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The bad news? Field Manual for Traveller by Spica Publishing isn't a field manual. The good news? For the modest asking price of the .pdf you do get some good ideas to blend into a mercenary oriented campaign (for which you'll need Mongoose's Mercenary as an additional prerequisite) and some really killer cover art.
When Spica puts out an art book featuring the work of David Redington I'll be all over it. A pyrotechnical backdrop frames Tin Tin, and some buddies, as colonial marines from Aliens! Silliness aside it definitely sets a strong mood going in and gets the blood pumping. This is what cover art should do: provoke an immediate "I wanna play that!" reaction from the viewer.
What Can I Use 'Field Manual' For?
Field Manual reads like, no more or less, missing chapters from Mercenaries. On its own, with only the Traveller core book, Field Manual offers some general color about how mercs live and some example units (but no stats for troops/vehicles/starships) and a sample campaign (also lacking in mechanical detail) but no guidance as to what one actually does with it. An imaginative GM could probably turn this into a series of adventures anyhow but, then, there's not much here such a proactive GM couldn't cobble together on his own.
With Mercenaries in hand one can see the effort in Field Manual to flesh out assorted vagaries in that book. What are the Imperial Rules of War and how does that impact merc operations? Attributes of tickets and barracks life, both touched on in Mercenaries, are studied with some more detail which could be helpful in roleplaying business negotiations and off-duty scenes.
A few sample mercenary units, with varying specialties, histories and outlooks are surveyed. Notable NPCs are described. But again, no crunch or actionable details. You'll be spending time turning the raw concepts here, some of them very good, into gameable content. My personal favorites are the Dark Angels, LLC...a small fleet full of transient, refugee, mercs and their dependents wandering through a strange sector and working as they search for a new home: BSG meets Hammers Slammers anyone? I'm in! How cool is that?
The Other Stuff
After this things move on to Spica's debut of its new Foreven Sector content via the sample campaign. In fact, my internal editor takes a look at this second half of the booklet and starts thinking they really needed to either make this a much bigger product or two entirely separate ones.
The sample campaign takes place in the non-Imperial Urnian subsector of Foreven's 'Delta Quadrant.' This is just conveniently over the border from the Five Sisters in the Spinward Marches. Not too hard to tie this region into a default Traveller campaign at all.
Urnian is primed to be a hotbed of conflicts with a history of waves of destabilizing immigration as well as the obligatory outside meddling of greater powers. An intriguing minor aquatic alien race, the Inanye, is introduced as well.
The included campaign outline, A Change Of Management, is something Mercenary desperately needed. It gives an idea of the political and military details needed to run a given freeform mercenaries campaign. Factions, locales and the motivations of important NPCs are surveyed. However individual battlefields and missions and opponents aren't detailed in mechanical terms, as with everything else in Field Manual. This will depend on, and from the looks of it reward, a proactive GM that digs in and creates the actual stuff of each engagement.
What's Not To Love?
I want a field manual! I need a supplement for Traveller that breaks down how to design and run battlefield engagements or, perhaps, just focus on spec op style operations. The latter would more easily suit the nature of a typical player group in Traveller as an alternative to the merchant trader default campaign.
I'd like SOPs for units. Unit loadouts. Typical unit stats, which can be found in Mercenary for mercs but also stats for assorted Op For troops.
In fact, it might even be more important to mechanically describe the kinds of situations, engagements and enemies mercenaries come across, in actionable and immediately useful detail, than to describe mercenaries themselves in broad narrative terms. Anyone who wants to run or play in a mercs campaign kinda knows what mercs are and how they work. But in a unique sci fi setting like Traveller what is harder to get a handle on are the particular challenges they face.
I've got a game to run Saturday. Gimme content! That's almost the motto of Traveller. Tables for generating everything from trade goods to animals to adventures themselves. So what I'd want from something called the Field Manual would be something as essential to me, a GM running a military mercs campaign on a deadline, as a field manual is essential to survival for a grunt in the field.
To be fair that's too much to ask from an otherwise well written and thoughtful product that's only 47 pages in size and is sold for the very modest price of $9.99 (Available online at a .pdf merchant near you! Order today!).
Yes, anal-retentive Virginia, there are typos. Sentences will run twice in adjoining paragraphs or a capitalization is corrected in one line and not in an identical following line. But, really, shut up. Who cares? This is product is written by actual military vets so they get more slack than you do in my book.
Bottom Line
Should I buy Spica's Field Manual? If you're running a mercs oriented Traveller campaign I'd say yes. It's cheap, it has good ideas, and will get your juices flowing. However, it's not a field manual. There's just not enough there, there. Also, aside from the cover, art is sparse. This is almost pure text. What is in there is professionally done and that's better than bad art stuck in for the sake of it or because the author's girlfriend likes to draw elves.
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