Traveller-61
Mongoose
And its appeared in the Esdevium release list for next week!! 
(that and the MI Army book too!!)
DW
(that and the MI Army book too!!)
DW
Merchants, Traders and Raiders - Out This Week!
- Thread starter MongooseMatt
- Start date
lastbesthope
Mongoose
As already pointed out, it is on the Uk Esdevium list for release 7th March.
It is technically 1st edition, since it's release is before the 2nd Edition comes out, however Matthew Sprange has stated repeatedly that all existing sourcebooks will be compatible with 2nd edition. So technically that makes all books both.
LBH
Faenril said:same question :wink:Garet said:Is this book 2nd edition, 1st edition or both
thanks
It is technically 1st edition, since it's release is before the 2nd Edition comes out, however Matthew Sprange has stated repeatedly that all existing sourcebooks will be compatible with 2nd edition. So technically that makes all books both.
LBH
Merchants,Traders and Raiders introduces a new skill to handle much of actual commerce, namely KS: Commerce. As Brakiri as supposed to be master traders should it replace one of, or be added to the list of, skills that all Brakiri get a +2 bonus with and get as class skills?
-Dwarf
-Dwarf
lastbesthope
Mongoose
I'll be picking mine up tomorrow, should be able to get a look through it on Sunday I hope.
LBH
LBH
lastbesthope
Mongoose
Well I now have it in my grubby little mitts. Figuratively speaking of course, I wuold never handle Mongoose product with dirty hands and my hands are normal sized :lol:
LBH
LBH
Traveller-61
Mongoose
Mine just arrived today!
First impressions - very nice. I might just be trying out a Merchant game in the future now. Nice to see NPCs & ships illustrated, new gadgets and toys plus lots of good detail about this side of the B5 universe.
Just one thing - what happed to the pictures in the book? They are all in colour and there are a lot of them (all to the good) but their dimensions seem to be slightly off..... stretched... a bit distorted. Either that or my eyesight is going now. Deliberate design or is my copy a one-off collectors' item because of it?! :lol:
DW
First impressions - very nice. I might just be trying out a Merchant game in the future now. Nice to see NPCs & ships illustrated, new gadgets and toys plus lots of good detail about this side of the B5 universe.
Just one thing - what happed to the pictures in the book? They are all in colour and there are a lot of them (all to the good) but their dimensions seem to be slightly off..... stretched... a bit distorted. Either that or my eyesight is going now. Deliberate design or is my copy a one-off collectors' item because of it?! :lol:
DW
Kizarvexis
Mongoose
Traveller-61 said:Mine just arrived today!
First impressions - very nice. I might just be trying out a Merchant game in the future now. Nice to see NPCs & ships illustrated, new gadgets and toys plus lots of good detail about this side of the B5 universe.
Just one thing - what happed to the pictures in the book? They are all in colour and there are a lot of them (all to the good) but their dimensions seem to be slightly off..... stretched... a bit distorted. Either that or my eyesight is going now. Deliberate design or is my copy a one-off collectors' item because of it?! :lol:
DW
Mine was the same way. Reminds me of when a movie is put on tape/DVD and long shots end up stretched.
Kizarvexis
Traveller-61
Mongoose
Oh well so much for my "one-off collectors' edition" then... :lol:
DW
DW
lastbesthope
Mongoose
ANd in case Mongoose Steele is looking in, I haven't forgotten about your question, but I have 2 seasons of Stargate DVDs vying for my attention. But I will read it before the 25th.
LBH
LBH
lastbesthope
Mongoose
MTR will be my bedtime reading this coming week, at least now that I came up with an idea for the Paranoia XP demo mission I'm running on Tuesday that frees up a little of Monday evening.
LBH
LBH
ShadowScout
Mongoose
Same here... I really think that someone in the art department screwed up here.Kizarvexis said:
As for the book... well, I like some, and I hate some.
The "Merchant & Trader" sections are great!
