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Two more RPG Bundles - Mongoose Traveller
Dec. 11th, 2023 07:59 pmTwo bundles for Mongoose's editions of the venerable SF RPG Traveller, one a repeat and the other new
In 2021 I said This feels like a return to the roots of Traveller; without a lot of the grimdark elements that predominated in later editions, and with rules that are much closer to the versions that the game began with. There are a lot of new careers and options, but it ought to be possible to get up and running fast if you're familiar with the original game. This isn't to say that it's perfect - I found the explanation of character generation a little confusing, even though I actually know pretty much how it works. There's a flow chart that helps considerably but more of a simplified "these are the things you need to do in this order" explanation might help. Presentation is very good, and avoids some of the pitfalls by minimizing illustrations where they aren't really needed - for example, there is only one illustration of a player character, a spotty nerd just entering college, in the first fifty pages, and sexual balance seems fairly even in later pictures, with zero gratuitous nakedness, at least for pictures of humans.
I'm personally not so interested in Mercenaries, since I tend not to run military campaigns, but the 1978 version was one of the most popular supplements for the original rules, and at a quick glance this is a good updating of it.
The bottom line is that Traveller has been around nearly as long as D&D, and as a result there's a vast range of material in print for it: Supplements, campaigns, space sectors, alternative universes with variant history, and anything else you could possibly want for an SF game, and publishers like Mongoose have kept it up to the standards people expect from modern RPGs. If you're even slightly interested in running an SF campaign it should be high on your list of systems to check out.
In 2021 I said This feels like a return to the roots of Traveller; without a lot of the grimdark elements that predominated in later editions, and with rules that are much closer to the versions that the game began with. There are a lot of new careers and options, but it ought to be possible to get up and running fast if you're familiar with the original game. This isn't to say that it's perfect - I found the explanation of character generation a little confusing, even though I actually know pretty much how it works. There's a flow chart that helps considerably but more of a simplified "these are the things you need to do in this order" explanation might help. Presentation is very good, and avoids some of the pitfalls by minimizing illustrations where they aren't really needed - for example, there is only one illustration of a player character, a spotty nerd just entering college, in the first fifty pages, and sexual balance seems fairly even in later pictures, with zero gratuitous nakedness, at least for pictures of humans.
I'm personally not so interested in Mercenaries, since I tend not to run military campaigns, but the 1978 version was one of the most popular supplements for the original rules, and at a quick glance this is a good updating of it.
The bottom line is that Traveller has been around nearly as long as D&D, and as a result there's a vast range of material in print for it: Supplements, campaigns, space sectors, alternative universes with variant history, and anything else you could possibly want for an SF game, and publishers like Mongoose have kept it up to the standards people expect from modern RPGs. If you're even slightly interested in running an SF campaign it should be high on your list of systems to check out.
