High Guard is a book that a few of my friends in the intelligentsia would call "workman-like". That is for a great many of us that play Traveller this was a book that needed to be written, but wasn't going to be terribly exciting. The writing isn't going to be inspired because the material presented is in many ways boring, unless of course you are playing in a pure military Naval Campaign. Many people think that all writing should be inspired, but I disagree. There is a place, especially in manuals and non-fiction where this so-called “workman-like” writing is preferable because it is usually clear and concise. In many cases more inspired prose is less clear.
When Traveller first debuted in the 1970s there was a pretty big disconnect in the first two editions of the game. In the original version that I purchased, just before the debut of Star Wars, large ships were in the 4000-5000 ton range. In Traveller a ton is measured by hydrogen displacement, about 14 cubic meters per. So that's a pretty big ship. Not as large as a super-carrier, or a large container vessel on Earth, but sizeable nonetheless. After Star Wars quite literally set the collective unconscious on fire, Traveller changed a great deal.
In the original version, or what we now call the LBB version, for the little black books, digest sized, that made up the first boxed set. The smaller ships that players had access to in character generation could actually make a difference in combat. With the publication of High Guard these ships became for the most part tactically meaningless as Imperial Dreadnoughts could tip the scales at up to 1,000,000 tons, dwarfing even small planetoids, and some moons. The idea of a single tiny ship living through such a battlefield was ludicrous. The beams of spinal mounts would vaporize even the largest of those, and that just seemed unsportsmanlike.
This was a major disconnect in my mind. The SF RPG that I first designed in the time following my initial discontent with Traveller was a knee-jerk reaction to this. Well that, and a heaping overdose of Cordwainer Smith. As I muse on the older version of High Guard let me be clear that my discussion on this bit of history is not directly a reflection of the newer version. I'll get to that later.
Even the later printings of the Traveller basic rules were a much different feel. The ephemeral and faraway Empire became much more real and immediate concern. Where the Spinward Marches were a remote and mysterious frontier, soon they became a major quadrant with a massive and powerful fleet. While part of me was enthralled with the idea of designing these huge and powerful vessels. Creating elaborate designs and complex deck plans was just plain fun. However it constantly reinforced the idea that a few guys in an aged Scout/Courier wouldn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe.
So my own SF RPG was much more like the world of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination than Lucas' Empire, or Asimov's Foundation. Individuals could make a difference; change the universe as it were. Not so much any more in Traveller. Before I get too maudlin, let me say that I enjoyed our Fifth Frontier War Campaign. I commanded the Zhodani Forces and wrecked the Marches for the Imperium. I commanded hundreds of ships in large fleet actions. I bombarded planets into the stone-age, but it wasn't the game I wanted to play. I was constantly perplexed by how much I loved the game and resented the setting at times. The best Traveller games I played were much smaller and more intimate, where a ship or two was a huge difference.
There are challenges to writing a book like High Guard. Like the rest of Mongoose Traveller published so far, there are thirty years of fans and players watching over your shoulder. They all have their peeves and peculiarities. None of them wants to be slighted. On a related note, there are challenges with the continuity or established canon. For High Guard you want to create a better ship design system without obviating the various ships and classes of craft that are considered an integral part of the setting. I think that Mongoose has done a very admirable job of addressing these challenges; however that still leaves some pretty serious problems with this book.
I think the text editing is pretty lax, if it was even an edited document per se. While an editor may have made some changes, it never went back to the writer and was edited as final copy. I spotted no less than twenty or so errors, and I am an average writer and a fairly poor editor myself. Not to mention the fact that the table of contents is lifted wholesale from Mercenary without changing the content. Even worse there are a few page XX errors, where the copy editor or the layout team didn’t insert page numbers as they actually appear.
Next is the graphical presentation. High Guard us a book about tables and charts. This is one of the most elementary presentations I have ever seen. While these kind of simplistic tables work well for things like character generation, and text centered rules presentations, they are inadequate for the complex information displayed here. Other information that in this reviewer’s opinion should be presented in table form is not. On a related point, the ship’s deck plans are presented in a topographic style. This is new for Traveller, and while a nice idea in theory, in my opinion it fails in execution. The problem with this presentation is that it is both very wasteful of page count, especially with the designs utilized for the examples, and it also leaves the deck plans themselves too small to be any real use by the players and GMs.
My other criticisms of High Guard are shared with Mercenary, and I won’t belabor the point too much here, this book does two things passably well, and it probably should have focused on one thing and been excellent. Mongoose is not showing a strong ability to mix character information and technical systems, so I suggest they instead focus on one or the other for now.
So whether you believe that the addition of larger ships adds or detracts from your Traveller universe High Guard has information that you will no doubt find useful. However it could have been presented in a much better fashion.
