I had an interesting conversation last night with a friend who is working on a Traveller project. Can’t divulge anything at this point. It is all in the beginning stages.

We did talk a bit about what exactly the Cepheus Engine is. He honestly didn’t know, and I suspect a lot people who are fully into some version(s) of Traveller don’t know either. So, while I was not really involved in the Traveller/2d6 world when the Cepheus Engine rose from the ashes of Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition, I have a pretty firm grasp of its history now and the many versions and permutations of it that are available.

A quick search of “what is the Cepheus Engine?” on DuckDuckGo will start unravelling that question for newcomers. I think the best explanation is on the Traveller Wiki, and it is the simplest too, but it fails to mention that the main open source for the CE is Mongoose Traveller 1e.

Stay with me while I think out loud here…

So there’s a lot of history about why the CE was created in the first place, which I’ll not get into here. The main thing to know is that the CE System Reference Document, created by Jason Kemp of Samardan Games, is the base document from which the other versions have sprung. The online version of the SRD has an intro page with links.

Cepheus Engine is essentially Open Source punk rock Traveller, with a lot of different versions and creators involved.

All of this complicates the world of 2d6 SF roleplaying quite a bit. I get questions about it pretty frequently, so I’m writing this post and I’ll refer future questions here. Now yes, it does complicate things, but it also creates a hell of a lot of diversity in the 2d6 world. You have standard SF, systems tailored to mimic horror SF like the Alien franchise, etc. So there’s a lot to choose from. The easy interoperability of all the systems is cool. I’m running Classic Traveller, but I can pull in rules from Mongoose Traveller 2e and all the Cepheus stuff very easily and it doesn’t break anything. It enriches the experience.