MGT Only: Book 1: Mercenary Second Edition - Now on Drivethru

[MongooseMatt]

From freelance soldiers of fortune to grunts of a military charter, there are mercenaries from all walks of life across the universe. It is a good life of adventure for most travellers, and for those fortunate enough to survive a long enough, wealth, fame and adventure is almost certainly assured. Of course, there is always the chance the mercenary dies a horrible death fighting a battle they never should have joined – but that is just a hazard of the job.

Book 1: Mercenary Second Edition gives you everything you need to play a combat-capable character and lead others into battle. You can grab your copy at;

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/130477/Book-1-Mercenary-Second-Edition?affiliate_id=7242

This all new edition of Book 1: Mercenary provides a great many rules and revisions suitable for all ground-based combat in any Traveller campaign. With this book, you will be able to;

* Recruit squads, platoons, companies and entire armies from across the stars to create your own force of mercenaries.

* Engage in massed battles between these forces using a new system that is just as quick as combat between individual characters!

* Take your character through university and higher education before embarking on a career.

* Wield the all new Destructive weaponry to annihilate any foe you meet on the battlefield, while using forward observers to rain artillery and orbital fire down upon them.

* Use the all new ticket system to pick up mercenary contracts and earn massive amounts of Credits.

* Build strongholds, fortresses and bunker complexes, and then engage in sieges and assaults to destroy them.

* Learn the secrets of bulk-buying huge amounts of weapons at a discount, and pick up some new vehicles designed specifically for mercenaries along the way.

* Apply the new gun combat skills and revisions to your games for a greatly enhanced battle experience.

 

[Kilgs]

“Book 1: Mercenary Second Edition is a guide to the gritty life of the hired gun.”

I call BS. Mercenary 2nd edition is… junk. Prepare to be disappointed. As an appendix to the 1st edition, you could consider this a decent product but for those of you who wanted a revamp of Merc 1st, the only real thing you’re getting here is Mass Combat and redone character generation tables for Wet Navy, Air Force. And some rules for building evil villain lairs.

I'm not quite sure what Mongoose was hoping to accomplish with this book. They could have released the Mass Combat rules as $4 pdf and gotten better reviews. That would still be a price point of $1 per page (yes, Mass Combat is 4 pages long) but hey who's counting?

Character Generation has completely disposed of the Merc careers so I assume we’re supposed to use the 1st edition ones. Only Wet Navy and Air Force are in the updated 2nd edition. They do add College and Academies but I believe those have been made available already. Not exactly juicy new stuff. I went through the character generation section and found no mention of the Merc 1st careers. No idea whether they are erasing them or whether this book is supposed to operate as an add-on… in fact, this product never mentions the other book that I can tell. So handle that how you will…

They’ve redone about five (5) skills which is helpful in some respects. This section seems more like “Update” or “Errata” and should have been published as a free pdf. It merely cleans up some of the more confusing additions that have been bolted on in later supplements. They changed some specialties around and, it appears, dispensed with several skills altogether (Recruitment, Discipline). This section consists of approximately 2.5 pages. Mildly helpful but most of the text seemed regurgitated.

Building a Mercenary Force is pretty pathetic. I have an entire page of modifiers for how many people I can recruit but absolutely no information on training them. They just come with the skills you want. There’s a table of DM's for that.

Force Organization is about 2 pages of useful stuff… then nothing. They give you the ability to add Traits to your units. There are four Traits. Strong, Weak, Marksman and Support.

Thanks.

The Ticket section MUST be relying on the 1st edition book since it has seventeen sample tickets and nothing else. No system for building them, no system for the little perks or haggling or anything interesting at all. There is no way to determine how much a ticket should cost other than by gauging what unit is requested and coming up with a set average based on something.

“You should get tickets as a mercenary. Here are some. You can use these to create your own.” That’s cool. I can make my own. But if I’m running a Merc campaign, or buying a Mercenary book with a chapter titled Tickets, I’d expect something a bit more meaty.

Payment section is mildly interesting except that it regurgitates text from other books. Although the additional salaries per rank table is helpful.

Chapter “Characters In Mass Combat” actually says:

“Generally speaking, the players own characters should be kept away from mass combat…”

Which would be excellent advice if I wasn't planning on playing a MERCENARY COMBAT campaign!

I’m not going to go over the Mass Combat rules or the Stronghold and Siege rules. The Stronghold stuff looks pretty cool and has all sorts of fun options you can add to your Bunker of Death. Because if there is one thing we know about modern warfare it’s that having a BASE and sitting behind walls is the worst idea ever. But hey, evil lairs are fun to build so I dig this section.

For Mass Combat and Stronghold/Siege rules, I’m sure they’re both lovely sets of rules but I doubt that I will ever look at this book again. For those of you are really interested, you could likely put 1st and 2nd edition together and use Mass Combat and the Ticket system and maybe come up with some cool stuff. But calling this a 2nd edition when it's clearly an appendix is just wrong.

