Welcome to Nephibis
You are about to become someone in the Nephibis System — a medium star system in the Orion Spur of the Kedia Galaxy, one yellow sun and seven planets strung along the trade lanes, home to civilization for over ten thousand standard years. Every one of those years shows. Aegis Prime is a planet-wide city of twelve billion where the wealthy live in spire-top penthouses and the poor carve out existence in the Undercity's subterranean warrens. Verdania is a green, terraformed breadbasket with four true seasons. Umbra is a tidally locked world of permanent twilight whose dark hemisphere hides things no one returns from. Somewhere, always, someone is fighting, trading, or dying.
This is a tabletop action RPG. Your character starts as a person with history — a species, a modification, a backstory, a name you'd answer to on a bad night — and becomes whatever you make of them.
How the game works
A session moves like this: the GM describes a scene — a rain-slick alley in the shadow of the Spire District, the bridge of a patrol frigate humming with the fusion drive. You say what your character does. The GM tells you what happens, applying the math when it matters. The world doesn't wait for you: events advance, factions maneuver, and the choices you make leave marks.
Nephibis runs on deterministic formulas with controlled randomness. There are no dice for stats, damage, or saving throws. You calculate your numbers, and the drama comes from choices, not luck. Two places keep a little randomness on purpose:
- Hit and dodge checks — a 1–100 roll against a threshold you can read on your sheet.
- Damage ranges — every weapon and ability deals between a minimum and maximum percentage of its base damage.
That's it. Everything else — accuracy, crits, status effects, armor, resources — follows formulas. This means you always know exactly what you're capable of. The tension in a fight comes from deciding, not from hoping.
Power scales dramatically
A street-level human with a pistol is a real threat to another street-level human, and nothing more than a nuisance to an Omega mutant. This is intentional. The same system supports a noir crime story in the Undercity and a cosmic battle over the fate of the galaxy. Your species, your type, and your level all stack to decide where you sit on that ladder — and the ladder goes very high.
What you need before you play
- A character — species, type, backstory, and starting numbers (Chapter 2).
- Your sheet read like a cockpit — stats, HP, resources, and how they grow (Chapter 3).
- A feel for how actions resolve — checks, attacks, damage, and status effects (Chapter 4).
- Combat — how a fight flows and what your abilities can do (Chapter 5).
The rest — skills, money, the living world, and how to be a good player — you can absorb as you go. Start with Chapter 2: make someone worth being.