Monte Cook's 'The Strange' Roleplaying Game - aka FanFiction for Grown Ups

by Leanne Willaims
They say you've not really cut your teeth as a roleplayer until you've tried one of the D&D spinoffs, but I have to admit that my experience was less than perfect.


Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the game: I dedicated over 2 years of my life to playing the Pathfinder: Kingmaker campaign. I was an archaeologist bard who became the queen of multiple kingdoms; a cool halfling Indiana Jones. That I loved.... but when it came to traversing around grids and bickering over whether a diagonal counted as one or two steps , I started to wonder what was the point. I disliked that you needed a filofax and about an hour's homework to choose the correct spells for a mission, I struggled with the convolution of puzzling out the stats for a grapple, I hated the maths involved and I felt ashamed to let the side down by simply refusing to try to memorise the majority of it, or that my eyes wandered to my phone so often in the long, long, long fights.

It seemed that the priority was the system, rather than the story.

Though playing with figures is fun...

Enter Monte Cook's 'The Strange'...

And I have to admit that I'm a little bit in love.

The Strange is a variant of Monte Cook's 'Cypher System', that is most famously used in the Numinera series. In The Strange you play as a team of agents from a mysterious organisation known as the Estate (The Estate Agents. Yes, I know, I know.) Set on modern day Earth, the Estate works tirelessly to contain the dangerous side effects of 'recursions', which are pocket dimensions that manifested on the planet as expressions of creative energy. These recursions obey their own laws of reality, fuelled by the fictional work that created them, and are connected to Earth via a dark energy network beneath the normal matter of the universe. This chaotic, dark network is called The Strange. 

The key to the Strange is that at it's core it has a Men in Black / Stargate vibe, where your team stands up against the unknown in order to protect Earth and/or goes off to explore these pocket dimensions yourself. Each dimension is based off a piece of fiction and its size and power is largely determined by the collective strength of imagination that the particular recursion is based off. You could have, for example, a hefty dimension based on the Harry potter universe, or a tiny dimension based on a player's own original stories.

Within these recursions there are some people known as 'the quickened', and these are characters that have the ability to understand their own sentience and to travel recursions. The important part is that whenever they travel, they shift too to match their environment, aware of their own special place in it yet also bound by its laws. Think of it as a lot like 'Kingdom Hearts', with Sora becoming a lion in The Lion King land (and Goofy becoming a  goddamn abomination.)

"Gworsh!"

So Far, so Fanfiction. But Why should I Play It?

For me, the most important elements of the cypher system and The Strange is the focus on flexibility and story. There is no rules-lawyering, instead the focus is on finding ways for the players to tell their stories and for the GM to facilitate this and, at times, royally screw them over.

Character creation

What characters you pick are completely up to you, but they must fit into one of three archetypes in order to produce a balanced team. These are the Vector (fighter/muscle), Paradox (sourcerer/mad scientist), or Spinner (charisma/talking focused).

You then choose  a 'descriptor' which flavours everything your character does. Finally you choose the 'focus' which is a character trait that informs skills and special abilities and changes to fit whatever recursion you're on. A hacker in a modern day recursion might become a technomancer in a sci fi recursion and then might become a straight up wizard in a fantasy recursion.

In my game I chose to play as one of my original characters from a story I've been failing to write since I was 12. He was on Earth and working for the Estate after having 'translated' from a teeny tiny recursion. He was a vector, because he likes to shoot things. His descriptor was 'resilient/tough' due to his having lost an eye. His original focus on his homeworld was 'moves like a cat' due to the primate agility of his (alien) race. In a fantasy recursion this shifted to 'murders' for cloak and dagger, in sci fi  it was 'fires a blaster' and so on. Other characters on my team were a literal sentient spaceship who could maths her way out of any problem (Paradox) and a Timelord from a player's old Doctor Who RPG, who could talk his way out of anything (spinner).

You can bet your sweet arse that there's a Lovecraftian recursion.

