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About the Book
Scout is, simply, about scouts: who they are, what they do, and what they do it with. The material in Scout is pretty scattered, but I've broadly split it into three parts: making and equipping characters; running scout adventures; and other rules.
Making & Equipping Characters
Scout features a standalone, expanded system for creating Scout Characters (much as High Guard did for the Navy). There are just five specialties--contact, courier, exploration, special operations, and survey--but they do a very nice job of laying out the breadth of tasks which scouts are responsible for. Like all of the standalone character creation systems found in these Books, I think this one is very successful (though as usual there are slight differences between the Books in how the different sub-careers are laid out and how you move among them).
The character creation chapters ends with some nice notes on how scouts can be called back from retirement, which is an important plot element for GMs in the Imperium--and a nice adventure hook too.
A section on Equipment details the stuff that your scout characters might want to buy. As I've commented before, I'm not really convinced of the utility of hiding a large set of equipment off in an accessory like this, because it's too easy to forget about. However, author Whitaker does a good job of trying to make it relevant for scouts by organizing much of the equipment by the five scout specialties.
Sadly, it doesn't look like this material was reprinted in the Central Supply Catalogue--sad both because it keeps this material less accessible and because the Catalogue could have used more non-combat gear. Nonetheless, there's enough good material here that any scout should be sure to check out his specialties' preferred equipment before finishing up his character creation.
There are also 30 pages of ships. Frankly, I was prepared not to like them, because for me once you have a few basic designs, I feel like most campaigns don't need more starships. I was pleasantly surprised.
The chapter starts off with a variant of the standard scout vessel called the SX Frontiersman which includes a modular design. 50 tons of the ship aren't locked down and instead there are modules that you can select among--depending on the needs of your players/campaign. It's a great idea and well executed.
After that we get: a modular survey and interdiction station, which is the sort of thing you might need to visit; a scout survey ship built on the battle rider philosophy (meaning that you dock a bunch of non-jump ships on a jump-ready mother ship); and a few ships related to the Xboat network. I thought that all of these ships did a good job of fitting into niches in the Imperial ecosystem and were the sort of ships that you might actually meet in the course of adventures. As such, I was quite pleased with them.
The character & equipment material as a whole rates a "4" out of "5" for Substance.
Running Scout Adventures
There are two different chapters which provide background that a GM can use to create adventures.
First up is Scout Missions which contains a Mercenary-like system to generate Scout adventures--or so it claims; it's actually much shorter and more simplistic. Nonetheless, it could be of use and more importantly it includes d6 fleshed-out adventure ideas for each of the 5 scout specialties.
There also some nice material on scout bases in this section, which could be used by a GM to create settings for a game involving scouts. Unfortunately I found the sample scout base, 'Scout Base Cygnus X-3', somewhat of a disappointment. It's primarily a listing of NPCs at the base, and they didn't jump out at me as likely to kick off stories. Worse, in order to avoid strong connections to the Third Imperium, it's filled with minor, one-off aliens like the "Penguinoids". The only Traveller alien that was included (or at least that I recognized), the "Llellewlowy", are otherwise known as the "Dandelions", and thus stick with the theme of silly aliens in this base. I suppose that if you already are planning to use a scout base, this could be useful, but it's not going to draw you in to do so.
First Contact and Survey is a chapter which gives details on these two types of scout missions. I presume it's intended to give GMs a structure for adventures of that sort. Unfortunately, it really doesn't lend itself to adventures that would be ... exciting ... and thus I feel like much of the potential is wasted.
The First Contact section is the worse of the two. It describes a very bureaucratic process that's required in First Contact situations. The result doesn't seem very fun. This might well be realistic, and it could allow you to create a First Contract backdrop for an actual adventure, but it wouldn't support a First Contact mission that would be interesting for your players.
I find it very disorienting that the Survey section is laid out in a totally different format than the First Contact section that shares the same chapter. It describes how Surveys are done, procedure by procedure (much as First Contact is sectioned off), but it specifically lists goals and abort criteria for each step. This result in a much more gameable structure--especially if you consider those abort criteria to be the start of an actual adventure.
Though I found the initial sets of d6 missions per scout specialty good, from there the section went downhill, with everything else being quite dry and thus not that conducive to adventuring. As a result the adventure hook sections of Scout averages just "3" out of "5" for Style.
Other Rules
There are two other chapters in Scout, the last two in the book: IISS Scout Service and Survival.
The IISS Scout Service describes the scouts of the Third Imperium and is the only part of Scout which is explicitly set in the Official Traveller Universe. It kicks off with a nice diagram showing the entire scout service, and I had really high hopes going from there in.
Unfortunately, the rest of the chapter disappoints. One of the biggest problems is poor editing and/or layout. Inconsistent headers make it hard to see what's what, a fact that's made worse by the fact that the organization takes at least one major branch--the Operations Office--and keeps it apart from the rest. There's some material in here that a Third Imperium GM will find generally useful, but it's unfortunately obscured by the poor editing of the chapter.
The Survival section is even more disappointing, primarily because it feels so random. Within this section, you'll find a few pages on basic survival psychology (which seem largely useless for adventure creation), a few survival kits, and rules for survival in a variety of environments--oddly including both planetary environments (like jungle) and space environments (like vacuum).
I think this chapter is further hobbled by inconsistent headers and inconsistent decisions about what to detail in each section. Some sections have rules and some don't. There's definitely crunchy material missing that I'd like to see, and what's there is so deeply buried in text paragraphs that I'd find it hard to rediscover the material when I actually wanted to.
I think the rules for the space environments are the best in this section, but it feels like they're in entirely the wrong book.
It could be that these last few sections have some great gems, but it feels like the editor just didn't get to them before release; as a result, whatever's here is going to stay buried.
On the whole I've given this section of the book a "2" out of "5" for Substance; I might use a little bit of the IISS material when prepping an adventure, but that's it.
I've given my ratings for each section of the book because I feel like there's a lot of variety. That should help to explain my overall rating of "3" out of "5" for Substance when looking at the book as a whole.
Style & Design
Graphically, Traveller Book 3: Scout is spare. Despite that, as is the case throughout the Traveller line, the character creation pages and the space ship pages both look pretty spiffy--and together those sections take up about half the book.
Unfortunately I don't feel like Scout holds together very well as a whole. The author definitely had a good idea in trying to structure chapters around the five scout specialties, but it's not carried far enough, some of those chapters weren't crunchy enough, and then afterward we get sections like "IISS Scout Service" and "Survival" which feel like they were tacked on just to fill out the book.
Then we get to the actual editing of those last two sections, which as I already said I thought was poor.
As a result I've given Scout a high "2" out of "5" for Style: it's slightly below average.
Conclusion
Scout feels like the weakest Traveller Book to date. It's better organized than Mercenary, but not up to the standard of High Guard. It also doesn't have as much pure gameable material, to its detriment.
Scout will appeal the most to GMs running Scout-heavy campaigns, who might even be able to make use of the crunchless material; otherwise GMs should assess whether the character creation, equipment, ships, and simple scout adventure creation are enough to warrant purchase of the book.
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