I am developing a somewhat unexpected love of the Cypher System for reasons that tend to push against my usual roleplaying game preferences. The ongoing experiment with Ariadne’s Thread, while very much a lumbering effort on my part, has proven very enjoyable and intriguing.

The premise was to mash-up 1977 Traveller with the vibe of Alien and the Firefly TV series. Powering it all with Cypher gives it a somewhat more pulpy and cinematic feel than I usually aim for, but it also makes it super-easy to improvise and drives me more into the depths of emergent play.

Seven sessions in, the game is still planet-bound on Cradle Down (think: Scottish Highlanders, farming world, low-tech) but the group have been uncovering an ancient pre-Night biotech lab complete with nanotech and augmented humanoid super-soldiers. They are on the brink of getting offworld.

I’ve been following the Jamison model of “Gamemastering” supported by the Cypher rules and, well… it’s been a blast! Prepping session-by-session, allowing the details to emerge from a combination of setting up situations, allowing myself latitude to improvise wildly, and to see how the player’s activities (plus the game’s mechanisms) feed the action… it’s all good fun.

I am still a little too heavy-handed at times with my GM Intrusions, I feel, but overall the way in which you can ramp up the danger or complicate a situation while at the same time rewarding the players with XP is fun. Add in the amount of 1s that the guys have rolled on 1d20 and it’s been wild. I am doing better at handing out Cyphers too.

There are lots of reasons you might suggest, on a simple read of the rules, that Cypher should not work. In play, though, it works a treat! Dropping in a quick GM Intrusion today featuring some Intimidator-type canine animals tearing into the crew’s parked Air/Raft was quick to set-up. Watching them scramble to fight off the intruders and drive them back was a quick half-hour hoot.

I don’t usually aim for wild-eyed action play. For this group and this Otherverse, it’s been lots of fun and relatively low-prep and stress… at least for me. There’s something very satisfying about being able to grab a few details and ideas which then get riffed out at the table. It does feel like the Traveller+Alien+Firefly premise… shaken, stirred, and given my own slant.

The game doesn’t entirely support in-character as-character the way I usually prefer (there’s a fair bit of resource management that knocks you into game speak) but, overall, it might be worth the trade-off for this particular vibe. Well, I am having fun anyhow.

Game on!