Imagine a place where you can find all kinds of great MCG video content. Now imagine a vibrant, friendly, well-moderated chat community. Put it all together in a single place with an elegant, welcoming user interface, and you have The Anywhere Door!
Imagine a place where you can find a plethora of great MCG video content—streams, unboxings, reviews, interviews, con activities, and more. Now imagine a vibrant, friendly, well-moderated chat community. Put it all together in a single place with an elegant, welcoming user interface, and you have The Anywhere Door: an environment for interacting with MCG fans and finding—and sharing—inspiration to take your games to exciting new places!
Why is it called The Anywhere Door? Because it's like that cypher—except it doesn't close. Once we open The Anywhere Door, you can step through any time you like. It's a new, official community hub from Monte Cook Games on the Moonbeam platform. And we want to create it with you and for you!
The Anywhere Door, supported by and in partnership with the fantastic folk who run the Cypher Unlimited Discord, will launch this fall. It will be open to all, but founders (including you, we hope!) will have early access, an exclusive founder's badge, and, depending on your pledge level, other rewards. More importantly, your backing will help us launch with an incredible slate of new content with loads of great support for the Cypher System and all of Monte Cook Games's game lines.
The Anywhere Door is built on Moonbeam, a new platform that combines multi-channel video streaming with robust chat community features. We love it because it draws disparate community elements into one rich environment (with really robust moderation features that make it a pleasure to maintain community standards). Streamers will love it because it helps them reach larger audiences and has superior revenue-generating and -sharing features. You'll love it because it gives you a multi-media community experience in a pleasant, easy-to-use environment.
The Moonbeam platform combines multi-channel video streaming with a Discord-like chat capability, all within a superior user environment. The best part is that it happens within "realms," which are like Discord servers (if a Discord server could host multiple live streaming channels, from different creators). The Anywhere Door is MCG's official Moonbeam realm.
We want to load The Anywhere Door with great content—both from us and from other great creators, large and small. To that end, our funding goal supports these items:
Paid Moderation: We will contract with the good folk at Cypher Unlimited to provide moderation for The Anywhere Door. This will ensure the conversation on The Anywhere Door maintains the same high quality and standards we all enjoy on the CU Discord, and provide a reasonable stipend to the moderators for their time and effort.
The Cypher Stream Creator Fund: $2500 of our goal funds $500 grants to new streamers. There are more details on the Cypher Stream Creator Fund below.
Established Streamer Grants: While we're keen to support up-and-coming content creators, we also want to make it easy for established streams to jump into The Anywhere Door with exciting new shows. So our funding goal also includes a $2500 grant pool for creators like Cypher Unlimited, Qedhup, DM Tales, Mr. Tarrasque, and other established streamers who bring great content to The Anywhere Door.
Streamer Resources: We'll create a rich package of customizable graphic resources for use by any streamer.
CypherCon Support: This year's CypherCon takes place in September, well ahead of the public launch of Moonbeam. But next year? As The Anywhere Door grows and takes shape in 2025, we'll explore ways to best integrate CypherCon programing into the realm to help it reach MCG fans everywhere!
MCG Content: We're making The Anywhere Door a great place for members of the community to meet, talk, and stream—and we're also planning our own content. We're starting with Game Night with MCG (see below), but we're looking at additional MCG-produced content as well.
Streaming to The Anywhere Door isn't exclusive. Streamers can also post their shows to other platforms, like Twitch or YouTube, either simultaneously with the Moonbeam stream or at a later time. So this campaign will fund great content for MCG Games you can enjoy regardless of whether you experience it through The Anywhere Door, or stick with other platforms!
One of the great things about a Moonbeam realm (as opposed to a YouTube or Twitch channel) is that it's not just a single-creator space. Not only can we stream within The Anywhere Door—so can other approved creators. That means Mr. Tarrasque, already an approved partner, can stream within The Anywhere Door whenever they choose. As can Qedhup, or Alphadean, Spiggs, and AncientAlbatross from the CU. More can be added to the list. (In fact, through the Cypher Streamer Creator Fund, and our established streamers grants, we hope to see loads more!) The Anywhere Door is going to be an active, vibrant streaming community. These wonderful streamers are already participating in The Anywhere Door:
We're even making plans to hold some portion of CypherCon 2025 within The Anywhere Door.
(But what if you absolutely love Twitch or YouTube? We think you'll find The Anywhere Door a pleasant, inviting space. But it's not exclusive—our partners are welcome to simulcast their stream to other platforms. So even if you never plan to hang out at The Anywhere Door, supporting this campaign supports streaming activity you can enjoy elsewhere.)
Small or new streams often struggle to gain audience, or even to get off the ground, because they don't have the resources to solve technical problems, pay participants, or market their shows. The Cypher Stream Creator Fund offers grants to newer or smaller streamers to help them overcome these obstacles. If you're a fan of gaming streams, this fund will help bring more great MCG-related streams to life. And if you're a streamer—or would like to be—it can help you elevate your game!
Aimed at new or smaller streams, the Cypher Stream Creator Fund offers a $500 grant, plus promotional assistance from MCG, to selected creators. We'll have more details soon, but here's an overview of the requirements:
MCG-related content. Obviously, we're looking for streams of MCG games or properties. We might give preference to streams related to currently available and supported game lines, but that's not a requirement.
