Reading Review - Claim the Sky

 This post contains affiliate links for DriveThruRPG. If you use one and make a purchase, I will earn a small percentage of that sale, and it will cost you nothing extra. Thank you for your support!

For the TLDR rating, click here!

It’s no secret that I am a big fan of tabletop role playing games. Also, I’m pretty sure I’ve written that exact sentence on this blog at least once before. I play a lot of games. I read a lot of game books. I think that my reading time is likely evenly split between game books and fiction books. Non-fiction is thrown in there, too, but I read a lot fewer non-fiction books than I do fiction and game books.

Okay, getting out of the weeds, there: I recently picked up Claim the Sky, which is a superhero supplement for the Cypher System by Monte Cook Games. I read through the book, slowly and bit by bit and… I gotta say that I really love it.

The Book

Image from MonteCookGames.com

Like all of the Cypher System books I have, it’s a beautiful book. The layout is clean and colorful. The text is easy to read, and has loads of references on the sidebar. Honestly, I ignore these the first time I read through such a book, because there’s just so much. But, when I go back and am reading for review and reference, these sidebars are invaluable. And, they’re just so good! It seems like very page has the sidebar full of references, pointing you to other places in the book, or pages in other books, giving you everything you need to understand what’s being discussed in the text.

Some of the art in the book has been recycled; I recognize it from the Cypher System core book. Other pieces, I don’t recognize, but I don’t know if they were made specifically for this book, or were reused from something else. There are some pieces that I can say with certainly are new to this book, because they are of characters and locations created for the setting section. But, wherever the individual art pieces come from, they all look really nice and fit the superhero theme of it all.

The book is divided into two sections: “Gaming With Superpowers”, and the setting “Boundless”. To tell the truth, I really appreciate them splitting it out like that. Cypher System is a generic system and this division supports that. They understand that, yes, you might love their setting and want to play in it, but then again, maybe you want to create your own world! Or play in a different world, already published by someone else, that has dozens of movies in it, with endearing cameos and such!

Ahem…

Rules Section

The first bit with the rules is my favorite. I’m a sucker for rules. Whenever I buy a new game book, the new rules are the first things that I look at, and if there aren’t many, or if they don’t have much substance, I’m disappointed. The new rules in Claim The Sky are pretty good! The rules are mixed in with a lot of discussion on how to make the Cypher System rules work with superhero stories, but they’re easy to find. There are 5 new character Descriptors and 7 new Foci. Along with the options in the core book, and all the other Cypher System games out there, I think those are good numbers of new material. And, the options look like fun! My favorite of them is the ‘Sensational’ descriptor. A character with that one gets more points for their Pools, more skills and is Popular! Yes, with a capital ‘P’!

Power Shifts are also expanded on in the rules section. I played with Power Shifts once during a solitaire game while I was podcasting and I thought it worked really well for superheroes. I think that this presentation of Power Shifts shows how the Cypher System has matured over the years. They’re all specific in what they affect, and all of them are very powerful. There is further discussion on changing powers on the fly and doing off-the-wall things with a character’s abilities, which is also very superhero-y.

The final bit about rules is just two pages dealing with Cyphers and Artifacts. Given how important cyphers are in the Cypher System, I expected this section to be bigger. The material given is fine, and I honestly couldn’t tell you how to make it bigger, but it was a let-down the first time I read it. Honestly, were I to run a superhero campaign, cyphers might not even make up a big part of the story. With Power Shifts, the characters are already extremely powerful, in their individual wheelhouses. Having zero cyphers might not break the game.

Setting Section

The Boundless setting is the next section, and is a lot of fun. Their world is a lot like ours, but there are some changes. The authors quickly go through the history of the world, and how major world events looked with superheroes involved. Then, they get into the major factions and NPCs of the world, and finish up the book with three different adventures.

All of the individual hero and villain NPC write-ups are in the first part of the book, and are referenced in this section with those amazing sidebars.

I liked this part of the book. It was a fun read and there are a lot of interesting ideas on how to change our world into a world with superheroes. There are a ton of ideas that I found to be wonderfully inspiring. Several times during my reading, I stopped after reading a detail, lost in my imaginings of how awesome a game campaign would be, based on that idea.

The adventures look like fun, too. They vary in length and complexity, and I honestly did not give them a very detailed read. If I ever decide to run them, one day, I will, but I didn’t feel like they’d add much to my reading of the additional rules or the game setting.

All in all, I really enjoy this book and I’m glad I picked it up. I’m already planning on pitching this game to one of my game groups as soon as we finish the games we’ve already got planned.

Addendum: As I was wrapping up the writing on this review, my son wandered down to the kitchen, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He asked what I was doing, and I gave him the rundown of the book. He expressed interest and started to flip through the book. With every page he flipped, his excitement grew and he ended up saying he really, really wants to play this game.

Re-Addendum: While putting this post together, I saw that the wonderful folks at Monte Cook Games have put together a free preview of the book!

TLDR

Rules Section: 4/5

Setting Section: 5/5