History TabletopGame / TheStrange

''The Strange'' is a TabletopRPG about exploration and discovery. The second game to use the TabletopGame/CypherSystem, after ''{{TabletopGame/Numenera}}'', ''The Strange'' was published to demonstrate how ''Numenera'''s mechanics could be extended to any game setting. There is a series of crossover guides that allows you to blend the setting and mechanics of ''The Strange'' with other Cypher System games and settings like ''Numenera'' or ''TabletopGame/{{Predation}}'' together. The game has since been discontinued and replaced by the standalone ''Cypher System Rulebook''.

* TechDemoGame: ''The Strange'' was an exploration of how the TabletopGame/CypherSystem, which was originally designed for ''TabletopGame/{{Numenera}}'', could be extended to any game setting. Its success in that regard ultimately led to the publication of the standalone ''Cypher System Rulebook'' and subsequent games utilising the Cypher System. Subsequently, support for ''The Strange'' was rolled into the Cypher System: in general, every product for ''The Strange'' can be taken from that context and used for any Cypher System campaign, and vice versa.

* MultiEthnicName: Camelot Le Morte is a name that purposefully conjoins English and French, reflecting the unnatural blended nature of many natives of the recursion.

* BalefulPolymorph: Recursors who translate into the deceptively dangerous recursion Desktop Terrene discover that they have apparently become an inert object on a desk. Though able to sense their surroundings, the recursors are inanimate, unless granted locomotion by special abilities granted by their type. The only focus offered in Desktop Terrene, Is an Object Found on a Desk, confers but one ability: an increasing acceptance of one's placid existence in the recursion.

* NuclearNasty: The zombies infesting the Braidwood Nuclear Generating Plant in Zed Amrica are highly radioactive. When they swarm out of the facility every few nights, they glow with a flickering, greenish-blue light and leave a blackened trail of dead plants and animals in their wake, which is impossible to miss.

* PublicDomainCharacter: Recursions of some popular worlds in the public domain exist in the Strange thanks to especially active fictional leakage. If someone were to find any of these recursions, it's not improbable they could meet the well-known characters. The core rulebook presents [[Literature/JohnCarterOfMars Old Mars]], [[Literature/LandOfOz Oz]], [[Literature/SherlockHolmes 221B Baker Street]], [[Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth Innsmouth]] and [[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland Wonderland]]; the ''Worlds Numberless and Strange'' supplement adds [[Literature/TheTimeMachine AD 802,701]], [[Myth/KingArthur Avalon, Camelot Le Morte]], [[Literature/TheJungleBook Kiplingverse]], [[Literature/{{Dracula}} Gothic Playground]], [[Literature/PeterPan Neverland-4]], [[Myth/EgyptianMythology New Kingdom]], [[Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu R'lyeh]], [[Theatre/TheTempest Sycorax Island]] and [[Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds War of the Worlds]]; other supplements mention [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Legendary Greece]], [[ArabianNightsDays Legendary Arabia]], [[Myth/RussianMythologyAndTales Legendary Novgorod]], [[Myth/HebrewMythology Legendary Canaan]], [[Myth/HinduMythology Legendary India]], [[Myth/CelticMythology Albion]], [[Myth/NorseMythology Asgard and the Nine Worlds]].

-->'''Explore -- Defend -- Create'''

''The Strange'' is a TabletopRPG about exploration and discovery. It uses the TabletopGame/CypherSystem, like its predecessor ''{{TabletopGame/Numenera}}''. There is even a [[https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/when-worlds-collide-converting-numenera-and-the-strange/ crossover guide]] that allows you to blend the two games' settings and mechanics together.

* TheLostWoods:
** The Forest of Perfidy which grew in the World Below of Starship Heinlein is inhabited by sinroots, sentient, mobile, aggressive tree-like creatures that use barbed roots to feed on blood.
** The Gloomwood, part of the Sword Realms, is foreboding and shadowed, even when the sun is high. A bloodborne corruption burrowed up out of a hellish realm under the earth, filling a portion of the wood with gloom, evil, and, most terrifyingly, vampires.

** Dinosaurs from mismatched terrestrial eras, mammalian megafauna including mastodons, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and savage hominids all cohabit various "lost world" recursions like Mesozoica and the Lost Lands.

* BrainInAJar:
** In the Eleventh Reich, the Führer has grown old. After a failed attempt at ascension, the Führer is only a head frozen in a vat of supercooled fluid. Various wires, computers and a few magic spells keep him conscious.
** The State of Panopticon is a schizophrenic mind made up of seven founding citizens whose brains are frozen in liquid nitrogen and linked via a computer-assisted network to the systems that keep the city a functioning artificial environment.

* ALoadOfBull: The singular half-man, half-bull Minotaur (there's no other) is the most famous inhabitant of the Labyrinth, a recursion seeded by the [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Minotaur myth]].

