Does Mongoose Traveller leave you cold?

[Commander Drax]

Like everyone is laughing at this picture, it's not the art it's the quality control!


Mongoose obviously paid money for that pic (and not just that pic) and all I can say is that it's crap, they wasted their money and could have used the space for other stuff, like more text. I don't care if the average mongoose product is a few pages shorter because crap art has been dropped out of it. It puts me off buying the book. I know it shouldn't but it does and that's that. I am 38 years old, not 3.8! it's bad marketing when you stuff your products full of space consuming crap. That Vargr is rippling with muscle when his strength stat is 7 (Mr average) he looks likes he's spent his entire life eating steroids. The art is competently done but is a waste of everyone's time money and mental processing power.

Bring back Blair Reynolds that's what I say...

 

[drnuncheon]

]That Vargr is rippling with muscle when his strength stat is 7 (Mr average) he looks likes he's spent his entire life eating steroids. The art is competently done but is a waste of everyone's time money and mental processing power.

OH OH don't forget that he's a prisoner but he's holding a rifle! How could he get a rifle?

(ahem)

I somehow doubt the art direction included character stats. They probably said "we need a picture of a badass-looking Vargr prisoner" and that is exactly what they got.

That picture makes me say "Here is a dude that is bad enough they have to give him a high-tech cybermuzzle to keep him from going all Hannibal Lecter on someone's face. And he's pissed off, he probably just took that rifle from a guard and now all hell is going to break loose. I wonder what the players are going to do?"

See, the art provides inspiration, which makes it good art for an RPG.

 

[Commander Drax]

i'm all for art providing inspiration, but this just makes me puke!

As a sci fi writer I don't need crap art to put me off the game, I'm a visual thinker and art makes a difference to me. DGP managed good art, so did T20, GDW wasn't bad, with mixtures of good and some poor art. T4 even had better artwork than this, (even after dropping the Foss Artwork from consideration). It just puts me off that's all. The thread was called 'Does Mongoose Traveller Leave You Cold'. For me it does, this is one major reason why.

 

[Kilgs]

If I let crap art put me off a game, I don't think I would have ever looked at CT...

I agree with most here. If the art inspires you GREAT! If it doesn't, what's the substance of the product, because I didn't pay an art book. I bought an RPG book.

 

[spinwardpirate]

heh heh... are you sure... the good thing about CT was the near total lack of art!
:rofl:

 

[Thunderbolt]

The Vargr mentioned earlier looks cartoon like, which would look fine in the right context, but doesn't seem to be the right tone for Traveller.

Traveller for me was always the Keith and Dietrick artwork, not forgetting that fabulous Jim Burns picture that graced one of the lead figure boxes.

 

[kafka47]

Funny that...as the resident Pain in the Art for the Traveller boards...I rather like the Vargr...save the muzzle...but it is keeping with the Prison Planet motiff. Long have I felt that beyond the CT era with some notable MT exceptions we have have been making the Vargr more puppyish rather wolf-like. Therefore, I have been taken illustrations of werewolves in times past to use for pirates & corsairs. Gotta bring the levels of fear of the Vargr back.

 

[Kilgs]

Gotta bring the levels of fear of the Vargr back.

Definitely. I dug around for some old Rifts/TMNT pictures for my Trav game and couldn't find many. The wolfen were a great feel for Vargr. As are the Canim in James Butcher's novels (Calderon Cycle or something) but, unfortunately, they're fantasy so I can't find any decent pics with guns. But I definitely think the Vargr need to be portrayed as alien-wolves in their own right instead of card-playing dogs around a table.

In fact, I was just wondering why I had never seen a good portrayal of the Vargr corsairs mentality. Granted, I don't own every CT supplement or adventure but the prospect of several sectors of raiding wolf packs should be the epitome of terror along the coreward portions of the Imperium.

 

[ThunderChilde]

Okay for the record, 44 year old gamer, going back to '77. My first experience was getting eaten by a black pudding.

RPG art has for most of that time been something you glanced at, didn't pay great attention too till Paladium Games hit the street. The old Mechaniods game had illustrative and head nodding art work. The Palladium RPG itself had very good art, and it has carried through the rest of the games they have published.

Iron Crown's MERP had some good art, Gurps never really aspired to great art, 40k's art is very expressive if you like the game. I always liked the art for Paranoia. Dragon Magazine was on a roll with cover art if nothing else for quite a while. Some of the WOD art was good , a few peices inspiring, most just continued the feel.

The original art in TMB was pretty awful, the pocket version is much, much better. I will freely admit that my sence of RPG art is informed by comics, manga and anime. From that prism the Vargr passes muster. It should make you somewhat afraid to be in close proximinity to him.

Vargr are not dog derived, but far closer to the wolf and its cousins, it should be scary if its angry.

 

[Jamus]

you guys will complain about anything wont you?