But the Raiders and ship sections are not so good IMO. From ignoring ships that really needed to go into this product (all the mostly unnamed transports we saw on the show, as well as all the other transports ships scattered around published products - from Bulk Freighter to Ore Barge; and of course raider conversions of all those small ships - AoG did a really god job on those, why didn't the author do his homework and take it from there?), to inventing unneeded strange new ships (like the Penguin Freighter that looks like the "Yellow Submarine"; or Battlewagon variants that have miliraty-level firepower and thus are waaay beyond anything a raider could come up with - that's like saying the Mafia owns a Battleship or Aircraft Carrier today...), to contradicting the show ("Ghosts of Omelos" - the show says Jha'Dur was sheltered by the Minbari, the supplement says she built that raider group...), to contradicting physics ("Wireknives" burning through flesh at 150° celsius - hey, try it some time, that temperature will raise blisters, but it won't even start iron glowing - and to use heat as method to cut through clothing and flesh in a time that makes it usable as weapon you need a lot more temperature...) Oh, well...
I liked the drawings for the NPC's though - even if one of them looks suspiciously like a certain Starfleet captain...
All said, the supplement is worth getting if only for the great mechanics on trading... but I really hope Mongoose will make a follow-up supplement dealing with the rest...
Matt Sharp
Mongoose
ShadowScout said:
That was me - sorry! There's a tiny tickbox on my screengrabbing software that I hadn't ticked... it was set to 'video source' rather than 'view'.
ShadowScout said:
They're all supposed to look like famous actors who would have been too busy/expensive/old/dead to actually appear on screen...
B_Steele
Mongoose
To be fair, it says that she was "one of its founders and benefactors", which could mean that she helped the idea get off the ground back in the 2230s when the idea of any Dilgar surviving was slim, and secretly helped it along since. From where she was helping and how, that is still a mystery.
There is nothing in that claim to contradict the show. Although I do my best not to simply fall back on another company's products (no matter how awesome they were, as I am a huge fan of AoG, it isn't cool just to recycle another writer's ideas wholesale), I am quite careful to make sure the main source of canon--the show and telemovies--are not directly contradicted.
Sorry you didn't like the Raiders and Ships...that was actually my favourite part to put together. :wink: I'm quite happy you like the trading section though...I was quite worried that wasn't going to come out quite right.
Thanks for the honesty, and I hope others enjoy it as much and more!
Bry
The Ghosts are my favourie part of the whole book - well, those and the V2s!
Though I'm thinking the Rah'kharn should perhaps be modified from a standard Ochlavita, to make room for a Jump engine (they don't have them in ACTA) and perhaps a flight or two of V2s (since they are the next best thing to Thoruns - and it would be better cover for the Ghosts to make it look like a Raider cell salvaged an old cruiser than for it to be an actual Dilgar warship)
Gary
Though I'm thinking the Rah'kharn should perhaps be modified from a standard Ochlavita, to make room for a Jump engine (they don't have them in ACTA) and perhaps a flight or two of V2s (since they are the next best thing to Thoruns - and it would be better cover for the Ghosts to make it look like a Raider cell salvaged an old cruiser than for it to be an actual Dilgar warship)
Gary
ShadowScout
Mongoose
Actually not really... let me quote:
"One of the founders and benefactors of the Ghosts of Omelos broke free of her role in the cell to take her 'immortality serum' to other governments..."
That sentence does strongly indicate she was part of the GoO from their beginning (which can't have been earlier then 2232, as before it made more sense for the Dilgar to put all their efforts into winning the war, or at least fight it to a standstill so they could use the truce to relocate their people Anywhere off Omelos) until her reappearence on B5 in 2258, which is contradicting the show, as that states that she was sheltered by the WindSwords shortly after the fall of the Dilgar (and to be honest, considering how much hate the League still has in 2258 for Dilgar in general and her in particular, minbari space is the only place where she Could have hidden from all those dilgar-hunters).
