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An Overview of the Book
Thus far, all of the Traveller Book have the same rough organization. They kick off with expanded character generation rules for the category of characters, then they cover other rules of interest to the topic at hand.
Mercenary has two character generation chapters, one covering army and marine characters, the other introducing mercenary characters. Later chapters cover mercenary tickets, unit recruitment, new combat rules, mercenary headquarters and military bases, and new equipment.
Making Characters
The Army and Marine Characters section has two parts. First there are expanded event and mishap tables for the existing marine and army careers (now d66 and 2d6, respectively). Then there are two new pseudo-army careers, the air force and the wet navy, which I didn't use but which look nice.
I did use these new mishap and event tables in my last character creation session, and they were fairly annoying to use. I had to constantly page back and forth between the Traveller Core Rulebook and the Mercenary book for each term of those players' careers.
In my opinion, this shows off one of the worst ways to present a supplement. It's too piecemeal. As a result a referee or player is much less likely to page over to the new book for just a few more options. Unfortunately, this is a continuing problem in Mercenary, which also offers piecemeal skills, specialties, combat rules, and equipment--none of which is going to get much use at my gaming table as a result. It's this decision about scope that forms my first major issue with the overall organization of this book.
Moving on, we next get our first look at an "advanced" career path for Traveller. It's a 20-page look at a mercenary career which includes six sub-disciplines--cadre, commando, guerrilla, security, striker, and warmonger--that a player can move among. These careers also feature those same new 2d6 mishap tables and d66 event tables. The end result is a lot more variety for characters, which is a big plus in my book.
(I also think these advanced careers work much better than the advanced careers of Classic Traveller, since they mainly add more color, whereas the advanced careers of Classic Traveller were unbalanced with the basic ones.)
After a few new rules covering commendations (which are good, but were too much detail for me personally) and some notes on how different alien cultures might become mercenaries, the front section of the book ends with a section on New Skills & Specialties. If these get reprinted in a master skill book someday, I'll probably take notice, but for now I suspect that these five pages of skills are likely to end up unused in my own games (because this isn't the book I go to when I want to find a correct skill for usage). I'd have been happy, by the by, if there were just one or two skills of particular note to mercs; it's the large-scale expansion that I find unlikely to be helpful.
Other Rules
My second major problem with the organization of Mercenary is that I feel like there's a missing chapter. I imagine it'd go at the start of the second half of the book and it would talk about creating mercenary campaigns.
You see, some of the later chapters presume that players might be part of huge mercenary companies, full of NPCs. But there's no discussion of how something like that might be organized. Are PCs peons or leaders? What type of unique adventures might they face as mercs? How might they interact with an interstellar government and its own military services? I feel like there's a lot of rich room for development here that could have resulted in a terrific book that would make you want to run a merc campaign. However without it, not only does everything that follows feel very scattered, but it's also only going to interest players already sold on a merc campaign.
With that said, there's still a lot of good material here.
It starts off with Mercenary Tickets. This could be used as a quick plot generation system, where you roll some dice to figure out what a patron is interested in. However, the rules also cover negotiations, giving players a way to change the terms of an agreement. I like the system and think it could have real use in a multitude of campaigns--not just those centered on the military.
There are also some rules for the costs of maintaining a mercenary unit during downtime tacked onto the end of this section.
Recruiting Unit Members gives some simple rules on how to get new recruits and how to figure out which ones make the grade. There are also some rules here for what your overall mercenary unit might look like. It all looks useful and well-designed.
New Combat Rules contains a few options which I like (such as panic fire and suppression fire), but which I think are unlikely to get much use, again because they're piecemeal dropped into this book. More importantly, it's got some rules for ground forces attacking starships, which I thought was a big gap in the original rules. Finally, it's got a mass combat system.
The mass combat system looks pretty easy to use. It's got some nice design, including a sort of "fog of war" which prevents all parts of a unit from acting during a round. I also like the importance placed on the leader, who is likely a PC. Unfortunately, it fails at my most important criteria for a wargame integrated with an RPG: no PCs other than the leader are notable in the fight.
The Mercenary Headquarters and Military Bases chapter was the one misfire in the book. It's solely textual, featuring discussion of why you'd want a base and descriptions of bases at different Tech Levels. What was really needed was a base construction system, which would have added some more nice crunchy bits and could have integrated well with some of the other systems, but it's not here.
The book ends with a section on New Equipment. Again, my comments on including this very piecemeal material apply here, primarily because the material doesn't shout "merc" to me. It's mainly a list of new weapons. In this case it appears that Mongoose agrees, because almost all of the equipment featured in this book has already been reprinted in Traveller Supplement 4: Central Supply Catalogue.
I talked at the start of this section about Mercenary's lack of an overarcing design for how a mercenary campaign might work. I actually think this problem goes beyond a missing chapter; a lot of the chapters just don't work together like they should.
For example, the recruiting section gives a list of average skill levels for recruits: "introductory", "marginal", "average", and "exceptional". The mass combat section also has some terms for how experienced members are: "raw", "trained", "regular", "veteran", or "elite". There's no way to correlate the two experience measures.
The same lack of integration is also shown when looking at mercenary unit costs. As I noted, the Tickets section gives some rules for unit costs. The Headquarters section notes that mercenaries might have to pay a few thousand extra credits every couple of months to have a headquarters. That doesn't correlate at all with the (very abstract) costs for living expenses shown in the Tickets section (which are much higher), nor are the costs for building a headquarters covered at all.
I would have loved to see a very well-organized and coherent Mercenary book, which offered up all of these great crunchy systems in a polished and singular whole. This book ain't it though. Maybe in a second edition?
With all that said, I think the actual content of Mercenary is quite good. The character generation is all colorful and the crunchy systems seem to have interesting mechanics. The Mercenary Ticket section is really the prize of those systems, primarily for the way that players can negotiate their jobs. Thus, if I put aside my organizational and usage issues, and just look at the content, I can give the book a high rating for Substance: a "4" out of "5" to be precise.
Style & Design
However, it's Style where the book falls down. As I've already said the piecemeal systems are going to limit their usability and the organizational issues with the book itself prevent it from being great.
Style also tends to include art and graphic design. Here, Mercenary is pretty average for the Mongoose Traveller line. Plain pages, simple fonts, and good-quality grayscale artwork.
Thus it's the organizational issues which keep Style down to just "2" out of "5".
Conclusion
I think the average Traveller GM is likely use to Mercenary just for the character generation, and not a lot more.
However, for a more military-minded GM, Mercenary is a book with a lot of potential. I think the Tickets section will be a straight-up win, and it's quite possible he'll get good use out of the recruiting and mass battle systems alike. He's just going to have to do some work to fit it all together, and he'll have to already know the shape of his military campaign.
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