DriveThruRPG.com
Browse Categories
$ to $















Back
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus $9.99
Average Rating:4.5 / 5
Ratings Reviews Total
41 5
10 1
4 1
0 1
1 1
The Sword of Cepheus
Click to view
You must be logged in to rate this
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by William [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/11/2024 08:51:08

The 2-star reviewer (who wrote the exceptionally sarcastic and lengthy review) did not read the rules too well. So far most of the complaints they had are either 1) inaccurate or 2) covered by optional rules that allow players to ‘soften’ some of the harsher rules re: character generation and fighting. The game has suggestions for ‘everyman’ skills such as melee or athletics set to zero level that soften the blow if your character ends up without much fighting ability. Also survival for barbarians is not 7+ … it is END+7, so if you want to play a barbarian, put a high score (11-12 assuming you roll at least one score that high) in Endurance and your chance of survival goes up. Perhaps meaning there will not be as many barbarians in the game yes but your chance of survival isn’t so bad. Second the designers include an optional ‘mishap’ rule so if you want, no death during char gen, just some penalties to your benefits. Personally my take is that anyone at all familiar with Traveller who wants a reasonable fantasy variant should enjoy this. I’m going to have fun rolling up characters solo regardless and for that reason alone, worth it.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 11/06/2023 12:02:38

I wanted to give a thorough review of this title, as it seems some of the other reviews here are a bit short. To blunt my review a bit, I will be fair and state that I fully support indie developers and understand their limited time and resources. I don't expect (or want) Pathfinder when I buy products like this. However, I have a hope that feedback can help the developers improve over time.

My group: We mostly play simple systems and prefer low fantasy. We wanted to take a break from our usual system (SWADE, Beasts & Barbarians) and tried a short trial of Sword of Cepheus (6-ish hours).

Here are the bulletpoints of our experience:

Mechanics: Surprisingly clunky resolution mechanic despite being a 2d6 system. Rolls need several modifiers both from the player and GM. This might get easier with time, but it didn't get intuitive for us. For an easier 2d6 system in the same genre I'd recommend Barbarians of Lemuria. The modifiers need a special mention. Your main stats are rolled as 2d6, with equals a modifier. Exactly like people are used to from DnD - except that the modifiers corresponding to a given score ARE NOT the same values as in DnD. Insanely confusing for people who have grown up playing DnD (basically everyone). Obviously 2d6 isn't 1d20 but I would strongly advise the authors to redo the math to make it fit with what players are used to.

Nomenclature: Sword of Cepheus have decided to use their own words and nomenclature. A refreshing, albeit very confusing, choice. For instance there is no "rolling", it's "throwing". Why? No idea. Stat are written in their own hexadecimal typeset, so a 15 is "F" for instance. Why? No idea. Presumably it is to avoid misunderstandings when writing your stats in a long line (they call this UPP). But there is no reason to do such a thing, just as there is no reason to translate your character-sheet into binary code. When writing a skill level it's written as: "Medicine-1". This means that you have +1 to Medicine... Except when it's a modifier denounced by the ever-familiar acronym "DM". Then DM-1 means 2d6-1. Ohh, and DM of course means Dice Modifier silly. What made you think otherwise?!

Character creation: Character creation is a game in itself, and one probably best left for a fun night with beers on the table. You roll into a career to get skill points. The longer you manage to "stay" in the career, the more skill points you get. I.e. it's impossible to make a balanced party. Which is fine in itself, but very hard to sell to players. It's literally impossible to min/max since EVERYTHING about character creation is randomized. Which is technically a somewhat good thing since the power difference in skills is vast. For instance, guess what's more important of these two skills: "Melee Combat": fighting hand-to-hand, either with a weapon or unarmed." "Steward: the care and serving of nobility, celebrities and other guests of high status and importance." Yes, you guessed right - this is not a game about being a butler. Or is it (see under Combat section). Instead of using the normal way in modern game design of removing virtually useless skills, or at least folding many of them into one, Sword of Cepheus have gone with the interesting choice of forcing players into playing a Vagabond with high Crafts. We're talking about a game with a giant, firebreathing dragon on the front here, not The Sims: Iron Age.

