#Desperados 3 character creation series

The only Traveller alien that was included (or at least that I recognized), the 'Llellewlowy', are otherwise known as the 'Dandelions', and thus stick with the theme of silly aliens in this base. Worse, in order to avoid strong connections to the Third Imperium, it's filled with minor, one-off aliens like the 'Penguinoids'. It's primarily a listing of NPCs at the base, and they didn't jump out at me as likely to kick off stories.

Unfortunately I found the sample scout base, 'Scout Base Cygnus X-3', somewhat of a disappointment. There also some nice material on scout bases in this section, which could be used by a GM to create settings for a game involving scouts. Nonetheless, it could be of use and more importantly it includes d6 fleshed-out adventure ideas for each of the 5 scout specialties. There are two different chapters which provide background that a GM can use to create adventures.įirst up is Scout Missions which contains a Mercenary-like system to generate Scout adventures-or so it claims it's actually much shorter and more simplistic. The character & equipment material as a whole rates a '4' out of '5' for Substance. I thought that all of these ships did a good job of fitting into niches in the Imperial ecosystem and were the sort of ships that you might actually meet in the course of adventures. It's a great idea and well executed.Īfter that we get: a modular survey and interdiction station, which is the sort of thing you might need to visit a scout survey ship built on the battle rider philosophy (meaning that you dock a bunch of non-jump ships on a jump-ready mother ship) and a few ships related to the Xboat network. 50 tons of the ship aren't locked down and instead there are modules that you can select among-depending on the needs of your players/campaign. The chapter starts off with a variant of the standard scout vessel called the SX Frontiersman which includes a modular design. Frankly, I was prepared not to like them, because for me once you have a few basic designs, I feel like most campaigns don't need more starships. Nonetheless, there's enough good material here that any scout should be sure to check out his specialties' preferred equipment before finishing up his character creation. Sadly, it doesn't look like this material was reprinted in the Central Supply Catalogue-sad both because it keeps this material less accessible and because the Catalogue could have used more non-combat gear. However, author Whitaker does a good job of trying to make it relevant for scouts by organizing much of the equipment by the five scout specialties. As I've commented before, I'm not really convinced of the utility of hiding a large set of equipment off in an accessory like this, because it's too easy to forget about. The character creation chapters ends with some nice notes on how scouts can be called back from retirement, which is an important plot element for GMs in the Imperium-and a nice adventure hook too.Ī section on Equipment details the stuff that your scout characters might want to buy. Like all of the standalone character creation systems found in these Books, I think this one is very successful (though as usual there are slight differences between the Books in how the different sub-careers are laid out and how you move among them). There are just five specialties-contact, courier, exploration, special operations, and survey-but they do a very nice job of laying out the breadth of tasks which scouts are responsible for. Scout features a standalone, expanded system for creating Scout Characters (much as High Guard did for the Navy). The material in Scout is pretty scattered, but I've broadly split it into three parts: making and equipping characters running scout adventures and other rules.

Scout is, simply, about scouts: who they are, what they do, and what they do it with.

This review discusses the third of them, Traveller Book 3: Scout.

#Desperados 3 character creation series

Mongoose Publishing has put out a series of Books, each covering one category of Traveller characters.