Monte Cook’s Award Winning The Strange RPG Gets a Boxed Set on Kickstarter

Feb 21, 2017

The award winning RPG The Strange is about to receive the V.I.G. treatment with it’s very own boxed set. Designed by Bruce R. Cordell and Monte Cook, The Strange is a wild thrill ride setting of alternate dimensions colliding. A Strange Box is a Kickstarter project which will include hundreds of pages of goodies such as the players’ book, setting book, GM’s book, adventure book, and more!

The project funded within the first few hours, and Monte Cook Games has an excellent reputation of delivering on their Kickstarters, so backers can pledge with confidence. You can reserve your copy of A Strange Box beginning at the $120.00 pledge level through March 17th.

From Monte Cook Games:

One of the first questions we get asked at every convention is whether we’re going to do a boxed set for The Strange like we did for Numenera. Because of that, we asked fans of The Strange to let us know how much they’d like to see this. They responded enthusiastically. Since we love The Strange and its fans at Monte Cook Games, we decided to give them the most spectacular experience with The Strange that we can create with a deluxe boxed edition.

As you can probably imagine, we want to make it absolutely beautiful and crammed full of all the coolest extra content we can come up with: character sheets, XP cards with a brand new design, and maybe even a gorgeous cloth version of the Ardeyn poster map, if we hit some stretch goals. We did it once before, and with your help, we’re going to make that dream a reality again, this time to create a deluxe boxed edition of The Strange!

(Already own The Strange? Don’t worry—we’ve got some things that will interest you as well as those new to the game.)

The Strange RPG is where stories, movies, myths, novels, and even comics and games come alive in limited alternate dimensions called recursions. Player characters explore these recursions, accumulate treasures and wonders, and defend the Earth from entities they discover who are jealous of—or want to consume—the real world. Recursions float in a medium that scientists call dark energy, but that PCs call the Strange. Sometimes, fictional characters and creatures in a recursion wake to the realization that they’re not real. Then they seek to break out of their limited dimensions and reach Earth. As do far more vast and completely alien creatures called planetovores that have been swimming in the Strange for who knows how many millions or billions of years.

Critically acclaimed, The Strange was nominated for the Origins Award for Best New Roleplaying Game and received 3 ENnie awards, including awards for Best Setting, Best Game, and Best Art. A novel of The Strange is about to hit store shelves, called Myth Of The Maker.

One of the cool things about not selling this box through retail stores is that it doesn’t have to be marked like a retail product. We can leave off the bar codes and sales text and that sort of stuff. That means the entire outside of the box can just reflect the amazing esthetic of The Strange. So we’re going to make it look awesome—front, back, and sides! The box itself will be of sturdy design, with a deluxe linen finish. It’ll be a great way to carry The Strange around, and it’ll look absolutely wonderful on your game shelf.

This boxed set is not a new edition for The Strange. The box (see THE STRANGE BOX backer level) will contain the same content you find in the existing hardcover rulebook, but in easy-to-use, smaller books. This way, the GM can be paging through the setting guide, and a player can be looking up a new ability at the same time.

The books in the box will all be softcovers. With the exceptions noted in the table above, their content is not different than the existing hardcover rulebook, so if you already have that, it’s not new material. And, conversely, if you don’t own The Strange yet, this box gives you all the game content you’d find in the hardcover. It’s the same game either way. The difference is in the format.

We think an ultimate boxed set edition could be so much more than just that, though. What we want to do is create a boxed set so deluxe that its mere existence will seed an entirely new recursion. As stretch goals are reached, the content described as already being in THE STRANGE BOX will be improved by additional components!

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...