Oftentimes it's actually better to kill a character in creation than play it and slow the group down. Which is lucky since dying in character creation is super easy! Not like in Dark Heresy where it's a fun 1:100 thing. Nope, it's very easy to die before you start, to the point where it took us waaay too long to make characters. Which is ok for a Pathfinder game, but not what you expect from a 2d6 game.

An example: Say you want to play a Barbarian. You roll your stats and get an average Endurance of 7. The "Survival" roll of the Barbarian profession is 7+, so you need to roll 7 or above on 2d6 unmodified or you will die. Fair enough, you got about a 60% chance of not dying, right? Wrong - you need to make the roll 4 times to get the average skillpoints the game seems balanced around. So in fact you have about a 87% of dying in character creation.... You're welcome to quit before (and thus let your character live to actual gameplay), but again this will nerf you substantially. Or not, since you might roll completely useless skills. From a background standpoint, I really think the authors have a good idea here. There are tons of tables with fun things that can have happened to your character before session 1, which is good for less imaginative people. But as it stands, it's virtually unusable to players used to point-buy systems and designing their own character concept. I don't play Sword & Sorcery to be an artful farmer, I play to be Conan!

Combat: Prepare to whiff a lot. Like, really a lot. The target number on 2d6 is 8, with a -3 penalty if you didn't get lucky enough to roll Melee Combat at character creation. Yup, you have an 8% chance of hitting the enemy. Fun times. You don't have hit points. You use the sum of your Endurance, Strength and Dexterity. So you have 3 pools to manage and balance out, since if one or two goes to 0 you suffer wounds. Does it affect your abilities to lose these points? Are they like stats-drains in DnD? No idea, the rules do not say. Why not just sum them up and use that as a hit points pool, and say you suffer a wound if you go below half? No idea whatsoever, other than the authors felt the game needed more number-crunching (hint: It doesn't).

I can't say much more about the combat system since my players got so fed up with it that they decided not to fight at all. Which is technically a rational decision and made for a very realistic, and very un-Conan-esque, game. They simply left the ruins/dungeon I had planned and went back to town to apply for normal jobs. Then we played watercraft simulator for an hour, until I wanted to inject some excitement and had a costumer pull a knife. Which mortally crippled one character and made the rest abandon ship. One drowned since he didn't get athletics at creation (thank God at least swimming is not a seperate skill). Then it was time for farming fun and I gave up.

Layout: Lots of tables and very little fluff, which in my opinion is good. I don't need another Sword & Sorcery setting. Text is easily readable, although the pages are a bit too dense. But it keeps the pagecount down. The art is sparse and pretty generic except for some almost naïve pictures that honestly look like something sketched on the back of a character sheet. It's certainly new, and does underline the indie quality of the product. However, it does nothing to set the mood or scene. Just take a look at the beautiful layout of the Beasts & Barbarians Steel Edition players guide to see how much art can do to hammer home the feel of a setting. I do realise that the Steel Edition was backed by a massive Kickstarter - I know art costs. It's not a critique, just an observation.

Magic system: Really, the one saving grace of this system and the reason I feel like I got my money's worth after all. Not that original in the design, but super flavourful and setting appropriate. You are set up to fail spectacularily and mutate, blow up or get corrupted into NPC-hood (or all of the above) in very short order. Don't expect to survive as a caster - but then again, neither does the rest of the characters. Think "Perils of the Warp" from Dark Heresy/Only War. Which in my opinion is just like magic should be in Sword & Sorcery. I will definetely be using the magic system going forward in our games of Barbarians of Lemuria, as magic is the one major weakness of that system in my opinion. In my own game I was unable to try it out since none of my players were able to qualify for a sorcerer despite trying.

