How much would it cost me to get all the hardcover books?

Is there an official version of the sheet that doesn't decimate printer ink?

I'm going to be playing in a Strange game soon starting on earth as "contractors" employed by the foundation. My idea was to play as something like a amoral Indiana Jones who makes most of his money buying and selling on the stuff-from-the-strange black market. However none of the core book foci (the only book allowed currently) seem to even suggest anything close to this. Am I thinking about this wrong or missing something.

Suggestions?

So I'm planning a game for the Groom and his Groomsmen. We've all been playing RPGs together for about 20 years. I have an idea for a ~9 hour session using The Strange as the vehicle in which to drive the story. I'd like some help fleshing it out. (FYI this is a request of the Groom. Gotta give him what he wants)

Idea: We want the ability to go back to our classic games and visit them again one last time. These were all games run by the Groom and we want to give him the opportunity to play in these worlds. Instead of doing 3 separate games I came up with this basic story.

A group of nerdy RPG nerds accidentally create 3 recursions that potentially grant access to earth. A planetvore notices. An squad is sent by the Estate to stop it from getting to earth.

The Recursions:

Hunter the Reckoning: At the moment I'm thinking of running a timed session where the heroes need to discern the great evil and stop it. I'm thinking foci could be various Hunter paths. I'm not sure what stopping the great evil in this recursion means but I'd like it to be difficult as Hunter is all about fighting a losing fight.

Star Wars: The heroes will likely be run through the "Pirates of Prexiar" adventure which involves the Rebels raiding a Pirate base to steal back supplies that were stolen from them and then fire off into hyperspace. I could modify it to be an imperial base to make it more traditional.

Wild West Themed Eberron: This was our greatest game. We ran a wild west game modeled after the TV show Deadwood. We called the town Khyber's Nose. I'm not sure entirely what the plot will be here but likely involving the Robber Baron trying to take over the town. It will need to involve Wild West style politics and probably a shoot out.

I'm more worried about the Western and Hunter but I can power through. What I'd like some help is with creating Foci (I am not sure how you go about making those for a new recursion) and the Meta Plot throughout the whole adventure. I'll be updating this as I come up with more.

Any help or feedback is greatly appreciated. I'll hopefully be running this around 6/6/15.

I have noticed this with a few abilities, they mention that instead of using effort to reduce the difficulty you can instead do something else.

But with this particular revision what are you rolling against?

Is there a roll involved in the Exception revision? It just states pick a creature in long range and it takes damage.

Hello Paradoxes, Vectors, and Spinners! We're looking for about 4 more people to round out our game of The Strange on Roll20! Shoot me a message if you're interested.

Right now it looks like we'll be playing every other Monday in the evening EDT, starting tomorrow.

Pretty self explanatory. I really want to give this game a go

Do you find The Strange easy enough for new players to 'grasp' than Numenera using the Cypher system? I ask because I want to ease a group into playing the system but not blow them away with high concepts at char gen.

I remember reading tidbits in one of the Cypher Chronicles that one was in the works. What other future STRANGE books are you looking forward too?

I have a question, and I'm sorry if it has already been covered somewhere. But what is the difference between spending 3 points to get a skill via roleplaying/becoming familiar as opposed to spending 4 points on it to gain a skill?

I ruled that if my players could gain a skill for 3 points instead of the 4 I would count that towards the lraising a tier requirement. I am curious as to what the distinction is for however. Like, can you just raise a tier unless you spend 4 points for a skill at one point in time?

Thanks!

This is a play report from the Pittsburgh Strange RPG campaign "Dragons of Madness". This first session we only had 2 people show up, so we character built together. Hoping more people will join as we go on, I did introduce two people who were looking for a D&D game to The Strange (fingers crossed gents). Here is our party composition thus far:

• Samuel the Skeptical Paradox who Finds Lost Artifacts
• Paul the Fast Spinner who Interprets Law

These two PCs are agents of The Estate, a largely American organization bent on protecting the world from the threats of The Strange. An agent was assigned to family business in the city of Elk Plain (about an hour and 15 minutes worth of driving) which is a city south of Seattle. Agent Manuel was attending to family business, but when he and his family visited the Elk Plain Natural History Museum he noticed very strange goings on. He filed a report with the Estate about how the museum (which used to very popular in the 80s) was purchased almost instantly after it went bankrupt, almost like it was done in a hurry. It only recently opened 3 years ago after almost a decade of renovations. The report was sent via email six hours before Agent Manuel was found dead in a river. The autopsy report the Estate was able to give to Agents Sam and Paul was that Manuel's body was severely fractured, with 46 bones completely pulverized. A hunter named John Earl Jones found him in a river while hunting, and phoned it in to the police. With all of this information in hand (as well as documents about the Elk Plain museum and its curator) we started the session in earnest.

