Mongoose 2300AD: Bravo to Tools for Frontier Living

[Kilgs]

This arrived on my doorstep a few weeks back. I flipped through it and... honest Abe that I am... freely admit that the art was so poor that I threw it on a shelf. Since I bought it to assist with my Jovian Chronicle/2300 mash-up, it wasn't a necessary book and I was turned off enough that I didn't want to spend the time perusing it.

I ended up reading it this past weekend.

The Colonization chapters are absolutely astounding. Big, big kudos to the author(s) of those chapters as it is incredibly interesting, provides mechanics for colony creation and progression, and interesting facts/hooks for every location. It's an amazing collection of information and generation mechanics. EXACTLY what I was looking for.

Haven't even gotten around to looking carefully at the equipment because of the turn-off from the art... but the other parts of the book are worth their weight in gold.

I highly recommend the cover artist be engaged on all future projects.

 

[SpaceBadger]

I agree with review 100%. I found the text of this book very useful, and the art terrible (seems to be an MgT trait).

 

[mechascorpio]

Looking forward to buying it... when and if it is republished with art that I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to a friend. Or a stranger. I'm not holding my breath. I hate missing out on the text and tools; 2300-era SF is of more interest to me than the Third Imperium. But if I bought it at this point, I feel I'd be rewarding bad behavior. Because if I'd bought it without knowing, I'd feel ripped off. And considering that has summed up most of my Traveller experience lately, it might have been the final straw.

 

[atpollard]

I find discussions on artwork for Traveller books fascinating.

Unfortunately, I don't have the entire book to look through to measure your reactions against, but I did check out the preview on DTRPG. Is it safe to say that the artwork that you found disappointing was NOT comparable to the location aerials presented in the preview?

I ask because I found no real room for fault in the preview. The only nit that I found to pick with the preview artwork was the font for the location key - it seemed a little 1950 typewriter rather than far future to me - but that is a trivial matter of personal taste (perhaps it is a TL 5-6 colony).

 

[mechascorpio]

To be clear, it's not just an expectation I have of Traveller books, and Traveller books don't get a free pass because they're Traveller. If I'm going to spend $30 on an illustrated book, I expect the art to not detract from the text.

I don't have it, I'm not buying it (though it was in my Mongoose cart). I saw these in a review on RPGnet (and read the discussions on the board that indicated that there was plenty more like it in the book):

http://i.imgur.com/hicdpKU.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vFjIRW2.jpg

That's just unacceptable. I feel awful for Colin Dunn.

 

[Kilgs]

Correct on both previous threads.

The DTRPG preview only shows the sections I mentioned as amazing... the colonial stuff. No complaints there. Beautiful.

The artwork directly above this post is the actual equipment stuff. Except for the weapons which are lame line drawings which, frankly, could have been done far better with pimpmygun.com.

 

[PFVA63]

Hi,

One issue that I have with stuff like Pimp My Gun (and really alot of other art programs and 3D rendering stuff too) is that its easy to make impressive looking but not very realistic stuff.

For me, one of the things that really drew me into the original 2300AD and Traveller:2300 was how the alot/much of the stuff they showed just had the feeling of being kind of realistic looking to me. As such I didn't mind if they were just line art or not.

In the end I think that I'd kind of prefer stuff that looks like some one has given thought to what they are showing rather than just making it look cool.

On a side note to this, while I do like the images of outposts and stuff, when I got to looking at them a little closer I kind of began to wonder why "this" was lokking "here" and "that" was located "there" as some stuff that seemed like you might want nearby to other stuff wasn't always where you'd maybe think it might make sense to be.