System

    For those unfamiliar with it. the Cypher System is a story-telling system created by Monte Cook, which is the system behind their most well known game: Numenera.     

    As a quick summary, the game works with d20s. The DM tells the players what the "level" of any task they are attempting is, and they need to roll that number times three on a d20 to succeed (ex: Level 3 task = 9 target number). Through spending effort (which depletes pools doubling as your health) or using skills, tools, or abilities, players can reduce the level of a task. This becomes absolutely necessary when confronted with any task of level 7 or higher, because it is impossible to roll a 21 on a d20. 

    Character creation is decently unique, where you choose a descriptor (character traits with mechanical add-ons), a type (a general class), and a focus (a sort of second class that really sets characters apart). It is pretty interesting, but it is mostly a shifting around of normal character creation to sound cool.

    There are really three things that make this system stand out. 

    First, everything is player facing. The DM doesn't roll dice, just describes stuff and sets levels appropriately. Since everything has a level, this makes improvisation and running games feel incredibly light and easy. 

    Second, are GM Intrusions. Basically, whenever the DM fancies, they can suddenly make something bad happen. A trap gets triggered, monsters suddenly do something out of turn order, someone fumbles something, the situation gets worse. To balance this, it gives XP to the player it affects, but that player can also choose to spend XP to say no thanks. I really can't do it justice, and it may sound worse than it is, but it works well for the system. 

    Third, and finally, are Cyphers. Characters have a number of abilities, but they are augmented with single-use items known as Cyphers. They can be quite powerful, and are meant to act as a way to constantly be changing the status-quo of what characters can do. 

Unmasked

    Unmasked is a setting/campaign book produced to work with Monte Cook's generalized Cypher System rules. The premise of the setting is that for unknown reasons, some teenagers have been able to notice glows around certain objects called mementos (Cyphers). Once, they can collect a bunch of these and make them into a mask. Putting on the mask swaps the teen out with a super-hero alter-ego known as their Mask-Form. The ideas are described in some very general terms, with ideas for different settings, time periods, and answers to questions about why this is happening. 

    All told, Unmasked is a pretty original idea for using the Cypher System for a teen superhero campaign. The book comes with one fully fleshed out setting, Boundary Bay, with a partial storyline as well as a number of other campaign plots that could be used. It also includes one fully-written adventure in Boundary Bay. 

My Campaign

    For my campaign, I will admit I just used Boundary Bay as is for the most part. However, I did make a few key changes. The first was that I shifted the time of the setting. Boundary Bay, as written, is made for the 80s. I moved it 20 years to the early 2000's, because I wanted it to be during the age of fledgling social media. It was a pain, as I manually moved dates and corrected some inconsistencies that popped up, and none of it ended up mattering that much.

    The largest change I made was in how the supernatural elements worked. I once played a game of Microscope (a collaborative game about building timelines, check it out) with a player in my upcoming campaign. I ended up basing much of my plot structure on the timeline we had made, which was about a modern-suddenly-magic setting. In our timeline, we had three sets of magic-users: awakened, who did magic like wizards and witches through spells and rituals; chosen, who did magic like clerics and shamans through faith and spirits; and pure, who were a catch-all category for the people who developed one-trick powers similar to quirks or Mask-Users (handy coincidence). 

    And, because I had already started, I continued ripping other modern supernatural things I felt were cool and putting them in. This ended up including elements of the FEAR franchise (the campaign took place immediately after the first game) and the SCP organization. I highly recommend both of them, and they actually ended up working well for the campaign. 

    Going through the examples listed in the Unmasked book, I laid out my campaign plan. Basically a large overarching plot broken up by time and player tier. My plan, which I intentionally slowed down from the book's examples, was to take place over all four years of my players' high school experience. Things would start small, as people were getting to terms with their powers, escalating as a group of teens wanting to use their powers for whatever formed, and eventually climaxing with the reveal of magic to the world at large as the players faced down the government/SCP organization who were trying to do nefarious things to them.

    Additionally, to keep organized, I put all of my notes into Kanka, which is a very nice online platform for this. I actually ended up putting all of the information I had on Boundary Bay in there too, though most of it fell to the wayside as the campaign evolved. I did, however, consistently end up using the Calendar and my Session Journals to keep on top of things.

What Worked

    The campaign went fine, and even though we lost a couple players, everyone enjoyed it. We were all new to the Cypher System when we started the campaign, but now I would say we are all decently experienced. 

    Everything being player facing, and me only having to come up with the story and levels, was an absolute godsend in this campaign. It made prep an easy affair that I could get done in as little as 30 minutes.

    Even if everything didn't go to plan, the plan I made still worked for the campaign and allowed me to sprinkle in a lot of foreshadowing and secrets early on. The fact that there were actually two secret organizations in town (the SCP organization and the US government/FEAR) totally threw my players for a loop until they managed to get more information.

    The fact that I made the different types of magic-users differentiable based on their "glows" (something only visible to the player characters and those like them), allowed me to get another good surprise in, because I was able to pull out the Chosen and surprise everyone. They, unlike other magic-users, don't glow unless they are actively using their powers, which worked out wonderfully. 

    One aspect of the setting that I improvised, but worked out fantastically, was how superstitious the teens of Boundary Bay were. This started with a strange section of utility tunnel haunted by a ghost, but expanded to include the craze of Animology (knock-off astrology from Kim Possible), and eventually superstitions about those elected into homecoming royalty. That last one especially, produced a long running and very public love triangle (which no one actually wanted), which made for great drama.