* PoisonAndCureGambit: Right before their home sun went nova, several extereons were saved by the Chaos Templars who transferred them to a haven in the Strange. The surviving extereons and their descendants remain extraordinarily grateful to the Chaos Templars, who in truth had secretly caused the sun to go nova and then swooped in to "save" part of the race.

* PowerTattoo: At the Tattooed Woman's command, her tattoos animate, wiggle free from her skin, and do as she asks.

* ClimateChange: One policy that might be the result of Circle of Liberty manipulation is conservative opposition to climate policy, presumably in an effort to bring about long-term destabilisation of Earth governments as they're forced to deal with ever-accelerating global disasters.

* GlobalWarming: One policy that might be the result of Circle of Liberty manipulation is conservative opposition to climate policy, presumably in an effort to bring about long-term destabilisation of Earth governments as they're forced to deal with ever-accelerating global disasters.

* PublicDomainCharacter: Recursions of some popular worlds in the public domain exist in the Strange thanks to especially active fictional leakage. If someone were to find any of these recursions, it's not improbable they could meet the well-known characters. Tthe core rulebook presents [[Literature/JohnCarterOfMars Old Mars]], [[Literature/LandOfOz Oz]], [[Literature/SherlockHolmes 221B Baker Street]], [[Literature/TheShadowOverInnsmouth Innsmouth]] and [[Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland Wonderland]]; the ''Worlds Numberless and Strange'' supplement adds [[Literature/TheTimeMachine AD 802,701]], [[Myth/KingArthur Avalon, Camelot Le Morte]], [[Literature/TheJungleBook Kiplingverse]], [[Literature/{{Dracula}} Gothic Playground]], [[Literature/PeterPan Neverland-4]], [[Myth/EgyptianMythology New Kingdom]], [[Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu R'lyeh]], [[Theatre/TheTempest Sycorax Island]] and [[Literature/TheWarOfTheWorlds War of the Worlds]]; other supplements mention [[Myth/ClassicalMythology Legendary Greece]], [[ArabianNightsDays Legendary Arabia]], [[Myth/RussianMythologyAndTales Legendary Novgorod]], [[Myth/HebrewMythology Legendary Canaan]], [[Myth/HinduMythology Legendary India]], [[Myth/CelticMythology Albion]], [[Myth/NorseMythology Asgard and the Nine Worlds]].

* OurElvesAreBetter: Native to recursions that operate under the law of Magic, elves are slender, quick, graceful, long lived, and like song, wine, and the deep beauties of growing things.

** Descended from a far more advanced culture, the serpent people in most recursions where they inhabit (for example Mesozoica) have become degenerates, losing knowledge, culture, and, for many, language.

* PoisonAndCureGambit: Right before their home sun went nova, several extereons were saved by the Chaos Templars who transferred them to a haven in the Strange. The surviving extereons and their descendants remain extraordinarily grateful to the Chaos Templars, who in truth had secretly caused the sun to go nova and then swooped in to 'save' part of the race.

* {{Prehistoria}}: The lush, tropical recursion of Mesozoica was seeded by popular stories, movies, myths and misconceptions about the age of dinosaurs. It is inhabited by dinosaurs, mammalian megafauna, savage hominids and a degenerate race of serpent people.

* {{Prospector}}: Treasure seekers, especially dwarves, brave the volcano known as the One, looking for rare minerals belched forth by previous expulsions.

* ArtisticLicensePaleontology: Justified: the various 'lost world' recursions are seeded by popular media and misconceptions as opposed to facts.

* OurOgresAreHungrier: The ogre is a sadistic, 2 m tall, cannibalistic fiend that preys upon other creatures in the woods, mountains or other wilderness areas of recursions that operate under the law of Magic. Stupid and cruel, ogres don't like conversation, even with their own kind.

* TrulySingleParent: A hydra is born when the 'parent' accumulates too many heads and discards some of them, which braid together and crawl away as a new hydra.

** Dinosaurs from mismatched terrestrial eras, mammalian megafauna including mastodons, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats,... and savage hominids all cohabit various 'lost world' recursions like Mesozoica and the Lost Lands.

Earth isn't alone in the universe. It sits atop a network of dark energy, called the Strange. Uniquely gifted people, called ''the quickened'', are able to ''translate'' themselves into the Strange and the ''recursions'' found there - pocket universes, sometimes modeled on fictional worlds, other times alien beyond imagining.

''The Strange'' is a TabletopRPG about exploration and discovery. It uses the Cypher system, like its predecessor ''{{TabletopGame/Numenera}}''. There is even a [[https://www.montecookgames.com/store/product/when-worlds-collide-converting-numenera-and-the-strange/ crossover guide]] that allows you to blend the two games' settings and mechanics together.