Going through it solo, was not my favorite, although not bad either. The description pretty much tells it all although there's a bit of a plot twist or two. I didn't necessarily need a module to continue speculative trading, but I suppose if you went through the first 4 modules you've probably started speculative trading by now, especially if you're willing to be chartered out for a freight haul, which is this entire adventure. And it's expensive to stop speculative trading especially when you've leveraged yourself into a new ship with a big mortgage. However, this is the worst region of the galaxy I've traded in so far. That being said, with the new ship, I was still making a mega credit on most of the "bad" trades.

I don't regret buying this module and it wasn't the worst in the Reach series. I'd say it was better than 1 & 2. Certainly not enough to disuade me from buying the next (#6 in the series). It is very fairly priced.

There's quite a bit of room for drama in this one. So, if your group is heavily into the role playing (method acting) thing this is probably most suited for them although it doesn't prevent you from just delivering the cargo and being done with it because you couldn't care less about the drama. Not much of an adventure if you did that, but you were told up front that's what this is. It's really all the drama around it that brings it alive because at it's heart the entire thing is "take this cargo from point A to point B a handful of parsecs away". The worse you handle it the more likely you'll fight including some potential space combat. So, for those not caring about the drama, they'll likely get some additional combat out of it.

All that said, I prefered the drama in some of the previous Reach adventures as those felt more heroic and High & Dry still reigns as far as I'm concerned for the heroic scenes and overall adventure.

Mongoose have been systematically mapping the Imperium with their add-on settings. “The Rift” fleshes out 5 (Five!) whole sectors. However, as these sectors are mostly empty it’s not as generous as you’d imagine at first sight. There are some new rules to cover navigating the distances – which weren’t as innovative as I’d originally envisioned – secret military bases in otherwise empty sectors is part of it. A couple of new alien species are sketched out, a few pages are devoted to new equipment but at its heart it’s an atlas. Some planets have more detail than others and here are some story hooks but no fully fleshed out adventures – although there are three you can buy set in this region “Flatlined” is particularly noteworthy (one of the best introductory Traveller adventures I’ve ever read) but Flatlined is not predicated on being set in the Rift and could easily be purchased separately & re-homed somewhere else as a campaign-starter.

The production quality is typically Mongoose – excellent. There’s a lot of material here so I’m not going to quibble about the price – it’s fair for the amount of effort that clearly went into it.

The issue I have is that the area itself is fairly unengaging. When I read “The Pirates of Drinax” I could imagine a great campaign. Reading “Behind the Claw” (re)introduces you to two of the most fleshed out sectors from the Classic Traveller era – the greatest Sci-Fi setting in RPGs. Reading this, all I can see is a tedious series of (harder than normal) jumps to get anywhere worthwhile while in contrast the “Spinward Main” promises a new adventure every jump.

It's something a hardcore Traveller GM is going to want to own and I have zero regrets about buying it, but I can’t see it being the home to many great campaigns and as such I’d recommend you buy it after Drinax and Behind the Claw. You do probably want to own it if you want to run “Deepnight Revelation” though as that campaign kicks off in a sector mapped in this set.

3 stars seems unfairly low for a product of this quality and 4 too generous compared to other Mongoose products – let’s call it 3.5 stars.

There's a lot to like about this one. But this isn't the first time I thought I had found my favorite traveller module mid way through only to watch it get worse toward the end. I'm not sure why the author (as far as I can tell there's only one) keeps putting the best parts in the middle. I suppose it's because I prefer the emotional storytelling he puts in the middle instead of the hack and slash he always puts at the end. Of course, I'm going through these modules as a solo campaign before running players through them. One thing I'm not all that crazy about, especially for solo play, is that the author likes to just "throw a bunch of ingrediants on the counter" and tell the story teller to "Cook something!" I suppose that might mean something fresh for the players when you run it for a group, but it requires some work on the story teller's part and presumably you bought a module so as not to have to make your own adventure. Still, if you want something in between with "ingrediants" and some "suggested recipies" then this module and most of the other Reach modules up to this point should be pretty satisfying. I think once I get some players to go through it I can improvise something they'll like.

The high point for this adventure, for me, was Gollere. Part of that was because I made half of it up. Basically, I ignored the "taint" in the atmosphere as it's not explained in the module or the rules other than what I just wrote and it makes little sense that you have that many people at that low of a tech level living in an atmosphere that requires filtered breathing even if you assume the taint doesn't kill the local flora and fauna. I found it better just to ignore. I then decided that the port city has an entertainment district like Las Vegas where the local officials try and wine and dine off-worlders to try and convince them to trade with Gollere (not to mention for the locals to enjoy). So, I imagined the 1960's for the tech and had the locals wine and dine them offering comps and upgrades. It made for a great vacation as the crew really needed it by that point. The other "encounter" on Gollere was equally as rewarding. The station one is more planned but I improvised that one quite a bit as well.

That brings up the "Crew Fatigue" rules this module introduces. I'm not entirely sure what the point of this was. Granted, I've always tried to have a sort of "living conditions" on the ship rule in my campaign. I'll move the rest of this part of the discussion to comments instead of review, but I felt this "Crew Fatigue" idea was a great idea that was poorly implemented and should have been in the core rules. Or rather a better thought out version of it should be in the core rules.

Also, the deck plans for the Amuar are near the front of the book and the encounter there is at the end of the book. I hate this forced flipping back and forth from the front to the back over and over.