 

[fiat_knox]

I don't. Even if I have cause to, I don't.

And with Mongoose, I don't have cause to complain.

At all.

Let me explain.

First of all, it's an independent setting. You can run it in the Third Imperium, or you can set the game in your own Traveller Universe.

So far, the supplements which have to date been released don't worry about the Imperial setting. Your Third Imperium might have a Sylea - class battleship class: or it might not. Your TU might have a sully fledged Scout service like the IISS and the IGS, or it might run its Scout service more along the lines of STar Trek's Starfleet, or even the Family d'Alembert of E E Doc Smith's books.

Even within the Third Imperium setting, the year for the supplements is set currently at 1105. Characters could run the Fifth Frontier War, or the Rebellion / Hard Times / Virus / New Era, or choose to ignore all of that and just focus on a Traveller universe where things did not go the way you know they are supposed to go.

It looks as if Mongoose are working on keeping this product going for some time. They might choose to launch a Fifth Frontier War supplement some time, setting it in 1107, or they might leave all of that future well and truly alone. Hell, FFE might pull the plug on the lot tomorrow. Who knows?

All I care about is that, for the first time since I got involved with Traveller, a Traveller product has arrived on the market which feels like the original. No Imperial assassination, no Virus, no Vampire Ships.

And it's a game where the player characters' choices could determine the fate of an entire universe, if that is what the Referee decides. Not some Archduke climbing over smouldering dead bodies to claim a throne six Jump months away, and far away from the action. No. The player characters.

So you'll excuse me if I don't join in with the bitching. Mongoose Traveller has made me fall in love with the old game all over again, like finding out that the lover you thought had fallen over a cliff has come back to you, only she has amnesia and she's actually been sculpted out of disparate body parts ... but it's definitely her original brain inside that head.

I'm sure of that.

I think.

 

[rust]

Oh, I am very much tempted to complain.

Not about what Mongoose has done so far, all the parts I am interested in
fit nicely into my setting with very, very few minor problems.

I would like to complain that there is not more Mongoose Traveller stuff at
hand right now.
You see, I urgently need a robot design system and a vehicle design system
for my setting, and some more of the excellent adventures like Type S and
One Crowded Hour.
And then there are the equipment supplement and the world building supple-
ment already mentioned by Mongoose, and ... you get my point, I think.

 

[rancke]

First of all, it's an independent setting. You can run it in the Third Imperium, or you can set the game in your own Traveller Universe.

You can say the exact same thing about every other Traveller incarnation plus a goodly number of other roleplaying rule systems. Rules and settings are two different things. Sometimes there's a certain connection in that some rules are unsuitable for running the kind of adventures you tend to run in a given setting, but that's all.

So far, the supplements which have to date been released don't worry about the Imperial setting. Your Third Imperium might have a Sylea - class battleship class: or it might not. Your TU might have a sully fledged Scout service like the IISS and the IGS, or it might run its Scout service more along the lines of STar Trek's Starfleet, or even the Family d'Alembert of E E Doc Smith's books.

Sure, the same rules can be used for different settings and as I understand it, Mongoose is trying to make the rules as generic as possible. And that's fine. Just as you can use non-Traveller rules for running Traveller campaigns, you can use Traveller rules in non-Traveller settings (Like, for instance, 2300AD and Babylon 5 :devil

Even within the Third Imperium setting, the year for the supplements is set currently at 1105. Characters could run the Fifth Frontier War, or the Rebellion / Hard Times / Virus / New Era, or choose to ignore all of that and just focus on a Traveller universe where things did not go the way you know they are supposed to go.

The history of a setting is tied to the setting, not to rules. Things aren't supposed to go in any specific way unless you choose to avail yourself of the setting material. If you think MGT is the greatest set of rules ever, you can use them to run adventures in Piper's Federation or Asimov's Foundation or Anderson's Terran Empire or de Camp's Viagens Interplanetarias universe or Bujold's Vorkosiverse, etc. etc.

All I care about is that, for the first time since I got involved with Traveller, a Traveller product has arrived on the market which feels like the original. No Imperial assassination, no Virus, no Vampire Ships.

The campaign setting for T20 didn't have any of that. Neither did the settings for T4 or GT. And if someone really liked the MT or TNE rules but disliked the Rebellion and everything that came after (in the history of the OTU), what's to stop them from using those rules to run adventures in the Ziru Sirka, the Interstellar Wars Era, the Rule of Man, the Long Night, Milieu 0, M200, M400, M600, M800, or M1000? (Not to mention Pipers's Sword Worlds, Asimov's Caves of Steel, Anderson's Poleosotechnic League, Niven's Known Space[*], Vance's Oikumene, etc etc.).


[*] On no account to be confused with Charted Space .

