Traveller Book 3: Scout (Traveller Sci-Fi Roleplaying) Paperback – March 17, 2009

This new version of the Scouts is pretty insightful. It goes over the roles of the scouts (even SpecOps), how they survey, and the Character gen process.Also found in the book is a sample Scout base, its layout, and associated Pre-generated characters. Very compact, but you can see its functionality.The book also has some new gear, a handful of scout ships, and some other nice bits of info for Scout characters.The final section has a nice overview of how a survey works. Its not over-powering, but a nice flow on how it should work. Nice addition.The other reviews must have had a different copy of the book I have - I didn't get the 'feel' of the book they did. I agree, the Mercenary book leaves a lot to be desired, but Scouts does a pretty fair job on its subject.

Again, like in High Guard, we find around a quarter of the book filled with character generation tables for various Scout careers. To some extent I am reminded of some of the products put out by various publishers during the time of d20 3.5; endless prestige classes and new feats that really don't add a great deal to the game and are easy to churn out to fill space. To waste 25 pages of paper and ink on something you will use only during character creation seems intellectually lazy. Creating a character is a fun part of the game, but Traveller is not a game with character classes. Mongoose has show some skill at filling pages with very little meat in the past with its Conan line of books, and this seems be falling back on bad habits.While new ships and deck plans are always welcome, I didn't like the art. The ships look too organic and do not have the right Traveller feel to it. In some cases, like on page 55, I wonder if the artist truly understands the scale of the ship he is drawing. From the picture it looks like a large ship with rows of windows; but that is only a 150 dt ship! I have similar complaints about some of the art (by the same artist) in Traders and Gunboats. There is also a lack of clarity in the statistics for each vessel. Going back to the ship above (the Type SX Frontiersman) the table detailing it shows it being a Jump 2X1 ship. However one of its stated advantages is that it has Jump 4 range? Given its modular abilities, I am guessing that it has that extended range with a fuel module, giving it the ability to conduct Jump 2 X 2 with that module, but that is not entirely clear. The Terrapin class station on pages 62 & 63 is just plain odd. It makes me wonder if the art came before the concept of the ship, and they created a ship to fit the art?Unlike the original GDW Scout supplement, or even "First In" for GURPS Traveller, Mongoose's Scout does not have the detailed world creation rules that I, at least, have come to expect in such products. Granted, the world creation rules in the core rulebook are fairly complete, so perhaps there was not a need for that.

For the most part, this is a good book if you have any interest in playing a scout, or running a campagin with them.However, with that beings said, there are some serious drawbacks.1. A lot of this book is uninspired. I'd say a full half of it is. The survival section is boring, the scout adventures are not exactly interesting to run or play, the the equipment has no great surprises.2. Quality control is an issue, as it always is with Mongoose. Publishers much smaller than Mongoose can get it, why can't they?3. The detailed system creation is nice, but, hard to read and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It also doesn't seem to be based in science. Take a basic planetary astronomy course, THEN write this.Positives are few, but they are there.1. Character creation tables for the most part is well done. It adds another layer of fun to that element of the game. However, some of these careers are very uninteresting.2. The detail into the scout service is nice. Some of it is drivel, but it is useful to see the structure.Overall, I regret buying it, only because I could've bought something more useful for Traveller.

Great addition to the traveller line