Starports, when will we see it?

lastbesthope

Mongoose
Matt,

I know you said you were sold out at the tournament on Saturday, but when will it hit distributors, especially Esdevium, I wants my Starport goodness...

LBH
 
Treebore said:
Should already be in the distribution chain, so should hit our individual suppliers any day now.
Y'know, if you keep *hitting* the individual suppliers, they are going to start ducking and avoiding us. *GRIN*
 
Mine arrived from a non-Amazon source two days ago. Awesome book! Much meaty goodness to it and well worth picking up. All IMO, of course.
 
Mine arrived from a non-Amazon source two days ago. Awesome book! Much meaty goodness to it and well worth picking up. All IMO, of course.
I will masterize in a custom Firefly/Serenity universe (Keep the signal, Mal !).
Is it usable easily without the official universe part (Imperium, E.T., etc.) ?
:D
 
I'm liking it, got a week ago. The port design bit is quite interesting, lots of ideas for adventures and encounters too.. Must get back into playing.

Pretty ships too..... 'whistles innocently' :wink:
 
It's deliberately designed for use with the OTU as references crop up everywhere to it in general and the Spinward Marches in particular. I'm guessing this may have been designed with an eye to the Campaign Guide as it seems it would be easy to slot many of these systems and event/encounters into whatever that ends up becoming.

I did a quick compare between Mong Starports and GURPS Starports. GURPS Starports is singlemindedly focused on running starport campaigns with heaping piles of detail and references to all sorts of borderline useful, in a normal campaign, but highly informative stuff. Mong Starports is tightly focused on the role and function of starports in a standard Traveller campaign and much more on functional crunch over the fluff (though enough's here that it fleshes out the role and possibilities of starports).

It's the same kind of difference between Far Trader and Merchant Prince. GURPs takes an encyclopedic, almost academic, survey of a subject but leaves it to the GM what to do with the stuff. Mongoose slices and dices with an eye to immediate functionality and accessibility so a GM can just up and go with the content but it tends to have less sidebar-style digressions.

In both cases the works are complimentary for the most part. Just because you have the GURPs equivalent doesn't mean you don't want the Mongoose offering too.
 
I've just given it a once over. I'll post something more substantial tonight.

Yes, there are loads of typos. It's pretty egregious that way. Still the actual content is fairly strong and I was able to overlook it for the most part. As for errata worthy rules errors I'm the wrong guy to ask. You'll need a more crunch oriented player to go over all that and see if it works right.
 
I'd have to spend more time with Starports than I have right now to give it a fair shake. My initial impression is quite positive. It's loaded with ideas that can help flesh out adventures in starports. The introduction itself is a hefty twenty pages explaining how starports function, how they're organized and so on. This is both a concise and broad overview of the subject with interesting mechanics tucked here and there like "Tricky Landings" and "Getting Through Customs" etc.

The next section, Starport Encounters, covers literally that. It's a big collection of events and encounters divided first by the size of the starport and then into two lists: "General Encounters" (flavor encounters) and "Significant Encounters" (that could lead to some action or adventures). One slight problem might be just how specific the encounters are. These aren't the kind of thing you'd be able to easily reuse. Thankfully there is a pretty good selection.

They might serve better as ideas for adventure seeds than a general encounter list, however, as random encounter lists work best when they spur a GM to improvise a unique situation based on several randomized variables that aren't this explicit. Think subject X, verb Y and predicate Z. Make tables for X, Y and Z and that'll last forever. Instead we've got it all written out for us here. No recycling.

Also, stuck on the tail end of the chapter, are random NPC traits "Local Color" and a table suggesting the personality and management style of the local starport governor. Not bad to have but kind of odd choices. I'd be more likely to look for a list of random NPC traits in the Campaign Guide than to remember to check Starports.

Next is a section on building Starports. This I'll leave to the rivet counters. For my purposes I find lots of good ideas to help me think about ways to use starports woven throughout here along with potentially useful mechanics (Waiting Time for example).

After this a very large chunk of the book (pages 66-101 of 118 pages) is comprised of sample starports using the systems described in the previous chapter. However they're far from barebones with quite a bit of description and location specific storyseeds worked in. Oddly, there don't seem to be maps for any of them.

Rhylantinople (Rylanor - Spinward Marches), Dysonhome (Gileden - Spinward Marches), Helua (Arunsiir - Trojan Reach), Deskala (Phlume - Spinward Marches), Sidon (Arden - Spinward Marches), New Mara (Ianic - Spinward Marches), Boneyard (Yiktor - Spinward Marches), Hayven (Caloran - Spinward Marches).

In many ways the above are the real prize here. Just plug and play. Story seeds aside, of which each has several, many of these suggest all kinds of possible adventures.

After these you've got new ships. Two are specific to one of the ports but general ones that will likely find some use include a recovery ship and a tanker (complete with interior maps). Also here are systems for tugging and new equipment: magnetic grapples and fuel transfer equipment.

In the appendix you've got generic default stats for all the starport types using the starport building system as well as a set of basic maps for each type of port.

One issue is that information can seem scattered around. You'll have a sidebar on "Crimes Aboard a Starport" (Highport maybe?) in the Introduction but then separate entries on security and customs in the Building A Starport chapter. I'm still not certain how warehouses work just yet despite scattershot references here and there. But that could be more an issue with the cursory nature of my review.

Hope this helps somewhat.
 
Evidently there's also an older (and extremely verbose/chatty) review up over at rpg.net for a second opinion from someone who's more of an old Traveller hand.

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15252.phtml
 
Started reading through this today. Only 20 pages in and I'm already glad I bought it. My only wish is for actual star port layouts, but personally I already have enough from Judges Guild and GURPS. Still, people who have never bought such products probably really wish this book had at least one full layout illustrated for them. At least a Class C example. Doing Class A's or B's would be a book all their own in scope.
 
Has anyone in the States bought on at a FLGS? Ny store have not received either Starport or Merchants & Cruisers. I known myself and another Trav fan or two was waiting.
 
Mine came from an LGS. I got both of them there. Meaning Starports and Merchants and Cruisers. So either your LGS is lazy, or they have a bad contact with their distributor. I THINK my LGS uses Diamond.
 
Back
Top