Gunslinger Knights Upgraded—and Another Big Announcement!
7 months ago
– Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 07:34:01 PM
Hello, backers—
Once again you have blown us away, and knocked out another stretch goal. The upgrade to Gunslinger Knights is now unlocked, so the book is getting bigger and the setting even richer—plus we’re adding a poster map!
We unlocked that goal in just over a day, so as we head into the fast-paced final day, there’s definitely time for at least one more. We think you’ll really like the next one. But first we have another announcement.
We think not, but the best is still yet to come…
Announcing CypherCon!
We’re really excited to announce, in conjunction with our good friends at Cypher Unlimited, CypherCon 1.0: Into the Cypherverse!
This online gaming convention will run Friday, September 6th through Sunday, September 8th, and feature dozens and dozens of games. (It will also kick off with a special AMA with the MCG team on Thursday, September 5th.) It will be run through the Cypher Unlimited Discord—a vibrant and welcoming community of Cypher System fans.
This is a great chance to play in games run by some of the best Cypher System GMs in the world, and to sample the enormous breadth of the Cypher System. Look for a roster of diverse and imaginative games to be posted in the next couple of months. (If you’re a GM and want to take part, inquire on the CU Discord.)
Now: Let’s Upgrade EVERYTHING!
We’ve unlocked some really great stretch goals throughout this campaign, allowing us to expand and grow the three central books to create the rich, immersive experience we want them to bring to your game table. But as we close in on the final day, we want to go out with a bang. Let’s do it all!
Our next stretch goal will upgrade just about everything. Yes, everything! We’d like to:
- Increase the page count of Neon Rain
- Do the same for High Noon at Midnight
- Make the poster map in Gunslinger Knights double-sided
- Add a couple more maps to the handful already in the Hacker’s Matrix
- Add more images to the Otherworldly Sites Pack
- Give the Midnight Deck a slightly more premium feel, with foil stamping for the box
- Improve the already-upgraded GM Campaign Journal, with more more genre labels, so it’s a great fit for virtually any game you run
Wow, that’s a lot. But you’ve blown us away with this campaign, and we really want to take this chance to make the most of these products.
We’ll unlock this goal at 2,400 backers. Can we do it? It took a little over 24 hours to add the last 200 backers, so it’s definitely within reach. But remember:
IT’LL TAKE YOUR HELP. Even with all our best efforts, MCG can't reach the tens of thousands of gamers out there who might be interested in Knights of Dust and Neon. When you, the backers, mobilize, your combined reach dwarfs ours. Share this campaign, and help those gamers find it. (There are some tips and images you can use in
the last update.) Let’s unlock these upgrades!
Thanks so much for your support!
—Team MCG
How about an early stretch goal?
7 months ago
– Thu, Apr 11, 2024 at 06:04:23 PM
Hi, backers—
One of the truisms of running a crowdfunding campaign is that the stretch goals often hit at inconvenient times. When you’re about to go into a meeting, or that day you’re out of the office—or you close in on one just as you’re ready to go to bed, so you wait, and then it takes a bit longer, and . . .
That’s the direction we’re heading toward tonight: we’re gonna hit our latest goal, but probably not until midnight or so. And I’ve got a big day ahead of me, with all the work of bringing the campaign to a close.
So I have a deal for you: if you can get us to, say, 2,180 backers by 10:00 PM CDT (that’s 11 on the east coast, and 8 on the west), we’ll release the next stretch goal early—right then. It’s a win-win-win: you get an early goal, we announce the next one (it’s a biggie—plus we have another major announcement to go with it), and I get to go to bed on time!
We only need about 20 backers to make this happen. If you can take a minute to jump into social media and give the campaign a few shout-outs, we can easily do it.
Here are some tips to make it easy. Feel free to share anything we've put up on
Facebook,
Instagram, or
Bluesky. Or share one of the images here—along with a link to the campaign (use mymcg.info/kodan-sosh) and maybe a sentence about why you like the Cypher System.
20 or so new backers will do it—thanks for helping out!
The Hacker’s Matrix Is Funded! Plus a Big Announcement (read to the end)!
7 months ago
– Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 05:28:09 PM
Hello, backers—
You’ve done it: with your help, the Hacker’s Matrix is unlocked! It’s going to be a very cool addition to your Neon Rain experience—really putting a cyberpunk feel in your cyberpunk games. We’re super excited to be making this unique game aid!
We’d like to return to Gunslinger Knights for our next stretch goal. But before we get to that…
Have You Checked Out the Character Builder Yet?
You can build, store, advance, maintain, edit, and even share Cypher System characters online with this free resource. There are multiple modes for creating characters—the Guided mode, in particular, is super fast and easy. It takes you through the process step-by-step. You can build a character in literally three or four minutes. (It’s pretty self-explanatory, but you can learn more about how it works
with this article.)
You can make as many characters as you like. When you’re ready to play, generate a form-fillable PDF character sheet, export your character to a VTT, or simply play right from the Character Builder.
The Character Builder includes all the character options from the Cypher System Rulebook plus all of our existing genre books—The Stars Are Fire, Godforsaken, We Are All Mad Here, Stay Alive!, Claim the Sky, and even Rust and Redemption (which was recently released!). So you have thousands of character options from a huge range of genres. Build virtually any character you can imagine!
Now Let’s Upgrade Gunslinger Knights
We’ve added some exciting stuff to the books this campaign funds—the Midnight Deck, the Otherworldly Sites Pack, and now the Hacker’s Matrix, not to mention the zines. We’re really pleased to be able to turn these titles into such expanded and immersive experiences.
But let’s not forget the books themselves!
