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.
The System
I did a detailed breakdown in the differences between Classic Traveller, Megatraveller, and more modern Mongoose Games editions of Traveller in a previous article, and if you are interested in a detailed breakdown you can find it here.And if you are looking for the original Traveller rules, you can now get them from Game Designer's Workshop on DriveThruRPG.
The Rules
Here's the quick version:
Cepheus Deluxe uses the same engine all Traveller games have used since the 70s:
- roll 2d6 and add an ability modifier and a skill rating against a target number ranging between 6 and 16.
- Ability scores are rated between 3 and 18 and have penalties ranging from -2 to +4.
- Skills are rated from 0 to +6.
- If you have no ranks in a skill you roll at -3 (although a character with the Jack of All trades skill can reduce the penalty).
- Sometimes equipment adds bonuses, such as the speed of a ships M-Drive while manoeuvring.
- The amount by which your roll exceeds or falls short of the target is effect, and can either modify things like damage rolls or time taken to do a task, or be passed on to another player if you are engaged in a series of complementary actions called a Task Chain.
- While there are numerous tables of penalties and bonuses for extreme extenuating circumstances or when there are more than +/- 4 modifiers at play, players instead roll 3d6 and take the 2 lowest or 2 highest as appropriate. This called the Boon / Bane die in early versions of Traveller, and occasionally referred to as Advantage / Disadvantage in clones and newer versions
- Damage is rolled as a number of d6s based on weapon and modified by a positive effect, then armour ratings are subtracted.
- In older versions of Traveller this is applied first to a Stamina score (based on a character's ENDURANCE ability), which comes back quickly, and then to a Lifeblood score that requires long rest and medical attention to restore.
- In many older versions of Traveller the each tiem you lose lifeblood you get a wound that applies a universal penalty.
- In newer versions of Traveller, once you run out of Stamina you take temporary damage to your STR and END ability scores. Both have the affect of cumulative penalties, and make characters from all editions about as equally tough.
- Space combat relies on the ship's pilot rolling at the start of a round for an abstract position value that determines which ship is in a better position to attack. Ships with significantly lower positions may not even be able to fire back.
- In both editions when weapons hit, they compare the weapon's destructive potential to the armour type of the ship to determine whether the ship takes external or internal hits. The number of hits is determined by the weapon.
- Internal and external hits are then randomly rolled to affect a ship's systems. One or two hits to a system causes penalties, a third hit usually destroys the system, possibly resulting in loss of life support, crippling the ship, or making it explode.
- Modern versions of traveller also include a Hull Points system that is lost as a ship takes hits, if a ship is at 0 Hull it is disabled regardless.
The rules have remained so consistent that any adventure from any edition of Traveller will be compatible with only minor tweaks with any edition. You can use the 2022 game with a 1977 module with almost no headaches except knowing where skills in different editions change or overlap.
The difference between various versions of Traveller and clones like Cepheus Engine is often most pronounced in the list of skills available to the character and in character generation.
Character Generation
Almost all version of Traveller use a life-path character generation system. You determine their origins and their ability scores, and then play a sub-game to determine what they managed to achieve in their education and where they started their career before the beginning of the campaign. You then move the character through their life before the campaign in 4-year increments called terms, determining the major events in the character's life, often requiring skill rolls or choices to be made. There is a chance that your character can be severely or even fatally injured, make friends or enemies, go into debt, or go to prison. Every term builds up your character's skills and gives them more resources at the end of character generation.
In older versions of Traveller a character may choose to switch careers, or be forced to do so if injured or imprisoned. In newer versions characters are required to make a survival roll to see if they could hack it in their career, and may be forced to switch careers, and roll to see if they can find new work in the career of their choice, otherwise they may have to spend a term as a drifter or get drafted into the military.
As you play through terms your character may have to start rolling to see if they age, which reduces ability scores. You end up playing a game of chicken with the dice to see how long you want to build up your character's skills before the risk of losing abilities to age becomes too great.
When you decide you've played through enough terms, you muster out, getting a number of randomly rolled "mustering out" benefits that let you start with money, contacts, partial ownership of a starship, boosts to ability scores, or special equipment.
