Cepheida: The Exploration Game Original Design Notes

[Jubal]

So I've been mulling over what to do with Cepheida recently, with a round of new thoughts sparked by James Holloway's recent Monster Man episode on the creatures of Rogue Trader, in which he discussed the problem of wildlife and local hazards in wargaming and skirmish gaming and how early Rogue Trader sort of assumed a GM/DM system for a wargame, something that probably fell out of favour for reasons of practicality. So I was thinking through alternative approaches to making games focused on exploration, and returned mentally to the same rough system I've used for exploration systems a ton of times before - a blank map with tiles and diceroll-based exploration charts and making that the core of a game. I've used this system for multiple Warhammer Fantasy campaigns (now run about fifteen years ago which is scary to think of) and also most notably for Hetairos, my Greek underworld dungeon crawling game.

So I've been thinking about how to make a Cepheida game based on a similar system - hyper simple and quick for combats, few and simple stat checks, keeping the focus on the map exploration side. It will probably be a bit more involved than Hetairos in some respects - having different "factions" instead of a character list, I think probably also a campaign system, and a bit more setup for determining what kind of planet and biome the players are exploring which might affect the exploration charts somehow? I think maybe also some kind of creature generator system could be fun, I've always played Hetairos as a "just grab whatever cubes are around" game which I know limits its appeal but I think this might end up with similar systems.

I still sort of have the idea of a Cepheida skirmish game or computer game/RPG sometime, but I think this idea of an exploration game might make a lot more sense as a completeable project (I say - we'll see if I get anywhere with it).

Thoughts welcome!