Having spent the week delving into the Cypher System Starter Set, it’s probably worth doing a quick review and suggest that while it’s a fairly good product overall there are some seriously disappointing elements in that box.

Positives

The Starter Set provides a much-needed on-ramp to the Cypher System which the intimidatingly complete Cypher System Rulebook makes difficult for the neophyte. For this reason alone, it’s worth the $30 cover price to get the Starter Set. If you’re curious about the system, this is a way in at half the cost of the main rulebook.

The Starter Set gives you five fantasy-genre characters ready to go and five SF-genre versions of those same characters if you don’t fancy fantasy. This is a boon for the newbie player and GM alike, meaning you don’t need to spend time on character creation (which is time-consuming with this system).

There are character creation rules for First-tier characters and a natty section on how to learn to build characters by tweaking the pre-gens. This is a clever aspect of the Starter Set that I admire and would like to see for other fairly crunchy character-build systems because it helps the neophyte learn how each decision matters.

There are two adventures in the box – one fantasy-genre and another SF-genre – which are adequate. They are actually not the most inspiring scenarios but they do give worked examples of how to build a Cypher-powered adventure. They give the set some reusability too, as you can run it at least twice with the same group.

You get dice and XP Cards, plus some GM Intrusion Cards in the box. These are useful for the neophyte and add the appeal of tactile elements. Passing XP to the players with the cards is much better than just saying “Here’s two XP”. The Intrusion Cards provide examples for the GM to learn what that term means.

Niggles

I’ll not harp on too much on the negative elements but here’s a list of the individually small niggles that took the gloss off the Starter Set. In no particular order:

• The box is thin card with a folding flap at each end, which feels cheap and flimsy.
• There’s only 1x d20 and 1xd6 for your proposed five players.
• There’s only one copy of the Cheat Sheet to be shared by up to six people.
• The large poster map has a location map that doesn’t feature in either adventure: it feels like the SF adventure replaces a pulled alternative that used that weird second map.
• The maps on the poster have location numbers printed on them but the GM’s Book says they are printed without numbers.
• The ten pre-gens are really five pre-gens done twice: same names and details except for equipment and cyphers.
• The SF adventure doesn’t have enough clues for the investigation and all of them are buried deep in two-column text.
• There’s no station map for the SF adventure, only a dungeon map for the fantasy one.
• You can’t get .PDFs of the booklets, characters, or maps (as far as I can tell) – so no playing online without a scanner for the sheets.
• The link in the Player’s Book to an article on the basics of RPGs is a dead link to the Monte Cook website.

Overall, it’s good value and there’s much to recommend the Starter Set but with caveats. I think it does a good job of cutting down the signal noise when you’re learning to play. This makes it a good choice if you are intimidated by big rulebooks or (like me) easily paralysed by too many decisions.

Game on!