Cepheus Universal (CU) is one of the most impressive science fiction games I own. The Lulu book arrived yesterday, and it's significantly better than the previous print-on-demand (PoD) I received (I think it was from DriveThru); the book is gorgeous.
The game is also awe-inspiring. The original Traveller Little Black Books promised a universal science fiction game, but ultimately delivered only upon the Imperium. The Cepheus Universal game delivers on the one-book, any-universe promise. You can build Star Destroyers and Constitution-class UFP cruisers using the capital ship rules. You have mechs. You have vehicles. You have star-fighters. Everything Traveller forgets to include, you get in CU, including classic Traveller.
CU is the closest thing we have to the original Space Opera game, and that says a lot since that game was a legend in our group.
Hostile, from the same publisher, is a custom-built version of the same 2d6 rules, but tightly tied into the setting. Hostile is better suited for those who enjoy the corporate sci-fi genre, such as Alien, Blade Runner, and Outland, as well as industrial hard-science settings. You can also throw in "underwater" movies in here too, like The Abyss or Deep Blue Sea. Where CU is a toolkit that allows you to create settings ranging from Star Wars to Star Trek, or any other science fiction setting you can imagine, Hostile is built exclusively for the hard-science setting.
But if you are looking for that flavor of industrial, hard-science, dark universe, life is worthless to corporate greed, gritty and dirty science fiction, go straight for Hostile and don't try to emulate it through CU. You could, but Hostile is a complete universe and game built to support the concept.
Hostile reminds me of the Traveller 2300 and 2300 AD we always wanted to have. We played this in a campaign, and it didn't resonate with us. We leaned more into Alien, and that salvaged the game. Still, 2300 was not interesting enough to us on the low-level, humanistic, grease-and-gears level of science fiction gaming.
Traveller 2300 always had that identity problem. What was this game? It was somewhat of a "not Aliens' setting, and beyond that, it didn't fully take off with our group. To be a great setting, it needs to move beyond the xenomorph. Hostile has your standard 2d6 animal and creature generation, and just replacing these with "strange variants of Earth creatures that want to kill you" works well. Featherless, bat-like vultures that swoop in and rake hooked claws from packs that hunt from the air, squid with ripping claw-like teeth, horse like maw-beasts that look like undead lizards, and if you put a little effort into it and possibly a book on insects and worms, you can come up with things a hundred times more scary than a xenomorph.
There is an excellent Xenomorph expansion that turns them into all sorts of creepy monsters, such as snakes, spiders, runner dogs, and many others. The game is more unrestricted to run with the concept and turn it into something truly terrifying, and it also opens the doors for the referee to take this in many different directions.
If the corporations of the universe want to kill you, then none of the alien creatures you encounter will be something out of a D&D cozy RPG. Everything wants to kill you, tear you into steaks, and feast on your flesh and internal organs. I dislike this "cutesy sci-fi" that assumes a standard distribution of cuddly animals throughout the universe. Sorry, planetary ecosystems activate their creatures, which serve as white blood cells to hunt down and consume colonists, miners, explorers, and anything else the planet sees as "alien" to its billion-year history. Even the rocks and geology will try to get in on the act, trying to kill you.
Roll 2d6; if you roll low, the planet gets to try to do something to kill you.
The game is called "Hostile" after all.
Just assume everything is.
Back to CU. Eliminate Traveller and Alien from your thinking. Although this game does those things, other games do them better, such as OG Traveller and Hostile.
For everything else, CU is going to win. Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Frontiers, Firefly, Pitch Black, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010, and the list goes on. This also wraps up the Cyberpunk, Battletech, and Blade Runner genres quite nicely, along with a fair number of non-gonzo post-apocalyptic genres. CU does all that in a simple, fast, and quick 2d6 format that gives you a heroic option for play.
CU is the best "everything else" science fiction game there is.
It is challenging to review a game like this without discussing the alternatives. Part of my problem with this game is that the first time I saw it, I thought it was "alternate Traveller rules" or "another Alien game"- both of which were incorrect. I saw Cepheus Deluxe (the black and white printing) as a better generic Traveller game, since "Why should I change?" I have a lot of current-edition Traveller books, so that game is the king of that setting.
I didn't understand this at first, which is why I initially discounted it.
I know now not to.
This is one of the best universal science fiction games of this generation.
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