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 through play.
Start with First Steps
Before anything else, read Chapter 1: your table picks one build — Immersion, Grounded, or Full Anime — and deletes the other two. That choice sets stat caps and formulas for the whole game. Everything after this assumes you know your build.
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.
No levels — you are what you do
There are no levels and no XP thresholds. Stats grow because of what you do: taking hits and eating hearty builds Constitution, running and sneaking builds Dexterity, hauling and climbing builds Strength, study and craft build Intelligence, and so on. Neglect, sickness, injury, or hostile powers can shrink stats. Caps come from your build, species, and type — play moves you toward them.
Power means what your build says
A street-level human with a pistol is a real threat to another street-level human. What they are to an Omega depends on your build: in Grounded they stay relevant with tactics and gear, in Immersion the Omega is a living disaster, in Full Anime that human might become the disaster. Your build sets the ceiling; play decides who reaches it.
What you need before you play
- Your build — Immersion, Grounded, or Full Anime (Chapter 1).
- A character — species, type, backstory, and starting numbers.
- Your sheet read like a cockpit — stats, HP, resources, and how use-based growth works.
- A feel for combat and the living world — how fights flow and how choices leave marks.
Start with Chapter 1, then make someone worth being.