EDIT: Since Mass Combat is 4pgs, I was able to review it. I'm sure it works but I wouldn't call it a Mass Combat system. It's pretty simple and has no frills. Unit=character=standard combat+Morale.

For a $15 pdf, it should come with a sticker or something.

I’ll stick to 2300 material from now on. Knowing my luck, they’ll likely just cancel the line.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Hi there,

I call BS. Mercenary 2nd edition is… junk.

Very sorry to hear that.

Character Generation has completely disposed of the Merc careers

I honestly don't believe they added anything to the game that was not already covered by the core careers. Whether someone is in a planet's ground forces or a mercenary army, he is still a soldier.

They were one of the unpopular sections in the original Mercenary and so I was happy to drop them.

They do add College and Academies but I believe those have been made available already.

The have been completely revised and opened up to all careers, not just military specific ones.

Not exactly juicy new stuff.

Well, YMMV, but new options for character creation are quite funky, I think, plus we added Events for advanced education which always adds more colour to a character. You can now be a militant activist before ever starting a proper career...

whether this book is supposed to operate as an add-on

Second edition, it replaces it.

They’ve redone about five (5) skills which is helpful in some respects.

The Gun Combat changes are arguably the biggest revision we have done for Traveller since release, and a very important one.

This section seems more like “Update” or “Errata” and should have been published as a free pdf.

Well, we could - we could release everything for free, but you would very quickly run out of Traveller material.

It has been a good few years since the first Mercenary came out and, it has to be said, reception of this edition has generally been very positive. In fact, yours is the first negative review I have seen

Building a Mercenary Force is pretty pathetic. I have an entire page of modifiers for how many people I can recruit but absolutely no information on training them.

Page 7, Instruction and Training.

Force Organization is about 2 pages of useful stuff… then nothing.

We did not want to lock people into set organisations, we really wanted anything to be possible so these rules could be used with any setting (as befits a black cover book). So, if you want an army whose principle squad was three men armed with one rifle and two rocket launchers, you can do it.

We also wanted everything to be simple so any Traveller rule could be brought into this system, no matter how far in the future it is released, and that players could build forces quickly, without stress and with no advanced maths.

They give you the ability to add Traits to your units. There are four Traits. Strong, Weak, Marksman and Support.

Thanks.

Combine this list with skills, and you can create just about any type of soldier you can imagine, from Terminator Space Marines to dandys armed with tickle sticks. Again, we wanted to keep everything here simple so it was quick and adaptable.

The Ticket section MUST be relying on the 1st edition book since it has seventeen sample tickets and nothing else. No system for building them, no system for the little perks or haggling or anything interesting at all.

Ah ha! When we started this book, we were indeed going to have a wide-ranging system that handled all of the above.

However, the basic premise of this book (as I said above) was that it be adaptable to _any_ setting and that players would be able to do _anything_ they wanted. In a nutshell, we wanted this book to be a toolkit.

A system for the random creation is inherently limited, and as Tickets are effectively Adventures for Mercenaries, it dawned on us that we should take a leaf out of Classic Traveller and treat them as Patrons. A referee should either be writing his own or drawing from a list (and yes, we are planning a Patrons style book to support Mercenary, very possibly for settings other than Third Imperium - we are already talking about a 2300AD-based one)

There is no way to determine how much a ticket should cost other than by gauging what unit is requested and coming up with a set average based on something.

How do you judge what a Patron pays? This is something that, generally speaking, the referee controls depending on his players and the swtyle of campaign he wants.

However, if you take a quick trip to page 37, under Getting Paid, we provide guidelines for referees to follow.

“You should get tickets as a mercenary. Here are some. You can use these to create your own.” That’s cool. I can make my own. But if I’m running a Merc campaign, or buying a Mercenary book with a chapter titled Tickets, I’d expect something a bit more meaty.

We provided 17 straight away (more than you get for Patrons in the core book), and there will be more in the future.

Chapter “Characters In Mass Combat” actually says:

“Generally speaking, the players own characters should be kept away from mass combat…”

Which would be excellent advice if I wasn't planning on playing a MERCENARY COMBAT campaign!

Hang on, a bit of context is required here...

That section is all about how characters should be handled in a full-on battle, and what it is saying is that they should not simply be rolled up into a unit and fight as Private A N Other soldier. It is saying they should be treated as individuals doing heroic things - in other words, they may shoot an enemy soldier who is part of an enemy platoon, rather than using the mass combat rules to attack the platoon itself (which they would not get very far in, being just one person).

So, yes, players should very much be front and centre in a battle, they just do not use the mass combat rules.

I’m not going to go over the Mass Combat rules or the Stronghold and Siege rules.

Bit of a shame, as I think those are very much strong points of the book...

The Stronghold stuff looks pretty cool and has all sorts of fun options you can add to your Bunker of Death. Because if there is one thing we know about modern warfare it’s that having a BASE and sitting behind walls is the worst idea ever.