Actions and Combat

All actions make used of three 'pools' of resources: might, speed and intellect and you have a lot of flexibility in how you use them. You also have skills, which can improve as you level up from inept to standard to trained to specialised. The difficulty of each action is decided by the GM (or enemy level) and you roll against it, with each skill level reducing the difficulty by one level. Typically might is used for melee and heavy lifting, speed used for long-range attacks, dodging and running, and intellect for anything involving thinking or charisma. But what makes the cyper system special is the ability to put effort into what you do. By deliberately pulling 'effort' out of your pools, you can make a task easier, but do this too often and you will exhaust yourself as effectively as if you'd been sat there punching yourself in the face. This especially comes into play in combat, where damage can be dealt to any pool, so you may find yourself less able to fight due to your pool being depleted by enemy damage, pushing you to exhaustion faster as you also deplete your own pool too in order to heighten your chances of landing a hit. Judge it wrong and you quickly feel the pressure.

For me, I haven't come across a system that so effectively manages to keep combat short and snappy while also delivering a real sense of peril. Like all the best difficulty curves, your failures feel 'fair' because they are based off decisions that you made. Yes you can roll poorly, but this is mitigated by your effort. Underestimate your enemy and you'll have hell to pay even with a good roll. Refuse to pace yourself and you could find yourself exhausted and vulnerable before even a weak enemy or seemingly simple task. It just feels very human and very fair.

That is, until the GM intrusions appear....

Oh God WHY?!?!

GM Intrusions

Now where would a good roleplaying game be without punishing you for rolling a 1?

I have to admit I love GM intrusions. Put enough effort into a task you're already skilled in and you can make it 'routine' - which means that you don't have to roll at all. But you know, I never do that. I always leave at least lv1 difficulty just to have the chance to roll a 1 because it's always hilarious. But what's more, in the Strange it's rewarding.

In each session the GM is given one (or two)  GM intrusions. This means that, in exchange for giving you 2 experience points, they can jump in and take over the story for an action. This is very useful for a GM who needs to get the players back on track if they wander too far off the plot, but is also good for just screwing with them for hilarious results. The afflicted player gets to keep one experience point and then gives the other to the partner of his or her choosing.

I love it. It's a fab way to keep the GM entertained and give them some control and to inject a little unpredictability into the game while rewarding the player. But roll a 1 and you get a 'free' GM intrusion. They don't have to pay you diddly-squat and they get to royally screw up your day.

My favourite GM intrusion from our game was when -in a mad-scientist sci fi recursion known as Ruk- my character went to a cosmetic surgeon to get his teeth shaped into fangs to allow the team to infiltrate the medical facility. One free GM intrusion later and my character's head had been sewn onto the body of a dog for a day. Thank you, kind sir. 

Brave souls can also traverse the Strange itself.

Are There Any Cons to The Strange?

Unfortunately, as with any roleplaying system, there are a few points to the rules system that might not gel with you. For me, there was always a little tedium in filling out new sub-character-sheets every time you changed your focus. While some foci are draggable (for example 'solves mysteries' applies to almost every recursion), many aren't, which means that you need to re-fill out new parts of your stats with each recursion you travel to. In a fully fledged game that will be quite a few.

Another element that I think could be trimmed is are the cyphers themselves. Cyphers are, effectively, special items that are burped out by the Strange itself and so can work across recursions. You might have something like a curative or special ammo or a literal cure for cancer. While in the plot these cyphers are often hunted and exploited, in real terms they don't serve a lot of purpose and seem to be leftovers from the Numinera system that The Strange was based off. The players in my group generally got a little bored of them: it's ok to have super-powered items every now and again, but if you get into the story and use your pools and skills correctly you really don't need them, and they seem a little out of place.

It's that old cliche: "The only limit is your imagination."

So What's the Final Verdict?

You absolutely should give The Strange, or the Cypher system, a go if you're looking for a flexible story based rules system that gives you the breathing space to have some fun.

I used to love the rather broken rules of  the 2002 Vampire the Masquerade ruleset because of the fun it allowed you to have, fun that Pathfinder could never replicate. The Strange manages to scratch that itch while being significantly more balanced. It allows the GM to become an interactive member of the group, rather than just a storyteller, and the way the combat and standard actions operate along the same rules really makes the player feel in control and valued.

Imagination really is the limit.

I'm so glad I found it, and would give it a solid 9/10.

Where the heck do I get it?

 You can find all you need at Monte Cook's Games. Also keep an eye out on DrivethruRPG for the PDF bundles.