Which book(s), if any, offer interesting and useful tools for the enterprising ref who wants to:
- Create sentient, playable, non-humanoid alien species.
- Create menacing, NPC-only alien monsters.
- Create big honkin' spaceships without going crazy and/or spending a lot of time.
- Run mass combats involving planetside armies.
- Run mass combats involving massive fleets of big honkin' spaceships.
- Run a game of very ambitious PCs carving out political and mercantile empires among the stars.
- Run a game of Traveller without FTL, with PCs flying generation ships and using anagathics and cybernetics to survive the long journeys and deriving the profit margins from that crazy old Paul Krugman paper.
Looking for stuff that's available/in-print and worth my gaming dollar. Biased towards official, but good quality third party material can rock my world too.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475Which book(s), if any, offer interesting and useful tools for the enterprising ref who wants to:
- Create sentient, playable, non-humanoid alien species.
Flynn's Guide to Alien Creation (3PP, available through Lulu)
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Create menacing, NPC-only alien monsters.
Supplement 11: Animal Encounters (official)
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Create big honkin' spaceships without going crazy and/or spending a lot of time.
Book 2: High Guard (official)
Although if you want to try before you buy, you can download the SRD for this which includes a shortened version of ship design.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run mass combats involving planetside armies.
Book 1: Mercenary, Second Edition and Supplement 4: Central Supply Catalog + Supplement 5: Vehicle Handbook
DO NOT buy the first edition of Mercenary by Mongoose, it is terrible. Again, you can try before you buy just by downloading the SRD for these.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run mass combats involving massive fleets of big honkin' spaceships.
Book 2: High Guard + Adventure 3: Trillion Credit Squadron
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run a game of very ambitious PCs carving out political and mercantile empires among the stars.
Hmmmm.......
Depending on how they go about this, it could be almost any of the supplements. However I would start with Supplement 12: Dynasty and Book 7: Merchant Prince + Book 8: Dilettante
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run a game of Traveller without FTL, with PCs flying generation ships and using anagathics and cybernetics to survive the long journeys and deriving the profit margins from that crazy old Paul Krugman paper.
No FTL starts getting tough, I have a project going on about that on the back burner. If you are brave, T5 does have rules for NAFAL drives (Not As Fast As Light) and everything else but there may be some compatibility and errata issues.
There is Supplement 8: Cybernetics and Book 9: Robot
Quote from: The Butcher;802475Looking for stuff that's available/in-print and worth my gaming dollar. Biased towards official, but good quality third party material can rock my world too.
For good 3PP, I absolutely recommend Gypsy Knight Games stuff.
Hope that helps.
Oh, and just to show off the versatility of their system, Mongoose has a line of splatbook PDFs which are the "________ Vehicles of World War 2". So far they have covered German, American, British, Soviet, Japanese, Italian, and French if you want to do some historical wargaming.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475Run a game of Traveller without FTL, with PCs flying generation ships and using anagathics and cybernetics to survive the long journeys and deriving the profit margins from that crazy old Paul Krugman paper.
I haven't gotten a chance to read it but Orbital (http://zozer.weebly.com/orbital.html) may have some ideas for that.
Quote from: Ronin;802607I haven't gotten a chance to read it but Orbital (http://zozer.weebly.com/orbital.html) may have some ideas for that.
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
However,
Orbital is completely and totally awesome for Near Future science fiction confined to our own solar system.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run mass combats involving planetside armies.
Just to second Jeff, Mercenary 2nd edition's mass combat looks pretty darn good. I haven't actually tested it, but on a read through I'm quite pleased with it.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475- Run a game of very ambitious PCs carving out political and mercantile empires among the stars.
If you want a subsystem, I'd almost have to say the back end of Stars Without Number + Suns of Gold. Traveller could certainly do that game, but it'd come more from building on the speculative trade system and just making things happen in play. I'm not aware of any Traveller-branded, plug and play option like Crawford's developed for SWN.
I was thinking about starting a thread sort of like this, but I have a different version of this question for those into Mongoose Traveller: which of the books and supplements (beyond the core book) would you say are really well written and most filled with fun, game-able stuff? These games with extensive product lines are great, but inevitably uneven in quality (how many of your GURPs books would you include in your desert island gaming survival bag?).