Very true - but for a few possibilities;

1. You might be on a low TL world and have to use a castle or WWI style bunker network.
2. You might be on a very high TL world with a fortress that can resist attackers.
3. Your ticket might require you to defend a fortress.
4. Your fortress might be on the sea floor, or buried half a mile below the seabed (all the rules to make this kind of base are in the book).
5. You might get caught by a surprise attack behind your front line and have to defend whatever structure you happen to be in.
6. Your ticket may require you to resupply a strongpoint that is already under siege.

Those are just off the top of my head.

But hey, evil lairs are fun to build so I dig this section.

That too.

For Mass Combat and Stronghold/Siege rules, I’m sure they’re both lovely sets of rules but I doubt that I will ever look at this book again.

That is a real shame, as I think you have missed the best bits of the book.

EDIT: Since Mass Combat is 4pgs, I was able to review it. I'm sure it works but I wouldn't call it a Mass Combat system. It's pretty simple and has no frills. Unit=character=standard combat+Morale.

That is the point - it integrates everything into mass combat, from the core rules to anything we may publish in the future. It will all just slot right in with no conversion necessary by the referee. In play, you can run mass combats as fast as you can a firefight with the players' own characters alone.

It is also not trapped by scale - for firefights, use the core rules. When squads and platoons start clashing, switch to mass combat. You can go up from there to have entire companies, regiments, even continent-spanning armies fighting, all resolved as fast a a character-based firefight.

We really tried to give you the maximum flexibility with these rules, so you could do _anything_, not just 'standard' mercenary-recruitment-land-on-planet-fight-get-paid adventures.

You really can do anything with these rules.

I’ll stick to 2300 material from now on. Knowing my luck, they’ll likely just cancel the line.

I can, at least give you some good news there. The new Bayern manuscript is due very soon, Libreville has just appeared, Ships of the French Arm is rocking up to be the best ships book we have ever done, more 2300AD books are in the process of being written right now, and we are even talking about a 2300AD book for mercenaries, using Mercenary 2 as a base and introducing 2300AD mercenary forces, tickets, ships and weapons.

We have also revised the core 2300AD book (to be delivered in the next couple of weeks), but there _will_ be a free PDF updating you to that one. Likely popping up on our site next week.

I am very sorry you did not like Mercenary II (I am rather fond of it myself), but I wanted to explain to you why we made the choices we did, and let you know that all feedback is welcome.

 

[Orr]

I call BS. Mercenary 2nd edition is… junk. Prepare to be disappointed.

Typical of the line, sadly. Padding, old materials cut and pasted, no grasp of the subject matter, a few new bits which amount to very little of the book's 130 or so pages, etc., etc. The usual Mongoose MO.

The reviews at rpgnow are typical of those I've read elsewhere; ... this has put me off purchasing any of their books..., ... can't help feeling cheated..., solves things by getting rid of them..., etc., etc. One reviewer "praises" the book by pointing out it is an attempt to fix the original, a product they to go on to remind the reader is the weakest of a pretty weak group. They go on further to say there is no real compulsion to buy it.

Apparently, the book won't suck if you don't bother to buy it. :file_21:

And that's from someone looking real hard for a silver lining! :file_21:

Anyway, the price has dropped by $10 since the initial release in May. If you really need it, wait another six months or so for people to start flushing their copies out of their collection via eBay.

 

[atpollard]

Just a general observation on the subject of reviews:

Many (if not most) reviews seem to focus on first impressions during a single read through of the book, often sprinkled with comparisons between the new product and something similar that came before (Not a criticism, just an observation). The reviews of the first MgT Mercenary book were like that, too.

I didn't buy the first Mercenary when it came out because I tend to play non-mercenary campaigns, but I had the opportunity to participate in a Mercenary PbP that included equipment from the First MgT Mercenary book (and probably some other stuff that I just didn't realize came from the book) and it was a blast! Sure, not everything in MgT Mercenary (1 ed) was appropriate for every campaign, but none of the reviews that blasted some specific aspect that the reviewer hated ever mentioned that there was actually a lot of Role Playing fun to be gained from the equipment in Mercenary.

So has anyone actually PLAYED the MgT Mercenary 2ed rules?
How was it?

 

[tzunder]

I didn't find much of value in MgT Mercenary 1e. The careers were essentially in the Core and the weapon stuff was in the Central Supply Catalogue. I was never very interested in the ticket system. So actually I prefer the sound of the new version. It's on my to-buy list.

 

[eclipse]

Looking for that silver lining as well...

I wasn't thrilled with the first edition. Mainly due to what I considered a poor Iron Mongery section compared to the CT Mercenary book. No SMGs, but it had quad barreled magnetic dinner plate launchers!

I did like the character generation section, but then I'm easily amused by character generation.

I'm temped to drop the $15 for the PDF version just to see what changed.

From what I've seen of RTT in general, the folks at Mongoose are doing good work at producing material that has a good CT feel, but upgraded for the early 21st Century. So I'm leaning toward betting $15 that the second edition is an improvement on the first edition, which is generally considered one of the weakest books in the line.