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Jon Brazer Enterprises is a small publishing house releasing products under Mongoose's Traveller licensing program. They've released about 40 supplements, most of which are small folios, running 1-4 pages. This review covers one of their few products to break that standard and give author Dale C. McCoy, Jr. more space to really spread his creative wings.

An Overview of the Book

McCoy makes his intent in Fighters and Small Ships obvious from the get-go. He says: "Fighters and Small Ships is my attempt to help increase the breadth of ships offered for our beloved game. Inside you will find fifteen variations on six different ships that can be commonly found in any setting." Overall, the book does exactly that.

The book contains six different classes of ships, each laid out in the same way:

Each section starts off with an overview of the class written in a casual, but marketing-intensive style--the sort of thing you might find in an eCatalog if you were genuinely shopping around for something to spend 20 million credits on. The tone helps to keep the descriptions fun and easy to read. Besides introducing the class, this section also helps to differentiate between a few different variations of the class, which might be different sizes or have somewhat different emphases. The description tells players (or GMs) why they might want to use one variation of a class rather than the others.

That's followed by a picture of the ship (which I'll talk about more in the "Style & Design" section), plus floorplans for one class of ships.

Finally, you get the stats for all of the ships, carefully laid out using the rules from High Guard. There are a few elements in the ship writeups that deserve a bit of extra attention:

There'a a lot of nice variety in the ship writeups, and that actually comes about in several different ways.

First, you have a variety of ship classes, all carefully labeled so that you can see at a glance what's what. Besides standard fighters, you also get interceptors, which are built for speed. Even beyond that you get bombers and transports. It's a nice look at many things that could be done with small ships.

Part of the promise of the book is to offer variety even within the individual classes of ships, and I think that's done well too. For example, you have the Kraft, a 20T small interceptor and the Kraft II, a 40T medium interceptor. I can imagine using both variants of the ship in big battles and thus giving more veracity to a campaign.

Finally, you have a lot of variety in how the ships are designed, most importantly through different tech levels. They go as low as 8 and as high as 14, and thus give you different ships that might be appropriate on different worlds.

The book also contains some original elements. McCoy isn't afraid to use the idea of "pods", which allow ships to have slightly different designs at different times. He also introduces a couple of new things, most notably a mine system, which he supplies complete rules for. This book could have just been created using standard ship-design parts, but instead it seeks to expand the envelop.

Finally, the ships strike me as well-designed. That's just a gut feel, but the very precise sizes of some, such as the 87T RenStar S172-P, and the careful use of different tech levels suggests that a lot was being considered.

Though I don't find ship books to be that creative in general, and though this one is pretty tiny, I think it's nonetheless an excellent example of what a very good ship book could be, contentwise, and so I've given it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Applicability to Mongoose Traveller

This book is a licensed Mongoose Traveller book, so clearly it's intended to be used with the system.

For me, the real question is, how does it hold up to Mongoose's two ship books, Supplement 2: Traders and Gunboats and Supplement 3: Fighting Ships?

Putting this volume up against Supplement 2 offers a pretty tough comparison. The Mongoose volume has 32 pages of small craft, containing more ships than Fighters and Small Craft has, in a variety of designs and a variety of tech levels. The only places it falls short are that its ship descriptions are much shorter and more analytical and it doesn't include variations within a class. Nonetheless, I'd have a hard time suggesting Fighters and Small Craft over its competitor unless you want more small craft than Supplement 2 provides or a cheaper book of just small craft.

(Conversely, Supplement 3 isn't an issue because it contains just a half-dozen fighters, clearly a smaller cache than what's found in Fighters and Small Craft.)

Style & Design

The layout of Fighters and Small Craft is simple but attractive, looking pretty much like a Mongoose design.

However, it falls down in the artwork section.

First, there are only three deckplans among all the ships. Maybe you don't need much for fighters (though you'll find them in those Mongoose Supplements nonetheless), but even some of those ships that can carry additional personnel don't have floorplans.

Second, the artwork is quite varied. Some is very good-looking CGI, such as the Interceptors that appear on the cover. Another design looks like simple CAD work, full of straight lines and circles with no coloring and shading. Then there are a couple that look largely unprofessional. A bomber, which looks like 15 minutes' work in Adobe Illustrator is the worst.

Because of the artwork problems and the lack of maps (but more the first than the second), I've dinged Fighters and Small Craft a bit in Style, giving it only a "2" out of "5">

Conclusion

Fighters and Small Craft is a very good book of small craft for Traveller despite its stylistic issues. It's biggest obstacle will probably be that Mongoose has already produced a lot of small craft designs in its own Supplement 2--though these new designs could surely complement the ones already in print.

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