Conclusion: I really wanted to like Sword of Cepheus, but as the product stands it's heavily scarred by what I can only assume is a severe lack of playtesting. I can't believe the authors themselves found trying to make characters for several hours fun?!? As it stands the system needs serious work in core mechanics of dice-rolling and modifier, not to mention simple balancing of skills. It really feels like the authors were trying too hard to come up with new solutions to problems that do not exist. Why not just use common spelling and mechanics? I cannot in good faith recommend this game to anyone in its current form. Unless you want to port/hack the magic system. If you want to support Stellagama Games, I would instead recommend Barbaric!2E which feels like a simpler, smoother version of Sword of Cepheus. Or just play Barbarians of Lemuria like the rest of us.

Edit: Spelling errors and formatting.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for the detailed review!
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Garbo D. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/31/2022 05:12:26

Just wanted to say that I really, really love what this system offers. Big fan of Traveller/Cepheus type stuff, and, in running a Rider campaign recently, I decided to take a look to see what else was offered in the same style, and Sword of Cepheus scratched so, so many itches for me. Dangerous magic, the character creation common to the engine I've come to love, a charming old-school DND art style, and, this absolutely is a blessing, the book is fairly short! In a good way, you got right to the point and I didn't have to spend long finding what I needed or digging through fluff. Gotta say that the magic/mutation system is probably my favorite part, I ABSOLUTELTY plan on playing around with it for my cowboy campaign.

I think my only complaint is that the weapons don't have a lot of diversity beyond handedness and dice damage, but honestly that's fine- and sort of the norm for rpg's anymore, if 5e DND is anything to go off of. Other than that, book good, 10/10, cast spells and crush skulls. If you, dear reader, are seeking a quick and easy way to experience some of the best the Cepheus system has to offer, give this a gander. If you, Publisher, are reading this, you did real good!



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for the kind review!
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Forest B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/14/2021 00:17:58

After reading the system, won't be using it. :( While I like the character generation system (other than the couple near useless professions) and the combat system, the rules seems to less than supportive of long-term campaigns and player retention. The magic system appears to be a booby trap for unsuspecting players. IMO, you'd pretty much be setting yourself up to fail being a sorceror. It is billed as swords and sorcery, but it is more swords and swords and more swords based.

Almost bought Cepheus Atom, but found out about ever increasing corruption. I must ask, are any of the Cepheus-derived games long term campaign / player friendly or do they all contain some kind of 'gotcha!' rules aimed at the players? Both Swords and Atom seem actively player-hostile, like old time D&D with an adversarial DM, but baked into the rules.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for the review and our apologies.
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Cassiano C. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/13/2021 17:43:31

Great game. I loved it. Really fitted for the Sword & Sorcery/Sandal/Planet genres, especially the magic part because classic D&D-style magic is a huge problem to deal with campaigns of these genres. I'm only giving 4 stars out of 5 because the pdf has a certain number of typos and editing mistakes. For the relatively small size of the book, I thought it was worth mentioning. However, face this comment as an amicable criticism, because I actually liked the product and will watch out for future products of Stellagama. May the dice always roll in your favor.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Georgios [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/17/2021 03:16:40

Nice little indie fantasy implementation of the Traveller/Cepheus SRD. The character generation system really stands out, with the professions mini-game telling it's own backstory for your PC. It's great just for this. However the system falls short on other regards. Combat feels clunky, equipment is unbalanced, some rules defy common sense, and a bit more proofreading would help. Nonetheless, it does work, and considering it's based off such an old sci-fi game engine, that's a feat on it's own.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by MR M H P. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/15/2020 13:22:20

"If you want a handful of grit in your dice bag, if you’re more of about Conan than Rincewind, if you like the vibe of OSR, but not the engines, then Sword of Cepheus looks like the game for you."

