How's the Campaign Guide?

[saundby]

How's the Campaign Guide?

The preview makes it look a lot more like an "Adventure Guide" than a campaign guide to me.

Those who have it, does it actually have campaign material? When I say campaign I think of the milieu, not the details of the present adventure. That is, relationships between worlds and interstellar politics, general nature of the worlds and their internal policies, significant places such as places where special things occur or are made (unique manufacturing of important items, popular interstellar vacation spots, places with interstellar religious significance, etc.) The things that lie behind the motivations of the various parties to the adventures.

The preview material looks like it's at a lower level, what I consider the adventure level, to me.

I also don't like the presentation of random practically-no-background patrons hiring the party as being the major driver for the game. My players may be good with this for one or two adventures, but what they really want is a general background that allows them to take control of their own characters and their actions in the universe rather than set-pieces where they go to the tavern and wait for a patron to show up and give them something to do.

Plus, "there are no minor characters." Once a patron is presented, any decent group is going to want to know what their resources are, what their motivation is, who else has an interest in them and this job, etc.

*shrug*

This is probably part of what's behind a lot of my frustration with the lack of campaign material in the Mongoose stuff. We both say "campaign" but we each mean something different.

 

[MongooseMatt]

The preview material looks like it's at a lower level, what I consider the adventure level, to me.

That is probably fair - it is about running a campaign rather than constructing one, if you see what I mean and, specifically, about making running one as easy as possible for the tired/hassled/lazy/busy referee.

Using this book, it is possible to run a campaign with little to no prep work at all, using the various subsystems present in Traveller. No, it won't be 'deep' but you can add the depth once the structure of the campaign is under way, as the referee sees fit.

Being honest, probably not what you are looking for, by the sounds of it.

 

[tekawiz]

campaign guide for solo play?

How would you rate the campaign guide for solo play. Very high?

It would be cool if it can generate more specifics like where to go next, who you might encounter, Patron, alien, friendly or hostile NPC, and how many, what is the objective of the encounter. Does the guide also generate the worlds and ships?

Basically will it take a player through a series of encounters and generate a narrative just by rolling dice and looking up the tables?

Probably just the opposite of what the first poster was looking for.

Thanks,
Kurt

 

[kafka47]

Terrible. Takes some B movie tropes, misconstrues Traveller and has descriptions that just make you want to cry. Has to be completely redone.

 

[AndreaV]

Terrible. Takes some B movie tropes, misconstrues Traveller and has descriptions that just make you want to cry. Has to be completely redone.

Are we talking Sword Worlds "wouldn't know canon if you hit me over the head with it" bad; or Annililik Run "giant mutant space fungus" bad?

 

[captainjack]

Terrible. Takes some B movie tropes, misconstrues Traveller and has descriptions that just make you want to cry. Has to be completely redone.

o:

NOT wanting to start an argument, but is it significantly worse than the usual classic traveller B-Movie tropes ?
I mean, you know the tropes -"bugs keep arriving in a bus, kill them". Or, "O Noes space nazis landed on the planet we were stealing stuff from", or "we got hired to kill people we never heard of" or "bandeets will raid our veeellage come the harvest and we need seven Samuri I mean adve
nturers" or even "you come across an ancient ruin/artifact with wierd crap/writing in it".
This is an honest question; I'm not expecting Ian Banks from Traveller adventures.

 

[AndreaV]

o:

NOT wanting to start an argument, but is it significantly worse than the usual classic traveller B-Movie tropes ?
I mean, you know the tropes -"bugs keep arriving in a bus, kill them". Or, "O Noes space nazis landed on the planet we were stealing stuff from", or "we got hired to kill people we never heard of" or "bandeets will raid our veeellage come the harvest and we need seven Samuri I mean adve
nturers" or even "you come across an ancient ruin/artifact with wierd crap/writing in it".
This is an honest question; I'm not expecting Ian Banks from Traveller adventures.

There's nothing "too" bad with B-movie tropes, they can make a good basis for adventure. However there's still a line (the Annililik Run "giant mutant space fungus" line) that shouldn't be crossed. Then there's the adherence to canon bad. I don't have Campaign guide so I have to rely on others before I buy.

 

[Amra]

It's a book that assists the GM in creating adventures which can be linked together to create a "campaign". The quality of which will depend on the skills of the GM (a constant in tabletop RPGs).

It's not what the OP is looking for; it is also not a solo-player book (although it may be the best alternate available now).

 

[captainjack]

There's nothing "too" bad with B-movie tropes, they can make a good basis for adventure. However there's still a line (the Annililik Run "giant mutant space fungus" line) that shouldn't be crossed. Then there's the adherence to canon bad. I don't have Campaign guide so I have to rely on others before I buy.

I fear I have given the impression that I feel B-movie tropes are bad. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as my poor persecuted players will testify if asked..

