What Is Different

Read this before your first session. These five things change how you should play, and none of them are how Cypher runs by default.

Nothing resets

Your pools, wounds, XP, gear, and artifacts carry over between sessions. A character who ended last session at 2/8 Might starts there when someone next picks them up. There is no fresh slate at the top of the night.

Recoveries work exactly as the rulebook says — in the fiction. If you want a character healthy, someone has to spend in-world time resting, and the world keeps moving while they do. Ten hours of rest is ten hours a rival also gets to use.

Pools are the real damage

Wounds heal. Pools are what wear you down. Your pools are what let you push — Effort, rallying, buying down a difficulty. A depleted character can still act; they just cannot push. Most deaths trace back to having nothing left when it mattered.

You will see it coming. That is deliberate.

Death is real

Cypher's wound track is a death spiral, and nothing here softens it. There is no plot armor and no rescue the fiction did not earn.

A death is not a wasted character. The assassin who dies failing to kill a corporate officer has permanently changed the world — that officer is alive, alerted, and harder to reach. The next player inherits that. You did not lose a character; the world gained a fact.

Cyphers and XP are cards

Cyphers are dealt from a physical deck at the start of each session, up to your cypher limit. They do not carry over — use them or lose them.

XP is banked on your character and dealt out as cards at session start. Spending means handing a card back: a reroll, a reaction to a GM intrusion, a player intrusion. When the GM intrudes you get two cards — keep one, give one to another player.

You can change the world

Player intrusions let you spend 1 XP to alter something in the scene — a contact who owes you a favor, a maintenance hatch nobody mapped, one more use out of a cypher. This is not a loophole; it is the point. You are a co-author of this setting, not a visitor.

Anything bigger than that has a bigger price. 1 XP is the rate for a small, local change. Reach further and the GM may ask for 2 XP or more — quoted up front, before you spend anything.

The GM is the final arbiter, and a refused intrusion costs you nothing.

Homebrew Rules — the mechanical detail behind these: the card procedures, minor and major effects, session start
The Sentience Scale — how the setting rates machine minds
Characters — the shared pool these rules act on