I don’t like complexity in my tabletop-roleplaying games. It’s not just my age, I’m also more interested in the adventure than the stacking the of feats and traits. And, as a GM, frankly, the chaotic exploding synergies of games like Dungeons and Dragons make me feel panicky.

However, I don’t like it when glossing over resource management breaks genre conventions — if torches can’t run out, if food isn’t scarce, then players will turn each dungeon adventure into weaponized archaeology.

Unfortunately, I’m also — on reflection — unkeen on randomized emulations that take away the possibilities and drama created by choice: “Oh, you rolled a ‘1’. Whoops your arrows ran out.” (Some games square this circle a little.)

That’s why I was excited when Omer Golan-Joel announced he was working on a Sword and Sorcery game called (drum roll) Sword of Cepheus: 2D6 Sword and Sorcery Roleplaying.

Read the full review at Black Gate Magazine...



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for your very kind review!
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by Roberto B. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/17/2020 02:23:10

I've been waiting for a ruleset like Sword of Cepheus for a long time, an RPG capable of adapting the mechanics of Cepheus Engine to the fantasy genre. I have been waiting for the release of the POD version to purchase the bundle with the digital version. Something similar had already been tried with Worlds Apart (adapting space travel mechanics to sea travel), but SoC takes a completely different path. First of all it is openly Sword & [Sorcery / Planet / Sandal] and is designed for (I quote) gritty heroism, dark magic and open world. Character generation is life path based (as in Traveler) and you can die during your career. As an optional rule, you can roll on mishap tables (accidents), but death is not necessarily less preferable. There are 12 careers available, ranging from barbarian to vagabond passing through nobles, soldiers, sorcerers and shamans. Regarding the latter, the magical system is quite interesting. You are not limited by various "slots", but by spell execution time: casting takes a 10 minute turn, the combat round is 6 seconds. This means preparing the spells in advance, encapsulating them in "magical ammunition" called "foci". Learning a new spell requires a magical skill roll, with the associated risks. Additionally, high-level black and gray magic is dangerous and can lead to corruption and mutations on the performer. Another interesting feature: anyone can cast spells, but the PC without skill in magic is severely disadvantaged and risks bigger. The bestiary has been adapted from the classic OSR monsters to the Cepheus Engine animal traits system. The only flaw is perhaps not having included clear instructions on how to generate your own creatures, forcing you to consult Cepheus Engine itself. Everything remains compatible with Cepheus Engine and derivatives (Cepheus Light above all), so it is completely possible to imagine your fantasy campaign taking place on a lost planet of a larger sci-fi universe. As an old fan of both genres this is a plus for me. Until now there were few options for playing a "fantasy Traveller": Worlds Apart, which as I wrote above, insists a lot on interpreting the "sub-sector" mechanics in a marine setting. Or use some excellent supplements from Paul Elliott (Fast Magic, Low Tech Weapons, Archaic Firearms), Michael Brown (2d6 Magic) and "Flynn" Kemp (Flynn's Guide to Magic in Traveler). However, all of these supplements required a lot of effort on the referee's part to generate a homebrew ruleset. Sword of Cepheus offers a complete system, even without the Non-Humans supplement (which I highly recommend) and allows you to perfectly reproduce the atmosphere of R.E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and Edgar Rice Burroghs. I'm enjoying it so much and I'm organizing a mini Sword & Sandal campaign for my group.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Thank you for your very kind review!
pixel_trans.gif
The Sword of Cepheus
Publisher: Stellagama Publishing
by A customer [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/19/2020 13:32:37

This is one of the best " Classic Swords and Sorcery" games around. It is more of a "Conan" feel than standard fantasy feel. Magic is dark and dangerous. The game has many optional rules listed throughout the book to offer various way to scale your game for your needs. Hoping for some published adventures.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
pixel_trans.gif
Displaying 1 to 9 (of 9 reviews) Result Pages:  1 
pixel_trans.gif
pixel_trans.gif Back pixel_trans.gif
0 items
 Gift Certificates