Oddly, one of their best products is a free download. Pirates of Drinax (http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpgs/traveller/adventures-and-campaigns/campaign-2-the-pirates-of-drinax.html) gets good reviews on its own merits, not just for the price.
At least in regards to the Mongoose books, I generally find they cover what they claim on the box, so it can be a sort of odd question.
Most of the black books offer... call them mini-games that you can toss into a regular Traveller game or use stand alone. What do I mean?
Well: Mercenary (book 1) offers rules for running a mercenary company, with 'tickets' as missions and a number of supplemental rules for, essentially admin that would allow you to play an abstracted game of 'running a mercenary company' instead of adventuring... or you could use them alongside your adventuring career.
High Guard (book 2) covers Capital Ships, which by their very nature imply a sort of high level, abstracted play beyond the concerns of individual characters. The Capital Ship combat rules reflect this abstraction. Nothing stops you from running 'away party' style campaigns with it, of course.
When you get to Merchant Princes, (book 7), you really get into the mini-game, as running a company is played out with the corporation as character (complete with its own stats and skills), and operates on quarterly turns (three months).
Now, I could call these the 'green books', with the Core book being the "red book", as when you get to Robots (book 9 I beleive) and Dynasty (book 12...) they are 'yellow' lined instead of green. This is where you get into truly optional play, if you like. Robots can be used, poorly, to build robots in game for players or NPCs to have as flunkies, but it really is meant to run a robot themed game (think the Animatrix movies, or Battle Angel Alita... something along those lines), almost by itself. Dynasty doesn't, in my opinion, play well with the core rules, though it could with the Merchant Prince mini-game. Dynasties, working on 30 year generational turns, with their own stats and skills (again!) may be hard to mix with the span of a regular adventuring character's career. It could provide some backdrop, of course.
The hard back Supplements (also in Yellow) tend to say what they are as well. Fighting ships tends to cover naval vessels, including several capitals ships, while Merchants and Gunboats covers ships more likely to be encountered, or used, by regular characters. Vehicles covers vehicles, Supply catalog covers a wide range of equipment (emphasis on guns and armor, of course), over a wide variety of 'tech levels'. Cybernetics covers Cybernetics...
the 'blue books' seem to be adventure themed books. Then you have the two Orange book Compendiums, which compile articles from earlier Traveller updated for Mongoose, which means adventures, locations, people and even off the wall stuff like 'Ships Locker contents', and so forth.... you know, things you might find in a fan magazine.
The books branded "third IMperium', which have splashy artwork instead of boring black with colored lines, cover, well, the Third Imperium setting and generally fall into to catagories: Alien races (Which includes the earth based Humans, weirdly...) and 'locations', or Sectors. The Alien line tends to be very good, though the art quality of all the Mongoose books gets sloppier the later you get in the line. The Sector books seem to be very good as well, but less to my taste, per se, so I have less experience with them. Both are chock full of adventure ideas.
Third party? That I'll leave to people more familiar with them. The stuff I've seen is mostly alternate universe stuff, and generally seems a lot... smaller. No FTL settings and the like, which don't appeal to me.
I was thinking about getting the MongTrav basic book, but now I see it's even more of a gateway drug than the original GDW boxed set. :D
Quote from: Phillip;803080I was thinking about getting the MongTrav basic book, but now I see it's even more of a gateway drug than the original GDW boxed set. :D
Well, it depends. I'm mostly okay with the level of detail of the careers in the basic book (where your d6 skill roll can be considered your actual job or MOS). The career books I've seen tend to drill down farther than I'd like, so between that and Mongoose's uneven editing I actually find them easy to resist. On the other hand, if the core careers are too general for you -as they are for an appreciable amount of the market- then you're in danger of wanting them all.
Quote from: Spike;802850At least in regards to the Mongoose books, I generally find they cover what they claim on the box, so it can be a sort of odd question.
No, I think its a fair question just on quality. The core book impressed me enough I had considered getting all the supplements in order. So I went to my FLGS and ordered Book 1: Mercenary (1st edition) and Adventure 1: Beltstrike... which happen to be two of the weakest books they've put out.
