Solo Gaming Fiction: Bad Medicine (pt.1)

One of the things I make a point of doing any time I am reviewing a TTRPG is to play a couple of sessions of it in solo mode so that I can get a feel for how it plays at the table. If I am going to share a game with you, I want to make sure I am doing my best to have good information. It is not enough to describe the mechanics of a game; I want to have a sense of game play.

This unfortunately slows down my reviewing process - a lot.  Recently, one of my kids has developed some pretty extreme issues related to the way his autism expresses itself. I have had to drop everything - including work - to take care of the little guy. Finding the time to sit down and take a trip into a dungeon or into outer space has been hard as of late. And when I do, it has been more for the joy of playing than for the purposes of the blog.

 But I wanted to relate a cool story from a recent solo game. I decided to sit down and play a round of the 2022 Mongoose edition of Traveller so I could have a better basis of comparison to Cepheus Deluxe and Stars Without Number, which I want to finally review properly in the near future.

This is the first adventure of my home Traveller campaign; and I will present it in four parts to make it more digestible than last year's Death in Space story. 

Game Review: Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition

Author(s): Omer Golan-Joel, Richard Hazlewood, Josh Peters, & Robert L. S. Weaver 

Publisher: Stellagama Publishing

System: Classic Traveller / Megatraveller

Marketplace: DriveThruRPG

 Cehpheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition is a retroclone that mixes elements of Classic Traveller with Megatraveller and a few more modern upgrades to make it play a little more smoothly.

About two years ago I ran a campaign using White Star: Galaxy Edition as a base set on a starship called the C.H.V. Natani, and posted play reports here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). It was meant as a short game to give us a little break while some of our players dealt with life issues that made dedicating time to our heavier more involved Silver Gull campaign was difficult. While I was playing White Star with my friends, however, I kept running up against the limitations of the system.

My players didn't find starship battles in White Star as exciting as they wished they were. A couple of players wanted to dabble in mercantile endeavours, which White Star wasn't built for (heck, one of my players was a gmae dev' on Elite: Dangerous and was hoping for a game experience like it) And while they enjoyed some of the silliness of space-faring rockstardom and jedi powers to an extent, they ultimately preferred the adventures where the characters' odd superpowers didn't come into focus. In other words, they really would have been happier playing Traveller.

And so I looked for a Traveller-based game that I could grab in hardcopy at a reasonable price, because I am fed up with .PDFs. Ideally I wanted something I could get both physically and digitally, and so I settled on Cepheus Deluxe and I am glad that I have.