We’d like to return our attention to Gunslinger Knights—this is turning out to be such a unique and cool campaign setting. Let’s make it bigger! For our next goal we’ll upsize the book with approximately 32 pages of additional content. Plus we’ll add a poster map.
We’ll unlock this goal at 2,200 backers. Things move quickly in the final week, so with your help we can unlock this goal quickly and move on to even more!
Which brings us to this reminder: All of our stretch goals are based on the number of backers. We’re going all-out to reach the thousands and thousands of gamers out there who don’t know about this campaign—or perhaps don’t even know about the Cypher System. But we can’t reach them on our own—we need your help. Spread the word, and let’s have a gangbusters final week!
Thanks so much for your support!
—Team MCG
Oh, One More Thing…
We have a small announcement to make about our next crowdfunding campaign, coming this summer. It relates to a standalone Cypher System RPG we recently published.
Have you felt them, that great shuddering of restless Things coming awake? Calling your name in the darkness? Will you follow them down and serve their masters? No? What if it’s the only way to protect the ones you love? What then? What will you sacrifice in the name of love and family?
Only you can answer that.
But first, you must go down deep. Deeper. Deeper still.
There. Now we will see what are you truly made of.The
Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game is an eldritch horror game set in an alternate Appalachia. Based on the popular podcast of the same name, the game takes players deep into the hills and hollers and down into the mountains where ancient beings of immeasurable darkness and unknowable purpose have begun to stir.
Old Gods of Appalachia: Deeper Still, coming this summer, brings new adventures, character options, and other content to the hit tabletop roleplaying game.
Sign up to be notified when the campaign launches!
The GM Journal is Upgraded—Now Let’s Dive into Cyberspace!
8 months ago
– Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 01:36:53 PM
Hello, backers—
We have some great stretch goal news for you. But first a reminder: we’re about to head into the final week of this campaign. All of our stretch goals are based on the number of backers. (For example, we just unlocked a goal at 1,800 backers.) Reaching new backers is how we hit stretch goals—and we can’t do it on our own. Your effort to spread the word this morning really paid off in hitting this goal quickly today. Keep it up!
Now let’s talk about those goals:
The GM Campaign Journal Has Been Upgraded!
We’re really excited about the GM Campaign Journal. We made a truly beautiful—and very useful—journal for the
Old Gods of Appalachia Roleplaying Game, and there’s a similarly awesome one in the works for
The Magnus Archives Roleplaying Game. We can’t wait to bring that same luxuriant utility to any Cypher System campaign. In fact, we hope to make it
even better.
And now we’re going to! Thanks to you, we’ve upgraded the GM Campaign Journal with improved features, including a label set that lets you customize your journal. If you’re not backing at a level that includes the GM Campaign Journal, you might consider an upgrade. And if you run a lot of Cypher System games, like we do, you might want more than one—it’s available as an add-on!
Time to Delve into the Matrix
Earlier in this campaign we funded the Midnight Deck and Otherworldly Sites Pack—unique and immersive extras for
High Noon at Midnight and
Gunslinger Knights, respectively.
Let’s make something really neat for
Neon Rain. We’re calling this next stretch goal the Hacker’s Matrix.
Delving into the net is a staple of the cyberpunk genre. Hackers and runners dive into a virtual world, find their way to the subnets and nodes of nefarious corps, criminal groups, and shady government agencies, and confront obstacles, AIs, virtual traps, and other dangers as they seek out information, install their own worms or trojans, or simply tear the whole thing down.
The Hacker’s Matrix lets the player get a taste of this virtual universe. It’s effectively a player-facing map, but instead of being an illustration on paper, it’s a virtual 3D space the player explores as their character navigates the net.
How does it work? When the PC delves into cyberspace, the GM opens the Hacker’s Matrix on a laptop or tablet (or sends the link to the player). The player navigates through an evocative, high-tech 3D space, just like they might use a city map in a game book, telling the GM where they go. Different sites in the Matrix may have encounters, obstacles, characters, or AIs to interact with. Just like with that city map, where you’d play through anything you encounter at the night club or the gang safehouse, you’ll play through the things you find in the Matrix just like any other RPG encounter.
The Hacker’s Matrix will include several different maps, of the sorts of virtual locales cyberpunk PCs tend to dig into: corporate mainframes, terrorist subnets, AI nodes, and so on. It will be web-based, so you don’t need anything special to use it—just a tablet or computer with a web browser.
We can’t wait to use this in our games—it’s really going to make cyberpunk feel like cyberpunk! When we hit 2,000 backers, we’ll unlock the Hacker’s Matrix.
As we said above, your effort in spreading the word really helps bring in those new backers—it worked today in getting us to this goal so quickly! But there are still thousands and thousands of gamers out there who don’t know about this campaign. Let’s reach them, unlock the Hacker’s Matrix, and head into the exciting final week shooting for even more stretch goals!
Thanks so much for your support!
—Team MCG
Just 25 Backers--Let's Make It Happen!
8 months ago
– Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 10:06:55 AM
Happy Friday, everyone!
We are just about 25 backers away from hitting our next stretch goal. That's an eminently finite and achievable number--we could absolutely unlock that in the next few hours. IF YOU HELP!
If you have a moment to share a word about this campaign, that would help us hit the goal quickly. Don't know what to say? Feel free to share anything we've put up on Facebook, Instagram, or Bluesky. Or share one of the images here--along with a link to the campaign (
use mymcg.info/kodan-sosh) and maybe a sentence about why you like the Cypher System.
I have a rough draft of the update (which includes news about the next, really cool stretch goal) ready to go. I'd sure love to post it before knocking off for the weekend!
Here are some sharable images, if you'd like to help spread the word!