State of the Mongoose 2024

[TrippyHippy]

This may be a late thought but considering the back catalogue that Mongoose now have, may I please request that we can crank up the number of classic titles - Traveller and Paranoia - that are made available on Print on Demand? I’d happily buy a lot of them.

 

[MongooseMatt]

This may be a late thought but considering the back catalogue that Mongoose now have, may I please request that we can crank up the number of classic titles - Traveller and Paranoia - that are made available on Print on Demand? I’d happily buy a lot of them.

There is actually a lot of work in getting an old title to POD - it would be lovely to have them all available like this, but this is more a project to be done when everything else is quiet.

 

[Bifford]

You will find us well represented in the likes of Leisure Games, Games Shop of Aldershot, and others. The same applies in North America, where retailers can deal directly with our warehouse on very good terms.

There is Firestorm Games in Swindon and (recently opened) Game Knights in Devizes. In case you want to try to get some books locally!

 

[sbrengard]

Loved me some Twilight 2000 back in the day. I had EVERYTHING for it. Love to see it make a well deserved come back on its own, as well maybe some cross-rule for traveller.

 

[rhibbs]

I just wanted to second the print on demand request. Maybe having bundles of the current ebook only items as a POD option. I would also buy pretty much everything. Just look at my order history as I have pretty much bought everything physical for Traveller from Mongoose, including the kickstarters. Or maybe have a kickstarter for a harback or several hardbacks of the current ebook modules.

 

[apastuszak]

Having printed a few POD books for Classic Traveller, it's definitely work. For one, you need a good quality scan of the book. Even though I own the Classic Traveller CD-ROM, some of those scans contain quite a few things that needed cleaning up. I ended up borrowing a copy from a friend and re-scanning Book 4 - Mercenary. I then redid the cover from scratch. You need to get the whole thing to fit into the POD publisher's template. Getting it the right size, making sure there are no artifacts, and making sure you center all the scans on the page is work. If it were my full-time job, I think it would take me about 2 business days of only working on one LBB to get it "print-ready" for a POD publisher, assuming I had a good quality physical book to scan in.

You're also looking at resizing the books. None of the Classic Traveller books are of any "normal" size by 21st century printing standards. So, any large book needs to get redone as either US Letter or A4 books. And the LBBs would probably need to be US Digest size. US trade size or A5. Then you have the entire issue of saddle-stitched versus perfect binding. DriveThruRPG will not do saddle-stitched anymore. And the POD publishers that can do saddle-stitched books usually limit them to 48 pages.

So, if you want POD Classic stuff, it will not match the existing classic-era material.

Also, does Mongoose (or even FFE) have good quality print copies they can scan in? If they don't, they'll need to go "eBay shopping" trying to find a copy good enough to scan in. When FFE released the CD-ROM, the world of computers was quite different. File size was very important; the smaller, the better. In 2025, file size matters less. Good 300 DPI or 600 DPI scans of Traveller books no longer posses network bandwidth or disk size issues anymore.

If I were retired, this is something I would happily do as a contractor for Mongoose. But sadly, I'm a decade away from that point in my life. And having redone a few of the Alien Module covers, I have to say, those are a lot of work to get looking good enough for POD.