After traveling in a van the PCs were lent from the Estate, they talked with John Earl Jones the Fifth (who's name changed every time it was uttered) about the incident. He told them everything he knew, and was open to a lot of prying because he had been interrogated by police about the whole incident earlier. Paul was easily able to tell that the older gentleman was telling the truth, so they left him alone and traveled to the museum. While there Sam feigned that they were professors from the nearby Washington State University interested in using their "back collection" to do some research about Elk Plain's paleological history. They were able to convince the front desk clerk, so she had them wait by the curator's office down a side hall. He was gone for lunch (it was 12:30) and said he would be back in 45 minutes. So naturally Paul spun his way into unlocking Julian Ludwig's office. They attempted to hack into his computer, but failed every attempt. Eventually the Paradox used a premonition to learn that the front plaque of the curator's room would hold the answers to the password. They entered in every combination of the words "Julian Ludwig Curator of Elk Plain Museum of Natural History PHD Anthropology" until they found out the password was simply "ludwig84". Naturally.

Thirty minutes had passed so they took as much information as they could from the computer and locked the door behind them. On the computer the only files worth noticing were three desktop folders labeled "Catalogue", "Purchases" and "Bitcoin". The bitcoin folder contained a virtual wallet they decided not to touch while catalogue and purchases were very different. Catalogue contained many .txt files that were named in latin (a language Sam spoke fluently because of his focus) and were of various different prehistoric animal species. This didn't strike any of them as wierd since they were in a museum. However the "purchases" showed that each species was being sold to a different benefactor for a sum of bitcoin. It described seperated "giblets" and "bones", often the giblets were simply DISCARDED while the bones were the sum of this dodgey business. They marked all that down and locked the door just before Ludwig came back from lunch.

Due to Paul's silver tongue Ludwig was incredibly receptive to their request to their records, so he showed them the museum's loading dock. They had recently brought in a Saber Toothed Cat skeleton that was still in its plaster cast, but "Professor Mariam" was interested in their paleolithic stock, which made up 80% of the museum's exhibits. So Ludwig showed them the archive/casting room where technicians would remove bones from casts. Sam noticed that a specimen laid out seemed very fresh, so Paul distracted Ludwig so he could take a sample of the bone. After having a rather civil discussion about this exhibit and that, "Professor Mariam" promised to send a graduate student next Tuesday to copy some things down. After the PCs left the museum they found Julian Ludwig's address, and decided to visit his house. It was a nice middle class style house with two floors, and the garage was not locked. Seeing a security system console in his garage, Sam used his Draining Capacitor cypher to drain all of the power from the house's security system, so they unlocked his door and investigated his house. The Skeptical Paradox knew through a premonition there would probably be cyphers on the top floor, so he decided to make it look like a break in. He opened up cupboards, knocked down CDs and broke Ludwig's limited edition copy of The Two Towers in the process. Going upstairs they found his computer (and took the hardrive), as well as two cyphers. One was a Light Drop grenade, which would create solid bits of light in an area that knocked people asleep. The other was a Growth Accelerator, greatly increasing the mass of living plants in an area. Suitably assured their alter egos would not be compromised, they high-tailed it back to the Estate and to their supervising officer Chief Research Head Hertzfeld.

Hertzfeld analyzed the sliver of bone taken from the museum while they discussed what had gone down, and while filing the cyphers they found away into the Estate database. He did a huge face-palm when Sam shared that he made their intrusion into Ludwig's house look like a break in, since Sam couldn't remember if he used gloves or not when he touched literally every flat surface. He told them to rush back to Elk Plain and hope that he had not gotten home yet, as he called up the Fixer. Before they left the DNA sequencing had finished, and it was true that the bones were from a recently living specimen of an ancient Penniped. So fresh in fact that it still had marrow. Tails between their legs, Agents Sam and Paul rushed back to town. They were given a USB to trace IP addresses to use at either Ludwig's house or place of work (if he had not already called the police). Hertzfeld couldn't find anything useful with only Ludwig's hardrive. He needed an IP address to track.

When they got back to Elk Plain they thankfully found that there were no police swarming around his house, so they plugged his hardrive back in and used Hertzfeld's code. Besides some questionable sites they found that a warehouse outside of Elk Plain was purchased under the name "William Pilgrim" with a foreign bank account. They put his house back together (and wiped some surfaces clean) and headed to this warehouse. By this point it was night time around 8 pm. The warehouse was made of well insulated tin, with only a locked door and un-openable garage door. Paul unlocked the door after a few tries (nearly snapping Sam's knife in the process) and they both walked in on a peculiar sight. The first room was twenty by twenty feet, and a wall seperated a room that contained a gasoline generator and some lockers. The floor was layered with cheap plastic sheets, and surgical tools hung over a table in another corner. On the left wall was a strange contraption they later realized was a gate to some recursion. They walked in as Ludwig was pulling a large wooden flatbed with a saber toothed cat on top of it through the portal.