And it's a game where the player characters' choices could determine the fate of an entire universe, if that is what the Referee decides. Not some Archduke climbing over smouldering dead bodies to claim a throne six Jump months away, and far away from the action. No. The player characters.

First of all, that's once again a setting issue; second, the scope the player characters have is exactly the same before and after the Rebellion, no matter what rules you use. If any of the things the participants of any of the CT adventures did affected the fate of a subdivision of the Imperium (I assume that 'the fate of an entire universe' is hyperbole), it was purely inadvertently and as a result of adventure writer's fiat (I'm thinking about the consequences of the event in Twilight's Peak here).

If anything, the chaos of the Rebellion would give PCs greater scope for making a difference to greater numbers of people, as Hard Times touched upon.


Hans

 

[rust]

You can say the exact same thing about every other Traveller incarnation plus a goodly number of other roleplaying rule systems. Rules and settings are two different things. Sometimes there's a certain connection in that some rules are unsuitable for running the kind of adventures you tend to run in a given setting, but that's all.

Quite true. I have used almost all of the Traveller versions for my settings,
without ever using the Third Imperium setting for a campaign.

Mongoose Traveller makes this just a little easier, with more rules options
for non-OTU technology like hyperdrives or railguns. Traveller New Era's
Fire, Fusion & Steel had such options, too, although I found them too com-
plicated for my purposes, and appreciate that Mongoose Traveller's options
are much easier to handle.

 

[Commander Drax]

Classic Traveller had very little art, what there was of it was setting derived or compatible, DGP had great art and the DGP products that I own are still precious to me even now. Good quality art enhances a setting, poor quality detracts from it. I don't have much of a problem with the Mongoose Rules (apart from a few minor points, as I'm sure we all do). I just miss the excellent production values of DGP and the Superb Editing and quality of text found in the TNE stuff (under Dave Nilsen). I just don't understand why the present license holders cant seem to beat or improve upon these standards.

Every Traveller rule set has its strengths and weaknesses and every rule set is pretty much setting independent even the MegaTraveller rules only contained snippetts about the rebellion or the Traveller OTU. TNE was designed from the ground up to be a set of rules for any sci fi universe, indeed as was T4 which was designed to support multiple milieus, Classic Traveller was designed as a generic science fiction ruleset and only began including passing references to the Imperium from Book 4 Mercenary onwards. So it's only a continuation of this fine tradition we find in Mongoose and none of us should be surprised that you can use the Mongoose rules with any Sci Fi Universe. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

All I know is DGP would never have used that Vargr picture and their products very often featured Vargr characters, i.e. Villani and Vargr, The Flaming Eye etc. The art provided by Blair Reynolds was gritty, had realism and was often exciting and inspiring and deserved its place in the product. Much of Mongoose's art doesn't. You can dress it up as much as you like, that Vargr pic is pure crap from 100 different directions. Mongoose needs to realise that things like this kill sales, I for one no longer fancy buying prison planet.

 

[BillDowns]

The only objective fact about art is that it is subjective.

To me, that Vargr picture is not crap, but not great, either. On the other hand, the covers of MT and TNE that I have seen are crap comic-book covers, IMO, and I would hide those books if they were given to me.

To each their own......

 

[rust]

While talking about art ...

What I really am missing are more pictures of the equipment described in
the various Mongoose Traveller books.

I very much liked the approach of 2300 AD, with an illustration for almost
every piece of equipment described in the books. This was something I
could show to the players to create a "shared space of imagination", whe-
re each of us had at least a very similar idea of what a certain piece of
gear looked like.

Not so with Mongoose Traveller. And while it is nice to have a deck plan
for every ship, at least for me a picture of each important and often used
piece of equipment would be far more useful.

Next time we will meet to play I will introduce some mining droids from Belt-
strike into my setting, and I have no doubt at all that the players will ask
me what they look like ...

 

[fiat_knox]

The only reservation I would ever have for buying Prison Planet is that I really don't do good prison stories.

As a Referee, I really am bad at running prison stories. My one weakness, I regret.

I would only hope that Prison Planet helps me to come up with better inspirations than the stories I have tried to run.

 

[Icosahedron]

I don't like art in rulebooks. I'm paying for it and it doesn't serve a purpose.

Far from having a common perception, I find that pictures seldom match what I imagine a vehicle/weapon/whatever to look like, and consequently they tend to be disappointing to me and counter-informative to the players.

It can even get you into arguments of the "well it shows the thing has the sights mounted on the side in the rule-book" type.

 

[Jacqual]

Well the Pic isn't the greatest that I do agree. But I do think it is better then most of the pics I have seen of the Vargr as a race. Almost all of them are a pic of a human with a bushy tail and the head of a german shepherd or a husky with most of those looking like they were photoshopped badly by peeps practicing for doing pics of celebs doing things they dont do infront of cameras. I dont need to go into anymore detailsd then that.