That said, my question is thus: is it bad because it has B-movie sensibilities and you don't like B-movie tropes, or bad as in it makes bad use of BAD B-movie tropes (as pr annalilik run) ? I probably will like the first, but probably not the second.

 

[nats]

I had a look at the preview and decided I couldn't use it in a game myself. You would have to be seriously short of ideas to use the book.

IMO reading any good scifi or watching any good sci-fi film, or for that matter any book or film would provide more ideas that this book.

Its just so generic that it doesn't inspire anything at all. If you have the imagination required to flesh out the ideas in the book you have enough imagination to come up with your own (better) adventure ideas as well.

I cant imagine anyone going into a game and not planning anything whatsoever and using this instead, and it being any fun at all for your group if you ran an adventure that way. It wouldn't take more than a couple of these random events to get your players questioning whether you are in fact just making the whole game up on spec and getting bored.

I wish MGT would stop producing this stuff and just write some good short adventures along the lines of the classic ones that you can pick up and run easily and quickly and ones that dont take a month to read and digest first. But they would have to find some decent writers first.

 

[CosmicGamer]

Since we have the negative review from someone who never read the book, now I give you the possitive review from someone who doesn't have the book.

My guess is the campaign book has very few original ideas and is instead things found elsewhere - condensed and hopefully organized.

The campaign guide could be like a walk down memory lane as it helps you recall all your favorite moments from books and movies.

For younger people without an extensive background or people who have lives with limited free time, the campaign guide may help spark an idea without watching numerous movies and reading a shelf full of books.

Also, those solo players want to roll the dice and have a surprise.

 

[tekawiz]

Since you have the Campaign guide could you actually generate a character and play through different encounters just by rolling the dice and looking up the results on the table. If so, this would actually be pretty cool.

 

[kafka47]

Are we talking Sword Worlds "wouldn't know canon if you hit me over the head with it" bad; or Annililik Run "giant mutant space fungus" bad?

Annillik Run looks good compared to this. Whole thing has to be redone...my review will appear on RPG.net soon. But, essentially, there is no respect for anything of Traveller there. Just plunked a few Traveller/OTU references in but really poorly done.

And, yes, you could say that that Traveller is a broad church - but not this broad - they ignored some of the basic premises of any Traveller universe - unless they got the license for "It came from the late, late show". These seeds make Blood Brothers look good.

 

[saundby]

Thanks for the replies. (Matt, particularly.)

I'll be looking for the RPG.net review even though it looks like this isn't a book for me.

Maybe when I have time I'll write up some of my own campaign building material for submission. Right now I'm busy dealing with the fact that I've unexpectedly become CEO of a nonprofit corporation just in time for the annual taxes and corporate reporting paperwork.

 

[nats]

Since we have the negative review from someone who never read the book, now I give you the positive review from someone who doesn't have the book.

Assuming you were referring to me I wasn't reviewing, just providing my personal thoughts based on the preview which is all I can base them on at the moment having not seen it in a shop yet. But from the preview I could tell it is not for me, even before I read the review below and following comments on the Mongoose forum.

If you want a review go here, pretty damning stuff:

http://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2012/03/mongoose-traveller-campaign-guide.html

Mongoose cock it up again - more Version 2 material to go with CSC, Mercenary, Amnimal Encounters, Robots etc.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Wow, hope my product is okay. I suffer dyslexia, and often even when I read a document a dozen times I'll still miss the same mistakes over and over again.

It just sounds like this person needed another set of eyes to go over his writing. That way the review could have focused on the game mechanics itself.

 

[saundby]

Sounds like they needed more than editing.

A decent knowledge of common Traveller DMs, frex.

The creation of a separate reality for a given table is pretty old-school RPG, it takes me back to the early D&D stuff where they'd set up creatures that had their own little combat systems and such (e.g. Giant Frogs in Temple of Elemental Evil.)

Not that I think it was a desirable thing, either then or now.

 

[AndreaV]

Assuming you were referring to me I wasn't reviewing, just providing my personal thoughts based on the preview which is all I can base them on at the moment having not seen it in a shop yet. But from the preview I could tell it is not for me, even before I read the review below and following comments on the Mongoose forum.

If you want a review go here, pretty damning stuff:

http://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2012/03/mongoose-traveller-campaign-guide.html

Mongoose cock it up again - more Version 2 material to go with CSC, Mercenary, Amnimal Encounters, Robots etc.

OMG, "Battledresses"! Now I have this image of Strephon striding to the Iridium Throne flanked by a squad of burly marines in a uniform attractive floral print off-the-shoulder number. I think I need a brillo pad for the inside of my brain.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Oh wow, I completely missed the marine thing. Now I'm glad most of the characters I rolled up were scouts! o:

 

[scott]

The hell is a "necronumnum"?

Hah! I about snorted tea up my nose on that one. Some sort of hors d'ouevre for the dead? Tidbits of really tasty dead things? The hell?