Now, I don't mind the idea of "leftover Dilgar turning pirates" - hell, I used it myself in a campaign, inclusibe a converted Protra(Rohric) commerce raider (I mounted two extra engine pods from Full-scale Thoruns on my "Aky'Lahr" to make a conversion that could plausibly outrun pursuit - vital to stay alive for any surviving Dilgar that hasn't got a battlefleet behind his back... I really have to paint the sucker some day, and get my digi-cam back so I can make some pictures...); but I really hate it when people rearrange established B5 history (workig in the gaps of such history is another thing entirely - I actually like that). So, if one forgets the piece about Jha'Dur, and takes only the rest of the GoO, I'm happy.
Well... IMO that is a mistake.
It's the very thing I always hated about StarTrek - every company that got a license made up its own BG, and few ever incorporated work of the others (active or not), so in the end fanboys like me (or in that case, like my friend Tobs, who is the ST-fan around my circle of associates) are stuck with multiple, sometimes contradicting background infos (if only I think about all the completely different kind of ship classes spawned by board- and computer-games over the years... it's especially bad when you get to the aliens, as with starfleet they had at least enough "canon" stuff to follow that there was little need to invent their own...).
It is one of the things I liked about AoG - they took care to re-introduce stuff from other companies whenever possible. They took a few bits from the CEE B5-RPG (Starfury history, Cotton Tender, Pikitos fighter, Koulani & Ch'lonas), they took bits from Sierras "Into the Fire" game where possible (Narn T'Rakk; and the AoG Hurr shiluettes look much like the Sierra Hurr), and they even made room for races mentioned in the books on their map!
And I would like to see Mongoose make similar use of AoG material, in every case where there is no logical reason not to (of course, if there IS a logical reason for change, then Mongoose has precedence... but I hate it when things get changed only to change something - like with the Dilgar ship names; I liked the old AoG names better, and can see no reason at all why they should change; but for an example from the other side, I am content with them changing the AoG Protra scout into an assault ship for CtA, as in AoG's B5W "scout" meant an big electronic-warfare platform, while in CtS "scout" means more a small "go and look around" ship).
Now, concerning the MT&R ships, I would have liked to see all the small transports we saw on the show (from the "Green Ship"/Tango-7/Skylark Transport to the Bulk Freighter, from the Passenger Liner to the Common Civilian Freighter/Tanker -yes, even though they can be found in other publications it would be a great help for players and GMs to have all civilian hulls in one place for reference- from the Mongoose versions of AoG's Ore Barge or all those unnamed ships we see floating arond B5 in the show, or the Narn Transport ships like the Tal'quith... and of course a look on what hulls other races use to ferry cargo, and since AoG did a good job, I would have liked to see Mongoose build on that.)
And what else I would have liked to see are small Raider ships - if one follows the dialoge from the show (especially how long it took the Raiders to save up for a Strike Carrier in "Signs & Portents", and how much of a surprise that ship was for Sinclair and B5), then it logically follows that ships such as these are very, very rare, and most raider crews don't have them, and are forced to make do with smaller and non-jumpy ships... and I would have liked to see them (and again, since AoG did do good work on thinking up "raider-converted civilian hulls", why not build on that foundation? Sloops, Gunboats, converted Freighters from all races). And what did I get instead? Upgunned battlewagon variants! Which IMO are completely contrary to B5 raiders - it's like modern-day bank robbers having access to helicopter gunships!
Oh, well... I don't have to use it...
...but I really had wished a supplement that contained all the trading stuff and a lot more trader ships (see above) and then a second supplement that had the little raiding stuff, lots of raider ships in all size classes, rules for "how to turn stock freighters into raiser or smuggler vessels" and even more sample raider groups, complete with NPC profiles for their important personalities... (well, maybe some day someone with Mongoose will get around to do a MT&R-2... or call it "Smugglers, Privateers and Adventurers" or something along those lines - making a completely different name but with a definite connection... I'd like that...)
Well... I do have to admit that the V2s are pretty cool!
And I have already decided to use them in one of my campaigns, discarding my own idea for "advanced raider fighters during the 2260-ies" - the V2 are simply better. I am never one to cling to any idea just because it's mine - if something else it better, bring it on!
