What’s Different?

I wanted to really lean into what makes a piece of media, in this case a TTRPG, have that sense of dread and horror. For me, that’s putting normal people in extraordinary situations without giving them extraordinary resources to overcome it. This ethos is heavily influenced by the video game “Amnesia: The Dark Descent.”

For that reason I am making some drastic changes to the base idea of Cypher System. Which are as follows.

• Starting pools have generally been cut by 3 across Types.
• Starting additional pool points cut by 3.
• New Types.
• New Abilities.
• While standard Effort rules still apply (i.e. you may spend a number of levels of Effort per action equal to your Effort), it is also capped to Tier + 1 per scene. Meaning that a Tier 1 character may only use their Effort twice in a given scene.
• Any NPC with the Monster descriptor cannot be killed, only Dazed and/or Trapped.
• You’ll find that most of the outright combat abilities have been removed or reduced in effectiveness.
• A new PANIC! level has been added to the PCs and Group.