Some versions have a set of special traits or special burdens and benefits that can be bought at the end of character generation based on the number of terms spent.
After that you purchase gear and cybernetics, the you're ready to go.
The specifics of this process varies a great deal and almost every version of Traveller has a number of optional rules to work with.
Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition focuses on simplified character generation. Characters are given an array to assign to ability scores, with an optional point-buy or random rolling mechanic included. No mechanics for going to college are included. Characters start with a skill at level 1 based on their homeworld, another at level 1 that they choose from a pool of skill choices based on campaign style, and get a few 0level skilles based on whether they are in a military or civilian campaign.
The skill list is simplified to be more consistent with Classic Traveller, rather than the larger skill lists with specializations that have been growing since Megatraveller. Because of this the character generation gives fewer points. Skills upgrades are usually selected and not rolled.
Characters made in Cepheus Deluxe do not need to roll to enter a new career, and do not have a survival roll to see if they can continue in that career. Instead they roll a single event, and some of the events may include an injury or prison time as possibilities. Characters cannot die during generation. If they are injured they may start with cybernetics to repair the damage, but must take the cost out of their starting money or be in debt.
Once the terms have been played out a character may select special traits that give them bonuses on certain actions or other minor special abilities such as being attractive, fluent in extra languages, or particularly knowledgeable in etiquette, etc. The more terms spent, the more chances a character has to build these up.
Other Tools
Cepheus Deluxe has a the same random planet, random xenomorph, and random jobsm cargo, and complications tools that have made Traveller a rich system over the years. Their versions of these tools are often simple and robust.
Cepheus Deluxe keeps the rules on robotics and ship design relatively simple and consistent with the first two editions of the game to avoid some of the nitty-gritty of later editions.
What I Loved
Aesthetics
Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition has a great retro-80s cassette realism vibe to their artwork that I really enjoy, from the yellow-to-purple gradient frames to the blocky ship designs, to graphics that capture the early DIY feeling of early role-playing games.
Character Build Control
I find Cepheus Deluxe's character generation system strikes a good balance between the randomness of Traveller's chaotic character generation method and the totally player-controlled style preferred in modern games.
By eliminating the survival roll, your character normally only leaves a career if they are injured or imprisoned; otherwise you switch careers when you want to, but with Rank still in place, there is no incentive to min/max by having a character that hops professions every term.
By keeping in the random career event roll, you still have enough randomness that you are discovering, rather than building a character. For my players, who like having a little more choice this is a perfect compromise.
Also, it makes no sense for a character to die during character generation if you are not randomly rolling up their stats and early education; after all, you could just build another identical character. But maiming them and requiring their character to start with medical debt helps drive the character forward.
Setting Neutral
Traveller did not start with a setting outside of some basic assumptions about the campaign world that would make traveller work (No, A.I., slow FTL travel, no nanotech, existence fo space navies and scout services, no FTL communication). The Third Imperium evolved slowly over the first five years through modules and sourcebooks, and became the "official" setting, such as it was, around 1984.
More recent editions of Traveller, especially its GURPS spin-offs and Megatraveller have been very focused on the setting, and do not work as well without it.
Cepheus Deluxe takes pains to make itself much more setting neutral, with only some of the absolute basic assumptions.
Advanced Tech
Because it is setting agnostic, Cepheus Deluxe includes some highly advanced technology that you won't see in Traveller: personal and starship shields, tor example. Most of these make it possible to include material that you would never see in Traveller, and also amplify that 80s scifi feel.
Simplicity
Cepheus Deluxe has a few minor tweaks to the rules deigned to make the game play faster, such as fewer dice modifiers, and more use of the boon/bane dice and fewer skills to choose from.
Stellagama has a good instinct for how to simplify without losing the essence of what they can trim to simplify the game without compromising the spirit of the game (or it compatibility with existing material.) Nothing in Cepheus Engine feels extraneous or needlessly bulky, given their source material and the objectives of the game.
They have another excellent Traveller-based retrogame, Cepheus Quantum that takes the engine to its absolute most minimal format while still being recognizable as Traveller.