Novel and original content. We aren't looking for product reviews, streams of convention panels or similar events, or overt self-promotion. Maturity level should top out at PG-13 or so. Beyond those restrictions, we're open to your creativity—and the more interesting your content will be to the community, the more likely it will be selected!
Timely launch. Your stream must launch between January and May 2025. You must stream via The Anywhere Door, but may also stream to other platforms.
We'll open the application process for the Cypher Stream Creator Fund shortly after this campaign concludes. The application window will run through the end of October. If you're interested in a grant, start thinking about your pitch now, and you'll be ready to apply in August!
We think The Anywhere Door will be a fun place to hang out—in fact, we going to hang out there ourselves! We're planning a monthly game night, and we're going to stream each game.
Game Night with MCG will be held on the second Friday of each month throughout 2025. Players will include two or three members of the MCG team, along with a few guests. What will we play? That will be up to the whim of that Game Night's GM. But knowing the imaginative, endlessly creative MCG team members, whatever it is, it'll be fun!
Game with Us!
Who will those guest gamers be? Maybe you! Back at the Player pledge level, and you can join us at the virtual game table. Here's how it works:
We'll have (at a minimum) twelve Game Nights, starting in January 2025 and running through December. We'll host roughly three guests per Game Night (which is why the Player pledge level is limited to 36 backers).
Game Nights will be held on the second Friday of each month, at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time (6:00 p.m. Pacific). If events require a change of schedule, we'll announce it well in advance.
A couple of weeks before each Game Night, we'll poll the Player pledge level backers to see who's available and wants to join us. We'll choose randomly from among the positive responses.
Priority will always be given to backers who haven't yet been a guest. (But if for some reason we don't fill all the slots, a backer who's already been a guest can join us again.)
We make no specific commitments now as to which members of the MCG team play in any given session, who will GM, or what the game will be. (Those details might be available at the time of signup for a given Game Night, but they might not be.) We do commit to providing games that are fun, engaging, and delightful to participate in—and, we hope, to watch!
Games will be played online and streamed via The Anywhere Door.
The Anywhere Door is part of the Moonbeam Cross-Collab Campaign. When you back us, you support our Realm and get early access to Moonbeam. If you also back Moonbeam (at any pledge level), you'll receive an exclusive badge on Moonbeam to showcase your support, 100 moonstones, and an additional two months of Moonbeam+ for FREE! Find more details on the Moonbeam campaign page.
Monte Cook Games has been publishing highly praised, award-winning innovative RPGs since 2012, including such lines as Numenera, The Devil's Dandy Dogs, Invisible Sun, No Thank You, Evil!, Stealing Stories for the Devil, the Cypher System, and a range of system-agnostic products that make every RPG more fun. Our products are designed and written 100% in-house, allowing us to focus the massive creativity of our design team—Monte Cook (he/they), Bruce R. Cordell (he/him), Sean K. Reynolds (he/him), Shanna Germain (she/her), and Dominique Dickey (they/them)—into products that are imaginative, fun, easy to play, and beautiful.
Our mighty team includes Art Director Bear Weiter (he/him) and Graphic Designer Javier Beltrán (he/him), who make our products so visually stunning. Managing Editor Teri Litorco (she/her) wrangles the words and projects. Kate Evans (she/her), Jennifer Walls (she/her), Tammie Ryan (she/her), Olivia Ryan (she/her), and Charles Ryan (he/him) interact with our fans and customers and keep the business rolling along smoothly.
We're a small, values-driven team, but we deliver big!
If you back for physical rewards, you will pay for shipping when you redeem them. We offer a variety of domestic and international shipping methods from which you can choose. As of this writing, basic domestic shipping is $9 per shipment, but we do not control future postal rates, so that cost is subject to change. International shipping is based on postal and shipping rates at the time of the order, and varies by destination and shipment weight.
Shipping and global logistics are disrupted everywhere. That said, we operate our own warehouse in the U.S. and work with trusted global fulfillment partners in Europe and Australia, and we all do everything in our power to get your rewards into your hands as quickly, reliably, and affordably as possible.
International shipping is expensive. We don’t have any control over shipping rates, and we can’t accurately predict what shipping rates will be at the time of fulfillment. To comply with international law, we cannot mark your reward as a gift or as a zero-value item. Here are details that apply to your region:
Canadian Backers: Your rewards will be fulfilled by our shipping center in the United States. You will be responsible for import duties, taxes, and brokerage fees (if applicable). Please note that our books are printed in Canada, and thus are not subject to import duties; however, they are subject to GST. Items not manufactured in Canada, such as dice and decks of cards, are subject to import duties and GST.
The Rest of the Americas,the South Pacific, and Asia: Your rewards will ship from our shipping center in the United States. You will be responsible for import duties, taxes, and brokerage fees (if applicable).
The EU and UK: Your rewards will be filled by our shipping center in the UK. UK and EU backers will not pay import duties and taxes.
Australia and New Zealand: Your rewards will be filled by our shipping center in Australia. Backers in Australia and New Zealand will not pay import duties and taxes.
