With all of the attention to the Cypher System, I figured it was a good time to illustrate how easy it is to develop for this system. One of the design goals for the system was to make the task of GMing easier - in a specific manner. The system wants to make it easy for you to create anything you can imagine. The system wants the GM to be thinking about story - not about whether a new monster should get a penalty on dex saves due to its size.
To illustrate the ease of developing for the CS, I will start with a seed idea and show how quickly one can move from inspiration to game-ready material.
Last week I watched the most recent Jurassic Park movie - so I will use that as a starting point. Imagine that after watching that movie you decide that you want your players to face dinosaurs in the next adventure. Let us also take the "hard case" and say that you don't want to use any existing creatures. You want to develop the dinosaurs from scratch. Here is what it can look like.
The big finale will be the T. Rex, obviously. To be a big finale creature, I want it to have a high difficulty rating. Lets make it is a 7. Just deciding on this number does a lot of the work for you. This gives you how hard it is to hit, how hard it is to dodge, how much damage it does, its resistance to bad puns... pretty much everything. But, you can build from there.
I want to give the creature an area attack. I will make that some sort of epic stomp. I can decide that the stomp affects all in long range and forces a level 6 speed defense roll to avoid falling prone.
I can give it a special defensive power as well. It has thick reptilian hide -- lets give it an armor value of 2.
This is all you need for a boss monster who runs around, stomps to knock people over, and then bites them. You can even give the creature a bonus by saying that the task of dodging the bite is hindered if one if prone.
You could write something like this in your notes -- Trex (lvl 7/ 21 hp), bite (lvl 7) dodge hindered if victim prone, stomp attack forces speed defense or prone (lvl 6), armor 2
That gives you all you need to run a T rex -- though that is a simple example.
Now lets make it a scary fantasy T rex based on a dragon.
We keep the same base as above and just add some more attack options. We can add a ranged breath weapon. If we want this to be the most devastating attack, we can push it up to level 8. If we want this to be a back-up ranged attack but not the most dangeous part of the monster, we can drop it to 6. We can keep adding in new options (tail swipe, spell-like effects, etc.). We just define what they are verbally and assign it a level.
fire breath (lvl6, range long)
It is worth emphasizing that you probably only need to define 2-4 abilities, at most. There is no reason to develop many, many abilities and then never use them in the actual game. You make the monsters as complex or as simple as you want. Everything is tied together with levels.
Also, even your biggest monsters can get blown up by a cypher at just about any time. So, don't assume that any particular encounter is going to be difficult.The difficulty may depend on which cyphers the party has -- probably even more than the tier of the characters).
This is how many monster write-ups in MCG products are just a couple of sentences in the margins of the adventure. The core text is the story. The math of designing obstacles (monsters, traps, etc.) is kept simple so that the GM can keep the focus on the story.
Want to create more dinosaurs? A good guide would be to have a dinosaur for three categories of encounters: (1) easy, (2) challenging, (3) capstone/finale.
I will illustrate that next if anyone seems interested.
