Cepheus Engine Review

An introduction

TOC

1. Cepheus Engine Review TOC (you are here).

2. Introduction

3. Generating Characters

4. Skills

5. Psionics

6. Equipment

7. Weapons, an intro to combat rounds.

8. Combat - personal combat

9. Combat - vehicles

10. Starship operations

11. Trade

12. Ship Design

13. Common Ships

14. Combat - part 1

15. Ship combat, part 2

16. Environmental hazards

17. Worlds

18. Wilderness encounters

19. Social Encounters

20. Starship Encounters

21. Refereeing and Adventures

Traveller has been through a number of editions. There is of course Classic, that in and of itself had something like three editions and a number of expansions, between the original LBB’s, the early 80’s reprint, and the Traveller Book, the latter and expansion material starting to incorporate the assumed Third Imperium setting more. Then there was Megatraveller, and then the New Era. After that, we had Mongoose, Marc Miller’s Traveller, Traveller for GURPS, and then 5th edition.

My purpose here is to go through the Cepheus engine, which in my understanding can be thought of as an open-license offshoot of Mongoose, and is the basis for several other Traveller-style worlds and game universes, including Hostile and Zaibatsu by Zozer, and the Clement Sector resource books. While I have it, due to my time spent in CT and T5, I hadn’t looked at it in depth, though I did use the planetary descriptions to generate a sector almanac, and found the UPP codes to translate pretty well.

Second, I want to just go through the core rulebooks, and much like my review of the Traveller Book, ignore insofar as possible other expansions and supplements such as the vehicle design book, or Moon Toad’s Starship Design rules. As to why Cepheus and not Mongoose, Marc Miller’s, or T5? T5, for all of its wonderful systems, is difficult to pare down to something as playable as CT was. Mongoose may be more official, but with multiple settings and sourcebooks for Cepheus like the ones I mentioned above (hey, wanna be a space trucker dealing with mining colonies and xenomorphs a la “Aliens”? Try Hostile), there is a lot of support for it, and as I think we’ll see, there’s enough intercompatibility that you can use any of the current midweight systems.

Sadly, the OGL shenanigans and perfidious treachery of WoTC early this year affect not only ACKs and OSR products, but other game systems like Cepheus as well. We’ll have to see what finally shakes out in relation to Mongoose.

If I’m wrong on any of the above, please let me know, yeah, especially the guys over at Stellagamma.

So, let’s get started.