I was off work this morning so I rolled up my first character using the online Cepheus Engine System Reference Document.

I found it pretty easy to use. There is a bit of flipping back and forth on the site, which might be easier to do with the printed book, but it wasn’t bad. I did this while sitting in my chair, watching TV with my wife. I used an online dice rolling application as well.

As most RPG players know, one of the best way to learn a big chunk of a system’s rules is to roll up some characters of various different types. It will lead you through the process of learning about the game, from the players point of view, without being overwhelmed. I found this to be the case with the Cepheus Engine. Even though I’m an experienced player of Classic Traveller, there are enough differences that I need to study the Cepheus Engine to really understand it.

Anyway, without going through the whole character, I rolled the dice and put them down on the character record sheet as rolled. No third “drop-die” or an extra “drop” roll. I just rolled ‘em and took ‘em. Ran the character through a term as a Rogue. He failed the survival roll for term 2, which gave me a chance to try out the Mishap table rather than killing him. Ended up with an injury.

This in turn let me make the roll and succeed to begin a second career - this time as a scientist. Doing this forced me to learn the rules for 2nd careers as far as skill learned and all that. I ran him through three terms as a scientist before rolling to see if he was able to retire, which he could. So that is 4.5 terms of service (the failed second term in Rogues equals a half term. So that is 18 years of service, for a total age of 36.

I’ve not finished the character yet. Tonight I need to make his Aging roll, which is different than in Classic Traveller. I forgot about that this morning.

I’ve look through some of the other rules in the SRD, and they are all faithfull to the “feel” and tradition of Classic Traveller while really being an improvement. I like that in the first term of service a character gets all the skills from their profession’s Service Skills table at level-0. This makes a lot of sense to me. There are other changes to the skills that I think are entirely positive.

My initial excitement over the online version of the SRD seems well-justified. It is very useable, and of course the game is just great. I feel like especially for people doing a homebrew campaign who don’t need a bunch of setting material the Cepheus Engine SRD is really a perfect modern SF RPG.

I’m going to explore converting my Classic Traveller homebrew campaign to Cepheus Engine. At this point, only a few skills would change, and addition of 0-level Service Skills would make sense for our campaign. Frankly it would codify a lot of things we’re already doing, that I wrote into our House Rules.