What Didn't Work

    I don't want anyone to think that this campaign was a train wreck, or that the Cypher System is awful. Both were good and worked just fine, but me bragging about how awesome my campaign is doesn't make for a good read or a good learning experience. So, while this section may end up being the longest, that doesn't mean the campaign or the system are fundamentally bad.

The Campaign

    So, I am going to break this up into two parts. Here, I am going to talk about the campaign itself and the mistakes I made as a DM. In the other, I will talk about the issues that we, as a table, had with the Cypher System.

    So, perhaps the largest issue with this campaign, was that I wasn't prepared to run a teen drama. The setting was inspired, and I had a lot of interesting ideas for where it could go, but I ended up fumbling the teen drama aspect, which was recommended to be half the campaign by the setting guide. Obviously, things can be changed to taste, but what this ended up doing was giving my players whiplash when about halfway through the campaign, things ratcheted up and most of the teen drama got left by the wayside. 

    Doing any drama justice is a hard sell, but it was especially difficult for me because of the enormous cast of characters. Doing a quick check through my Kanka notes, I have pages for 90 characters. While some of those were player characters and their family members, most of them were characters I lifted from the setting book. That did a lot of heavy lifting for me, but it also burdened me with a lot potential NPCs to keep track of.

    Further compounding that issue, was that the players had a pretty diverse cast. The setting book breaks the school down into three social groups, the popular kids, the normal ones, and the outcasts, and we started with two player characters in each category. The setting actually sort of promotes this, because it explicitly calls for the DM to have strange and implausible events occur so that all of the player characters end up spending time together, effectively forcing them into being a friend group. It solves the problem of why players know/care about each other, but it doesn't solve the issue of their very different circles of acquaintances. 

    Honestly speaking, it overwhelmed me and is part of the reason the campaign ended up shifting like it did, as shifting into the event-focused conclusion of the campaign, which massively cut down the number of NPCs I needed to worry about. Effectively, I think I switched from an open campaign to something like a railroad.

    Also, while my idea to have more magic groups in town was fun and really gave the campaign flavor, I would absolutely never do it again. It only made things more complicated and really just bloated the campaign for not much benefit. In the end, I think the players went up against other mask-users twice. The other times it was against shadowy agents or wizard-types. So yeah, shot myself in the foot there, since the guidebook had helpful ideas for mask-forms and not what I came up with.

The System

    The Cypher system has a built in speed of progression, especially with Unmasked. The expectations with GM Intrusions, is that you use enough for every player to get a couple XP (note, the player who gets 1 xp from the intrusion also gives 1 xp to another player). Further, there are XP awards at the end of session that are meant to incentivize certain mindsets and playstyles. Those two things alone imply that that a player should expect to advance after every session, and tier up after every four (if not a bit faster). Thus, players are expected to reach the heights of their power (tier 6), in under 24 sessions. 

    XP can be used for thing other than advancements, the biggest drain for my players was rerolling dice, but that rate of progression was baked into the system and I wasn't savvy enough to notice it before we began. While I will admit fault on not being prepared for teen drama, the rate at which players were advancing through power levels basically forced me to pick up the pace. I tried to cut back, but by then things were already getting out of hand. To be clear: this built in advancement speed is neither good nor bad, it is just a thing to be aware of. I was not, and it worked against my plans for a slower burn of a campaign. 

    Now, for things that I can say are objectively bad. The Unmasked book contains maps of Boundary Bay, obviously with the intention that you will use it, but the resolution is awful. It took me hours of searching to find high-res copies on the original artists page, though I can't be sure since the entire thing was in a different language. I would share the links for other people, but I actually can't find it anymore.

    Another thing that is unfortunate, is that the Unmasked rulebook does not provide everything you need to play. You still need the generalized Cypher System rules. That isn't a problem, they even include page-numbers for reference, but the core rulebook has apparently been edited and revised, so none of the page-numbers are even close to right anymore. All of us were working with digital editions, and it slowed us down to say the least. Further, the organization of the rules and powers are slightly less than intuitive. Things would be in strange places, and if I needed to reference anything, it always took a couple minutes of concerted effort to find where they were. 

    This became a particular problem for my players too, because the character sheets made for the system don't actually provide enough space to describe what all of a characters abilities do, especially as they climb into the higher tiers and have over a dozen different abilities. 

    Finally, and perhaps most frustratingly of all, is the way Monte Cook writes out their abilities. For example, a player might have an ability that gives them some armor, which is pretty easy to understand. Other abilities, however, include a holy fire that ignites enemies. The way the ability is written, you just use it and the enemies are on fire. How it is meant to be interpreted, however, is that if you succeed on a roll based on the enemy's level, they are lit on fire. 

    This was particularly bad with one ability that a player picked, that had the text that they become unimportant and are ignored by people as part of the background. It also provided bonuses to dodging and stealth. With the confusing way abilities are written, it is very easy to believe that when a character uses this ability, everyone will just forget about them and ignore them, even in the middle of combat, an empty room, or a hidden base. As I managed to figure out (a session or two before the end), the player using this ability is probably supposed to have to make stealth checks against everyone, with the bonuses from the ability representing their improved unimportance. 

    To be clear, it is bad writing and worse design that abilities that need to be checked against opposition are written like they just work, when there are other abilities around them that actually do, just work! The hidden rule, that I believe exists but isn't written anywhere, is that if something affects anyone other than the player character, a roll is needed. But, I could be wrong and the ability could actually be so completely busted that someone will be ignored even as they stand at a computer panel as they shut off alarms in front of armed guards. That is also bad design.