Cepheus Modern

As time in the universe goes on, eventually there will be a Cepheus game for everything. Today, we have Cepheus Modern, a generic modern-day, World War II to the present, 2d6 game.

The 2d6 Cepheus SRD is a great and adaptable system that allows you to throw together a career table for anything, making it a proper universal system with some assembly required. You need the career tables, gear, weapons, and armor to have a game, plus mishap and injury tables.

Careers define the game, so the selection determines the roles in the game, unlike GURPS, where anything is on the table and you are trying to explain to the table why everyone doesn't have ninja training. GURPS takes a strong group agreement on what the game is about, what types of skills are appropriate, and how characters should be designed. You need the theme, and the players need to work with you to make it happen.

In Cepheus games, you all sort of pick careers that will interact together, like if you were playing a mafia game, most everyone would be criminals. Or, in a spy game, you would mostly be military or agents. About half of the careers in this game are military or spy-based, so it feels like a "Tom Clancy" or "James Bond" style game, with commandos and agents running around and battling the bad guys. 

In Cepheus, the random career system takes care of the rest. You need to "make something out of what you get," which is part of the challenge of playing a randomized character. Some like the challenge, while others want complete control.

 But now, let's take a step back.

Cepheus Modern is an 86-page game. Most of these "2d6 small book games" are anywhere from 30 to 80 pages. Is that really enough game to have fun with? Are we going to get enough character complexity and rules options to give us "meat on the bones" to have a satisfying game experience?

I am a GURPS player, and I will always answer that question with a "no." Compared to GURPS, nothing ever has enough depth for me.

But, given the time and commitment to play GURPS, a 2d6 game is a far more versatile choice than a d20 game. Where in a d20 game you need a huge framework of spells, classes, powers, and rules, a 2d6 game can do a lot more in fewer pages. This 86-page 2d6 game does what a 5E-based game would take 320 pages to fully explore. OSR games would be about half that.

Anything 5E these days is so chronically overwritten, full of fluff, and talking itself in circles it is almost a parody of itself these days. The D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has huge chapters, pages long, that talk in circles, and the best advice they can give you after all that is, "Just come up with a way to handle it yourself." Thanks for nothing, paid-by-the-word writers.

I would also choose a 2d6 game over a rules-light narrative game, such as FATE. There is more "meat" here for me to dig into. Rules and choices matter. Even though the characters and basic game rules are straightforward, there is a lot more to play with here than most rules-light frameworks.

 

Given that the original 2d6 Traveller and GURPS are sister games, moving between either is trivial. While they may not share the same rules, there are enough similarities here that if you know how to play one, you know the other, and even converting entire campaigns "once they get good" is a trivial matter. So I think of Cepheus Engine games as "rapid prototype tools" to see if there is fun in a setting or situation, and I always have the freedom to convert it all to GURPS later, if I want the depth.

And when it comes down to it, if all you gave me was a ham sandwich for rules, I could role-play using that. This is how 5E misses the mark so hard. It is not about the rules, creating excellent tactical combat rules, or fancy narrative systems! It is about what you bring to the table with your character and involvement with the story. You don't need rules to role-play, and they can get in the way.

If all I have is my 2d6 character, I can bring that to life.

As a referee, if all I have is a 2d6 combat system, I can make that as compelling as a rules-heavy combat game. If a 2d6 game gives me no "narrative tools," I have enough experience to make the game just as fun as if we had all sorts of pools, points, special dice, and narrative economy systems. Too many rules can get in the way.

It is 100% about the stories you bring to the table.