# Cepheus: Faster Than Light *Created:* 2026-11-01, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Cepheus - Faster Than Light (cover).jpg]] Sixty pages of 2D6 science fiction, written for the table you actually have on a Tuesday night: pick a character, roll some dice, exchange laser fire across a cratered moonscape, and be home before midnight. **Cepheus: Faster Than Light** calls itself "minimalist 2D6 sci-fi role-playing" on the cover, and for once the subtitle is the design brief rather than the marketing. It exists because the **Traveller** System Reference Document is open content. Omer Golan-Joel's Stellagama Publishing built a game on that SRD under the Open Game License, using none of the closed material from Mongoose or Far Future, and shipped the stripped-down version first: the full-scale companion, **Cepheus Light**, is the one with ship design in it. ## Setting There isn't one, and that is the point. The book is a toolkit with no implied universe — its introduction offers interstellar adventurers, aliens and starships, and leaves the map to the referee. Where **Traveller** arrives with an Imperium attached, this arrives with a character sheet and a ship and asks what you feel like doing. ## Mechanics ### Characters and checks Generation follows the SRD's shape: characteristics, a career history of terms, skills bought with those years. Checks are **2D6** plus modifiers against a target number — the Cepheus Engine's flat, one-rule resolution, which is why the book can cover a whole game in sixty pages. ### Combat, in three registers The middle of the book is combat, and it separates the three scales a sci-fi game actually needs: personal combat, vehicle combat, and **space combat** between ships. **Off-World Travel** covers getting between worlds, **Common Spacecraft** gives you the ships to do it in, and **Environmental Hazard** covers what happens when the hull, the atmosphere, or the local biology has an opinion about you. ## Editions - **Cepheus: Faster Than Light** (2017; second printing May 2019) — the minimalist version, 60 pages. *In the library.* - **Cepheus Light** — the fuller Stellagama edition, with the ship design rules this one leaves out. ## References - [Cepheus Engine SRD — the open rules this is built on](https://www.orffens-format.dk/srd/) - [Stellagama Publishing](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/13302/stellagama-publishing) - [Traveller (role-playing game) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game))