The Floating God's Corpse - Using Cepheus Engine Rpg & Stars With Number rpg Together - Session Report #3

 

There are times when you blunder into another friend's OSR game when things become apparent. DM Steve has been running a hacked Cepheus Engine Rpg mixed in with Stars Without Number rpg. Steve ditched the entire Stars Without Number space system & back mixed in Cepheus Engine. All of this is based on this thread on Rpg Pub here especially on Baulderstone's comment from 2018 "I'm familiar with 1st edition SWN, and one thing that struck me is that by using the same skill scaling as Traveller, it creates a lot of compatibility between the systems. For example, PC interact with the starship rules in Traveller purely through use of skills. That means you could take the i spaceship rules and easily use them in SWN. The only real conversion you would need to do is recalculating the damage the PCs take in space combat. Going the other way, you can use the hacking rules from SWN's suppement Polychrome in Traveller." 

"Given how easy it is to lift subsystems between the two, the decision really comes down to character generation and progression rules. Just decide which one is going to appeal to your players more, and you can grab parts from the other game as needed."
DM Steve has been doing a huge OSR space pirate campaign & the spike drive is no where to be found, Instead hyperspace drive is the norm & the Reticullan empire of the Stars Are Ours setting plays center stage in this campaign. 


There a number of Reticullan space pirate  cults floating around teaching dangerous psionic displinces & space magics. These cults are trying to destablize the Kraken sector from human control. The sector is former Reticullan/Grey strong hold. The humans have only recently made contact across the sector's psionic wall with several other sectors. There are several priveteers orgazinations running with the human government's saction to ferret out these Reticullan space pirate  cults. We played in one such crew of ruffians. While we fly the 'colours' what are are doing is actually space pirate extermination, the exploration of ruins, & the keeping of the instellar trade routes free from space pirate scum. 

There are a few artifact & relic star ships that are still flying. The game revolved around trying to stop a renagade group of space pirates. And our noses getting into the middle of 'Space Patrol' business in this session. 

During today's session I played a low level cybernetic spacer veteran named Yans Hans who was a veteran of many missions. But was aboard the USS Clive Barker a space hauler to which I was helping to install a new hyper drive. The Barker is a nasty little PC ship capable of bloodying the nose of a bigger ship & hopefully running away. 

The Barker's wizard is  working with us to get everything in harmony on board.The fact that next session we're going to loot the corpse of some ancient celetial god which has come back into reality. This means that my PC is gonna be rock & rolling with both the hyperspace drive & getting the rigs ready for the party. Can my PC do it?! 

We've been running several minor ships that are flying the colours. The question comes up if there are some rather nasty guardians around the god's corpse. Tune in next week for more Cepheus/SWN action coming up!