Merc 1e is actively, offensively
bad. So bad they wrote a second edition... not just an editing pass, not even trying to cover all the same ground, but a partly from scratch second edition. (2e has actual functioning systems for tickets and mass combat, but let some of the careers and the skills from 1e fall by the wayside.)
Beltstrike isn't
as bad, but its still underwhelming. Careers that are just a little too close to existing civilian careers and an adventure path biased towards the mundane, with no twists. Pirates of Drinax is superior in every way if you're looking for a campaign to run.
So I understand the question being asked, but I never did pick up the whole line after that, and I'm not the guy to answer it definitively. And it's like pulling teeth to get unvarnished reviews out of compleatist Mongoose fans sometimes.
What I do know: High Guard is fine, but after my bias towards the core book careers I mainly have it for ship rules. I've heard good things about Agent and Scoundrel, but never picked them up. I haven't seen Merchant Prince, but it's by the same author as the 1st Mercenary, so I don't have high hopes. Mercenary 2e does everything it should, but except for a military academy option they skipped the careers, so that's a book you want only if you're going to run that campaign. Central Supply Catalogue is fine, if you understand its more guns than mundane equipment.
My flip through Central Supply was pretty underwhelming; I think maybe the T4 version (which I have, but haven't looked at in ages) covers more.
Quote from: Phillip;803080I was thinking about getting the MongTrav basic book, but now I see it's even more of a gateway drug than the original GDW boxed set. :D
Psst, hey buddy! I hear you might be interested in some
Mongoose Traveller. Lucky for you, right here in my trench coat pocket, is a link to a free download of Book 0: An Introduction To Traveller. (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/58279/Book-0-Introduction-to-Traveller?term=book+0) You want a hit? Get a taste of it? It's some good shit, man....
Quote from: Saladman;803087No, I think its a fair question just on quality. The core book impressed me enough I had considered getting all the supplements in order. So I went to my FLGS and ordered Book 1: Mercenary (1st edition) and Adventure 1: Beltstrike... which happen to be two of the weakest books they've put out.
Merc 1e is actively, offensively bad. So bad they wrote a second edition... not just an editing pass, not even trying to cover all the same ground, but a partly from scratch second edition. (2e has actual functioning systems for tickets and mass combat, but let some of the careers and the skills from 1e fall by the wayside.)
Beltstrike isn't as bad, but its still underwhelming. Careers that are just a little too close to existing civilian careers and an adventure path biased towards the mundane, with no twists. Pirates of Drinax is superior in every way if you're looking for a campaign to run.
Well, it sounds like I'm overdue to replace my Merc book then. How ironic that it is one of the only supplements to NOT pull the mysterious disappearing act. Seriously, aside from the Hardback ship yellow books, I've had to replace every single Trav book except Merc and the pocket sized merchant prince... I'm still trying to figure out what happened to some of them...
As for Scoundrel, it repeats, and, AFAIK, cleans up the asteroid mining rules from Beltstrike. You can still break the setting conceit, given the limits on probability from 2d6, but it does eliminate the need to reference an adventure book for a reasonably common activity.
Quote from: The Butcher;802475Which book(s), if any, offer interesting and useful tools for the enterprising ref who wants to:
- Create sentient, playable, non-humanoid alien species.
- Create menacing, NPC-only alien monsters.
- Create big honkin' spaceships without going crazy and/or spending a lot of time.
- Run mass combats involving planetside armies.
- Run mass combats involving massive fleets of big honkin' spaceships.
- Run a game of very ambitious PCs carving out political and mercantile empires among the stars.
- Run a game of Traveller without FTL, with PCs flying generation ships and using anagathics and cybernetics to survive the long journeys and deriving the profit margins from that crazy old Paul Krugman paper.
Looking for stuff that's available/in-print and worth my gaming dollar. Biased towards official, but good quality third party material can rock my world too.
What's the primary RPG system you've been using before thinking about using Mongoose Traveller?
Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;803614What's the primary RPG system you've been using before thinking about using Mongoose Traveller?
For SF? None.