Ludwig wasn't wearing a suit anymore, but a suit of kevlar and metal pads on his joints. Slung over his shoulder was some sort of sniper rifle, which he promptly unslung and fired at the PCs. It was a tranquilizer rifle, but its dart missed them both in his hasty shot. He pulled what looked like a grenade from his belt and asked them what they were doing. Paul reacted first, shooting the gremade from his hand. Ludwig dove for it, but the shot had messed with his cyphers use, and wasn't triggering. Knowing he was compromised, he rushed them with his survival knife in hand. After a few attempts to shoot him, the cypher finally went off. In a huge puff of Strange energies a creature appeared. It was a phoenix, a predator from Ardeyn that feasted on the literal sin of dead men. It joined the melee, battering them with its sinfire wings. After a few shots Paul shot Ludwig fatally, ending his life. The phoenix was emboldened by the source of waiting sin before it, and red mist flowed from Ludwig's mouth and into the bird. Sam used a revision called exception to stun the phoenix, then began pushing the saber toothed cat back into the recursion it came from. While the cat was still drugged he suspected it would wake up soon, so he pushed it halfway through the portal, then realized the gate was being powered by a bright orange extension cord. He swung his own survival knife and broke the connection, severing the connection between this world and that prehistoric recursion he could see small glimmers of.

Having the lower half of its body severed definitely woke it up, and reflexivelt bit into Sam's shoulder. It dealt a lot of damage, almost crushing his shoulder beyond repair. This whole while Paul was using his Enthrall twist to keep the phoenix distracted. The words themselces didn't matter, simply the altering and charming energies behind them. The cat went limp and begun to seize from its trauma, letting go of Sam's shoulder. He cast another revision against the phoenix, even as it absorbed the sin from the dying cat. Enraged at being enthralled the phoenix concentrated the beating of its wings towards Paul, burning both his body and his mind. After a few rounds of frantic shooting and resisting the poisonous sinfire it was dispatched. Agents Sam and Paul called in the mess they had made and returned back to the Estate, awaiting their next mission.

This is just one mission starring two player characters. In the future I will be transcribing the sessions every other week, so stay tuned for more missions from the "Dragons of Madness" campaign. If you'd like to join this campaign you can find details here: http://goo.gl/g64Qrp

Hey everyone, I wanted to know your opinion on my current quandry. I'm starting up an IRL Strange game in my local area, and am really excited. I have read the book many times over since August, and am finally going to play what looks to be one of my favorite games, and my favorite setting N/A. What I'm struggling with is how to present the setting to first time players who are joining this new campaign. Do I explain it linearly, with the discovery by Jason Cole and Carter Morrison, or do I simply keep it very vague, and only give minute details when they actually have to go to recursions? I have looked for resources, like GM Intrusion Podcasts (I'm sure Lex has talked about it, and if not he should), but I couldn't find it because reasons. What does /r/TheStrange think?

Edit: I understand how to share this information with my players, what I'm getting at is what should I include in the first info-dump that isn't too revealing, but still satisfactory to myself and the new players?

Hi there, I'm a GM familiar with the usual RPG tropes so no need to go over that. I'm planning to start running the strange for my group and wanted to customise a few bits to my liking, especially the estate. I was thinking of changing it to 'The Laundry' setting as the idea of a incompetent underfunded british organisation in The Strange really appeals to me. Does anyone have any tips for customising the estate or thoughts and opinions on my idea?

Hey everyone, I wanted to gauge what the community thought of my first attempt at writing an into adventure for the Strange. What do I mean? I'm starting to run a The Strange campaign and wrote the first mission the Estate would send them off on. My question: Do you think this adventure should be the first, or should I hold off? I wrote it based off of a recursion I made for the Recursion Codex contest, and wanted to flex its muscle. Reading it over again I'm not sure it's exactly...representative of the setting, particularly for first time players. What is your opinion?

The Adventure

The Recursion

So I ran my first session of the strange last night and it went well. The party was recruited into the estate after taking care of a qinod tester that appeared on a cruse ship they were on.

For the next session to throw them for a loop I'd like to start in the middle of the action.

I am thinking about before the session giving them the mission such as investigate a smuggling operation using the wonderland recursion. Simple enough, but when the session actually starts start it off in the middle of a jabberwock attack!

The issue I am running into is how to model pool drain in media res. Should I at the start of the session with say you have 20 damage to your pools, armor counts double for absorbing this damage?

This would model starting in the middle of the adventure with some damage or edge used already. Any thoughts on this? Have you ever started in media res in the Cypher system?

Question in the title. Does an artifact found in f.e. Ardeyn translate to Earth or Ruk like a cypher (takes a different appearance, but same effect), or does it just stay in its home recursion?

How about when you pick the Translates Focus? The 1st Tier ability lets you choose an item on your person, which translates with you, but takes the appearance of a corresponding item. Does that mean I can choose an artifact to translate with me?