Questions about the Cypher Open License or the CRD? You can find answers to common questions here. But note that the COL is a legal and binding agreement you make with MCG. Nothing on this page is legal advice. If there are elements of the COL you do not understand, consult a lawyer before publishing under the agreement.
To see the most recent version of the Cypher Reference Document, check the Changelog (you can find it in the menu bar).
The short answer is no. The Cypher Open License does not grant permission to use MCG’s trademarks or content from any of our products other than the CRD.
The longer answer: You can certainly make a Cypher-compatible product that would work well in a science-fantasy environment. Or a dimension-hopping game. Or a science-fictiony, post-apocalypticy version of the Cretaceous Era. So long as it doesn’t reference our trademarks or cite content from our products.
Absolutely. The Cypher Open License doesn’t restrict how you bring your product to market.
Products created under the Cypher Open License can use as much or as little of the CRD as needed—including none of it! So if you want to make, for example, a bestiary of creatures for use with Cypher games, that doesn’t include any CRD content, that’s fine. You can still use the “Compatible with Cypher” logo, and/or include the phrase “Compatible with Cypher” on your product and marketing, so long as you adhere to all the license terms.
Yes, absolutely. The only MCG-produced content it can contain is from the CRD, though (not other MCG products), and it must comply with all terms of the license.
So long as the material does not include content from MCG products other than the CRD, sure. So you could publish a set of resources based on the CRD. Or on an adventure or setting of your own design. But you couldn’t convert, say, The Dark Spiral for a VTT, because that would require you to include content from that MCG adventure.
Sure. You may use as much or as little of the CRD as you choose, and you can alter the CRD as you see fit for your creation. That includes translating text from the CRD into another language. BUT HERE’S AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT: Your work must be your own. Just like you don’t have permission to copy text from our books, you also don’t have permission to copy text from anyone else’s—and that includes translated versions of our products. So if there’s a version of the Cypher Character Rulebook in your language, you can’t just copy that text. Whatever CRD content you translate, you must translate yourself.
Now, here’s a caveat to the caveat: Our foreign-language publishing partners often have established translations for specific game terms. Matching their use of common game terms will ensure that your product is as compatible as possible with other Cypher products in your language.
The COL doesn’t place any limits on your rights to share content you create. If you’d like to allow other publishers to use, in products they produce under the Cypher Open License, content you created, that’s fine. That’s a decision or agreement that’s separate from the COL, though. The COL itself doesn’t facilitate or necessitate open content beyond the CRD itself.
That provision of the COL protects you, and everyone who benefits from the Cypher brand (including gamers, MCG, and other licensees) from becoming associated with the worst ugliness we see in the world, and on the internet, today. Nobody wants to proudly publish a shiny new COL product they’ve poured their heart and soul into, only to find a week later that the Cypher is being tarred and feathered on the internet because some other COL licensee has published a neo-nazi game, or an adventure about child abuse.
Conflict is at the heart of fiction, and bad stuff is often the basis for adventurous conflict. Our concern is works that promote, overtly or through lavish depiction, repugnant activities or views. The bad guys do bad stuff, and the good guys are out to stop them? That’s not promoting the bad stuff—that’s heroism.
You’ll have to make a call as to whether your depictions are problematic—it’s impossible for MCG to judge a product in the abstract without seeing the completed work and the context in which bad stuff is presented. So long as your goal is not to promote, or even excessively dwell on, the sort of thing you know we, and other licensees, don’t want to be associated with, you’re probably OK.
The short answer is no. The Cypher Open License is not the same thing as the Cypher System Open License, and you cannot use material from the CSRD under the Cypher Open License, just like you can’t use material from any other MCG publication.
But if you’ve published under the CSOL in the past, and want to update your product to be compatible with the current edition of Cypher, we may be able to offer special permission to do so. If your CSOL product was published before 1 July 2026, contact us via email (licensing@montecookgames.com) with details about your CSOL product and we might, at our sole discretion, give you special permission to use that product’s existing content, even if it’s derived from the CSRD, in a conversion to a new version published under the COL.
