This is a demo, so we’re going to move quickly through the first act of the adventure. Like any RPG, we’d normally play through a lot of early stuff, giving the players a chance to take action, explore, ask questions, and discover much of this information through play instead of exposition. But today we’re going to zip through it to get to the heart of the adventure.

We’re basing this demo in part on our Predation campaign setting. We publish several settings for the Cypher System, but you can also use it to run almost any campaign you can imagine, from gothic horror to superheroes to sci-fi to conventional fantasy.

In Predation, you live in the late Cretaceous period. For decades, an organization called SATI sent “commuters” from the future back to the Creatceous for purposes of research and exploration. The commuters built labs, research centers, and even small towns, and travelled back and forth between their time and this time. But then, for unknown reasons, the time travel suddenly stopped working.

That was decades ago—before you were born. Grevakc—a world of technology and dinosaurs — is the only world you’ve known. There are tens of thousands of people living in the Cretaceous, but it’s mostly a dangerous wilderness.

You and your friends were hired to help a river merchant who runs between isolated jungle settlements. Deep into uncharted territory, you picked up a weak radio signal and recognized it as the beacon for a SATI time drop.

Have the SATI labs in the future somehow “fixed” time travel? Or has this drop been lost in the jungle for decades? Either way, it’s almost certainly a fortune in valuables, so you’ve disembarked and set out to discover it!