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An Overview of the Book
High Guard is a book all about the navy and the spaceships that it uses. It's roughly split into three parts: character generation; new rules; and space ships.
Making Characters
Rather than offering piecemeal additions to the navy career, as Mercenary did with the army and the marines, High Guard includes a completely new and expanded Navy Characters section.
It follows the same (successful) model as the new mercenary career of the previous Book, splitting the navy career into ten different sub-careers and including expanded event and mishap tables for each. It all offers great variety and improved details for your characters.
One of the compunctions that I have about the Book series as a whole is that the expanded character generation rules from one book to another aren't totally consistent. They're close, but sometimes niggling details vary. The thing that changes the most from book to book are the rules about moving around among the sub-careers. Here, there's a minimum terms requirement that you can use instead of the qualification roll. I like any of the methods that make it possible to easily move among the sub-careers, as that allows for more interesting (but still coherent) characters, but I wish there was more consistency.
Getting back to High Guard's character creation: it also adds a number of other nice details like a medal system (which is from Mercenary), a college option (which I wish was used more widely in these Books), and some notes about the three sorts of navy: planetary, subsector, and Imperial. They all provide great specifics for your character.
These character generation rules add just a couple of new skills, which is how I think these books should be laid out, because it's small enough in scope that a player can suggest them to his gamemaster as appropriate (as opposed to the huge mass of skills in Mercenary).
Overall, the High Guard character generation rules are just what you'd hope for in a Traveller advanced character generation system.
Other Rules
There's nice consistency to the new rules in High Guard because they all center on one topic: ships. More specifically, the vast majority of the rules center on either small ships (under 100T) or capital ships (over 2000T).
This kicks off with some Ship Construction rules for each of these two classes of ships. They're necessary because the hull size system in the core rulebook limit ships to that 100T-2000T range.
The new ship construction rules nicely parallel the original ones, mainly varying in specific charts rather than overall concepts. They also offer some varied new systems, including some interesting m-drives for small craft and rules for large ships that are built in sections.
I generally like these new ship construction rules, though I have some issues with Mongoose Traveller's tendency to explain complex rules systems in text rather than offering up easier to read flowcharts or numbered lists. At least the frequency of examples resolves part of this organizational problem, and I think is sufficient to make both of these rules systems usable.
These new sorts of ship construction are supplement by a more general Spacecraft Operations, section which is meant to offer new ship parts for all three varieties of spacecraft. It depends perhaps too much on weapons and armor, when I would have liked to see a wider variety of system types, but perhaps that's expected for a Navy book. The most standout part of this section is a discussion of more primitive spacecrafts and more advanced ones.
The two construction chapters and the operations chapters don't fit together quite as well as I'd like. There's some material that's repeated (such as hangers which show up in both the operations section and in the capital ship constructions) and there are situations where the organization doesn't entirely make sense (such as the fact that the armory appears in the operations section while the barracks appears in the capital ship construction). I wish more effort had been taken to cut the two ship construction systems to their core, so that all of the options could have been included in Spacecraft Operations, but this is all an organizational annoyance rather than a deal breaker.
The last section of rules is the Expanded Space Combat. The most important rules cover capital ship combat, providing ways to aggregate hundreds or thousands of weapons into barrages. I haven't tried them out, but they feel right to me--like something out of Battlestar Galactica.
There are also some optional rules that you could add to your standard combat. One system is called "Orders", which revs up the importance of the leader a bit--though I'm not personally convinced that's the sort of thing you need in a multiplayer RPG game. The other variant system introduces vector-based movement. It's very elegant, though it largely depends upon using freeform miniatures and measuring sticks to plot out your combat.
Overall, all of these rules seem solid, though at times the organization of individual elements and the organization of the various rules as a cohesive whole could use at least a bit of work.
Space Ships
To show off the two new construction systems, the book features 14 pages of Small Craft and 44 pages of Capital Ships. If you've seen any Traveller book, you already know what these look like: nice spreads of data and ship maps. I think they're a nice collection of ships, though I personally find the small craft data much more useful than the small craft maps and the capital ship maps much more useful than the capital ships data. Your mileage may vary.
You can find more extensive sets of ships at these sizes in Traveller Supplement 2: Traders and Gunboats and Traveller Supplement 3: Fighting Ships, but there's enough content in this book that you might not need those supplements at all.
There's actually one more short chapter at the very end of the book, a 7-page Naval Adventures section. There are a few notes on running naval campaigns and then a nice random mission generation table, which any GM could use to start kicking off ideas for a naval adventure.
Overall, there's a lot of nice meaty detail in High Guard, centered on the navy and ships. Though I think some of the utility of these systems is somewhat limited by the organizational issues that I mentioned, in general those issues are relatively minor (and much improved over Mercenary), so I let it eke in a full "5" out of "5" for Substance. There's very little more that I think should be in a book like this and what's covered is covered with good detail.
Style & Design
Like most Mongoose Traveller books, this one features a spare layout style and nice grayscale artwork. I generally think that Mongoose has made two things particularly attractive in their books: the character generation spreads (with their clean charts and grayscale occupational artwork) and the ships (with their clean ship stats, good-looking maps, and nice artwork depicting the ships). This book features both in quantity and thus is a step up from the average Mongoose design.
However it's also dragged down a bit by the organizational issues that I already mentioned. Though they're relatively minor, they still keep the book from exceeding an average rating of "3" out of "5" for Style.
Conclusion
The Mongoose High Guard book does a good job of providing crunchy mechanics for naval characters, for the construction of new sorts of ships, and for new types of space combat. It will be utterly indispensable for a naval campaign and equally indispensable for anyone creating any ships on their own. Other GMs may want to pick it up for the enhanced naval generation rules and the new ship combat rules, depending on how important those are to their own campaigns.
