There is a rejig of the space battle rules to include fleet sized battles, I can’t see me using these in my campaign myself, but I could read them without tearing my eyes out with tedium. However, Mongoose have had the audacity to make it interesting and understandable to those who haven’t studied Physics at post-graduate level, the sly rogues.

It covers the same area as the GDW booklet: it fleshes out the space-based elements of Traveller by giving us ship design rules more info on life in space info on the navy and belt mining and much about weapons and equipment for ships. They must be the most universally ignored ruleset in the entire history of role-playing, I have never, ever, not once, met a single Traveller player or referee who has ever, ever, ever, ever used these rules.Īnyway, moving on … Mongoose’s High Guard differs greatly from the original (thank the Great Architect). They are so boring it is quite interesting how boring they are 2. There are two things that make the space combat in the original High Guard interesting: 1. If by ‘advanced space combat rules’ they meant ‘a bunch of rules that takes the quite nippy and exciting space combat rules from the basic set and turns them into a tedious, time consuming administrative process that bores players and GM alike to a whole new level of ennui and dispair’, then the designers can congratulate themselves on exceeding their remit. Here we were introduced to what the designers liked to call the ‘advanced space combat rules’. In the final section of High Guard things really went awry. The following section introduced new weapons and equipment for spaceships, and the rules for designing bigger ships than detailed in the basic rules (mmm – just getting slightly bored now). GDW’s High Guard started absolutely fine, the opening section was similar to that of Mercenary, except it targeted payers with characters with a navy (space navy, that is) background. High Guard was a different kettle of fish all together.

This was all jolly splendid and contributed to gaming sessions no end. The second section gave details on military grade weapons such as the Gauss rifle (yay!), military vehicles and so on. The first part of the booklet gave you an advanced and more detailed method of creating a character from specific branches of the army.

Mercenary was great little booklet which was aimed at PCs with a background in the army. Traveller: High Guard, Mongoose Publishing, Websiteīack in the olden days when the Traveller RPG came as a nifty looking set of three booklets in an even niftier looking slip case, it was soon followed by two supplementary rulebooks: Mercenary and High Guard.

Traveller high guard pdf