Print Quality
When it comes to POD products YMMV is an understatement, but my hardcopy of Cepheus Engine, which was around $40 CAD, turned out beautifully. The glossy pages are full of bright color from the retro-80s graphics, and the binding is solid. It is a real pleasure to browse through.
Growth Points
Book Organization
Cepheus Deluxe suffers from some of the same problems that every edition of Traveller has suffered from: mainly' that it is a very difficult book to effectively organize.
It's tricky to know exactly how to arrange the chapters in this book in a way that makes the information flow in a meaningful fashion. Robots, weapons, and non-starship vehicles each require their own chapter to fully flesh things out, ssowhile shopping for a character, you find yourself constantly flipping back and forth through the book.
Likewise, Starships have many separate topics that have to be divided across multiple chapters, some of which do feel more like they would work better as an appendix than as a proper chapter. And figuring out the order that makes it easiest to learn the game has been difficult, as is evidenced by the fact that the 2022 Edition from Mongoose is every bit as confusing.
In the case of Cehpheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition, however, there are places where it falls into the worst traps of role-playing game manual design that makes it even harder to break through, such as having large sets of tables break up a sub-section so that you have to turn three pages to finish a paragraph you want to read.
The character generation chapter in particular, while simplified compared to Traveller 2022 requires a lot of page turning, as the actual step-by-step process isn't laid all that well, and there's lots of small details about the process that need to be referenced during the character generation process. You can't simply open the core book and start building a character as you're learning without a pre-read.
I have never read a single version of Traveller except perhaps the GURPS version that is easy to simply pick up in the rules and play. The game may flow very easily during gameplay, setup is heavy at times.
Offer Alternate Modernized Rules
I have recently been playing Cehpheus Deluxe and the 2022 Mongoose edition of Traveller alternately, and generally speaking, I prefer the simplified rules of CepheusDeluxe. Especially for character generation. However, there are some places where Cepheus Deluxe carries forward anachronisms from the original Traveller that Mongoose has paired back for good reason.
For example, starship combat in Cepheus Deluxe still uses the position mechanic from classic versions of Traveller. At the beginning of every round, the pilots of each ship roll to determine a relative position score based on the maneuvering they have done. Ships with higher positions generally get fire on ships with lower positions, but if you are more than three positions behind another ship, you may not shoot at it. Faster ships with better pilots often have the most important advantage in combat.
I enjoy this rule and have used it to great effect when thinking tactically, but it does slow play down a bit. Mongoose has removed it and replaced it with a simplified initiative system. And for the starship chase I played through this morning, that was far superior.
Likewise, the Cepheus Engine uses the more traditional ship combat rules, where ships compare the type of weapon they are being hit with to their armor, and using that to determine which matrix they roll on for which system gets damaged. As systems get damaged the ship performs increasingly poorly, becoming slower, less effective, losing weapons, etc. The battle ends when a ship's movement speed drops to zero, it loses all its weapons, it's life support fails, or it's engine explodes.
Modern versions of Traveller has replaced that with a hull-point system and an armor with a numerical value. Sufficient damage done is considered a critical hit and a critical damage table creates some of the same malfunctions and failures you saw in the older system. It's faster, it's easier, and once you get into the rhythm of it there is no need to check tables.
I actually do prefer the older system much of the time. I like the David Weber-esque battles you can have with it where surviving crew members struggle to command a ship while counting the minutes of oxygen left in their space suit tanks. But, sometimes one has to sacrifice immersion for convenience. I feel that Cepheus Deluxe would have been better off with the option to use a hull point system. Perhaps is an alternate rule set.
Conclusion
Cehpheus Deluxe Enhanced Edition offers a great, paired down and fast version of the classic Traveller engine. And it's perfectly compatible with almost anything published for Traveller from 1977 forward.
I picked it up because I wanted a version of Traveller I could actually put in a backpack that didn't rely on batteries. And print editions of Mongoose Games products are prohibitively expensive in Canada. And I'm not sorry that I did, because it is a very enjoyable game that streamlines Traveller in all the right places.
If you are looking for a thorough and well thought-out Traveller-based retro game, this is a smart choice.
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