Took a look at another Cepheus Engine game, Kosmic Rpg. One thing I love about all these, it’s easy to steal parts from different ones.
Kosmic right now has the closest to what I would make for character creation. It’s got 39 careers, which is probably more than I would make, but that’s okay because you only have to use the ones you like. But more importantly, each one has its own d66 events chart.
I may be weird, but I usually don’t worry variations from different ship design systems. As long as it’s legal in the system it was designed with, it’s good enough for me. I just chalk it up to deviations from different shipyards.
So I’ll use anything from Classic Traveller to T5 to Cepheus. In the end the only real difference is a few MCr here or there.
Been looking at Faster Than Light: Nomad. It’s got a CC-BY SRD, and looks like a solid system.
Kind of thinking of a space soldier game. Basically life in the trenches of a 40K guardsmen, or starship troopers. Human with a laser rifle and basic body armor entrenched in a hopeless war on an alien planet. WWI in space.
But the trick is not to make it too depressing, while not making it heroic as well.
I backed Tales of the Valiant and Shadowdark and probably a few others I’m forgetting, but I find I can’t get excited about them because at their heart, they are still 5e D&D and I’m just tired of anything directly evolved from D&D. I’ve played enough of them over the years, and I really want new games.
That said I’m excited by the new version of Talislanta, even though I don’t expect it to be very different at all. But that’s getting a classic back in print.
Zozer’s monster Cepheus Universal book is out now. It’s an absolute beast, but you can also get a slim book of just the player rules. I’m looking forward to getting my copy.
Made a starship encounter chart for while my group is participating in The Great Hunt in Vargr territory. It’s allied with the nearby Zhodani Consolate, so I wanted ships from there to be more common than other humans.
Over on the Traveller discord Rob Eaglestone posted a link to his Traveller 5 Starship GitHub. He converted a fair number of classic ships into T5 stats, which is pretty awesome.
While poking around my files indexing starships, I remembered I hadn’t checked for a new issue of Cepheus Journal in a while. And look, a new issue came out three months ago!
Last night I was looking at old #JTAS for any ship designs they introduced, and in issue 10 they detail the fleet that won the first #TCS competition at #Origins 81. But there was clearly a typo on the USP for Wasp Interceptor, which had a Maneuver of Z.
I asked around on discord and we concluded it should be a 6. I was reminded that the fleet in question was designed by computer, which was banned after winning two years in a row.
I went looking for an index of starships for Traveller. I did not find one.
However, I did find that Freelance Traveller has BITS 101 Starships available as a free download. They are for GURPS Traveller, so some conversions required. Particularly remembering that GTL 10 is Traveller TL 12, etc.
The neat thing about looking at all these [GURPS] JTAS and Challenge Magazine articles is seeing familiar names in the by-lines. There’s a ton of cool little adventure seeds by James “Grognardia” Maliszewski.
My group did “training week” for the Vargr Great Hunt. They were tested on marksmanship, archery, climbing, riding, stealth, and camp setup. Perfect score would be 90.
The PCs did not do very well, Captain Feyne Vyren got the lowest rating, Evicru Nur is middle of the pack.
They are being split into four teams for the next event, an Arctic Gazelle capture.