One thing that can be said for the "you cook it" style of encounters here is that you will tailor the encounter to your group. The encounter at the end was too weak for my crew as this module didn't cripple their abilities the way previous modules had by marooning them or taking their weapons or both. If you're going through the Reach modules in order, previous modules had encounters easily 10 times more lethal in addition to making sure they had no equipment capable of dealing with it effectively. This module basically allows you any equipment you thought to bring and could afford and then throws low level encounters at you!? Although, it's easy enough to substitute something a bit more difficult. My entire group has boarding vacc suits because they were concerned they were going into frontier space and the ship might get boarded. But there's no attack in the end of this that can penetrate that even with max damage. I suppose it just illustrates how difficult it is to write an encounter in a book that will be appropriate for every group. That's probably why they lean so heavily on "Here's the ingredients. Cook it yourself."

Overall, I think this one's worth the money. And it has a lot of potential if you are comfortable with it's "cook it yourself" encounters.

No POD. Non Printer Frindly and it's encrypted so you can't take it to LULU for printing. It's like they don't want you to have hard copies that you can put into the hands of your Table so you can get them into this game. Well, OK.

I'm surprised that this is my favorite Reach module after going throug the first 3. I wasn't that crazy about it. Well, I actually LOVED the first half of it. But it's the same encounter over and over and over and over and over ... again after that. It really started to become a sad joke even to the point where the NEXT reach module starts out with THE EXACT SAME ENCOUNTER AGAIN! Are you KIDDING me!? Granted, they change a thing or two every time they throw the encounter at you; for example, once it's maybe indoors and the next time it's outdoors!

Then again, it's $9; you get what you pay for. And some parts of this module really make up for it. Certainly some oppurtunities for some heroic action and some emotional narrative! Like I said, I think it's my favorite Reach module out of the first 3 as parts of it I keep remembering fondly. But it IS short, especially if you count the repeating encounter as one encounter.

It also annoys me quite a bit on these modules how vauge the encounters are. No maps really for any of the encounters. Granted, it's theater of the mind, but as a story teller you have to invent the scene in your mind from scratch. You're given an extremely vauge scene such as "you're in a ruined building" and then YOU the story teller have to map at least the important parts out yourself. How many exits does this room have? What walls are the exits on? What obstacles are in the room to use as cover? What's in the adjacent rooms? You're going to have to run a combat in here and all this matters! But Mongoose isn't going to help you answer these questions; it's all on you to map the world out and populate it.

So, as long as you're okay filling in all these details yourself, there's some really good material here in a few scenes. Certainly enough to keep a group of travellers busy for 4 to 8 hours of game play.

I also didn't like this nearly as much as High and Dry, which has been my favorite Mongoose module so far. But I really do love the human encounters in it for the drama.

4 stars for being short and repetative, but overall delivering a decent story as long as you can spice up the repetativeness and flesh out the encounters and scenes yourself.

Mixed feelings on this one. Not particularly good for a solo play through, but not completely a waste there either.

All of these Traveller modules seem a bit short, but then again I'm looking at the price and the price is right. I think I'd rather pay twice as much and get twice as much adventure. Heck, a Big Mac pretty much costs more than this module these days! Wish I were joking but I can't get out of McDonalds for anything less than twice the price of this module just to feed myself one meal.

Like most of the Mongoose adventures I've played through so far, the characters are trapped in the adventure and can't leave without solving it and are disarmed and have their armor taken from them. This is starting to get a bit old. I get that it's hard to properly challenge players when they have gear that turns them into super heros, but I'm sure players are eventually going to get a bit miffed about not being able to use any of that cool gear they earned. It's one think to be denied it occasionally, but none of these adventures allow them to use their ships or most of their weapons or armour and throw creatures at them capable of doing enough damage to kill them with a single hit. It's getting old. Especially when they expect YOU to decide the encounter difficulty.

Encounters are left intentionally vauge presumably so that a story teller can dial up or down the encounter. For example, I don't think I've seen a Mongoose adventure yet that actually tells you how many opponents the group is up against EVER except when it's a single opponent. So, that kind of defeats the argument of taking all their gear away to keep them from being over powered when they don't define the power level of the encounter anyway.

And there isn't a lot of variety in the encounter opponents in Mongoose modules that I've seen so far. You're lucky if you see more than 1 "monster" given per module. Usually it's one monster, often thrown at the players over and over and over again, a group of human opponents, and a few skill rolls. This is the formula.

But all in all it was a decent adventure/story even if all these modules are starting to get a bit formulaic. As long as you're willing to flesh out the encounters and situations a bit yourself with general guidelines from the module, there's some pretty good stuff here to throw at players. I loved the underwater theme, but other than that this was certainly not my favorite even within the Reach series which I haven't been overly impressed with.

4 stars for being somewhat enjoyable and very reasonably priced. After running through it solo, I think I could make a fun evening out of it for a group of players.

The day I purchased my first RPG, occurred on a day that many of my 'firsts' occurred as a kid.

It was the first time my parents let me travel unaccompanied from the country town we lived in, to our state capital with my friends.

It was the first time I had fast food.

It was the first time I saw a movie in a cinema (our town had a drive-in theatre).

And it was the first time I went to a games shop.

So many RPGs and wargames to look at there.

But all I had played so far in my life had been D&D/fantasy games and I wanted to try/buy something different to what we had been playing.

And then I saw the Traveller Deluxe Set on the shelf in that games shop.

I picked it up and read the 'This is Free Trader Beowulf' Mayday message on the front of the box and I was hooked!

It was so evocative, particularly after hacking and slashing things in the D&D world.

I bought that game on the spot and the later gaming experience was fantastic! (although the in-game experience system was rubbish).

How could you put all of Charted Space into 3 little black books?

Traveller will always have a special place in my heart as the first RPG I ever bought.

I've read some detailed reviews here and I'll leave it to them to explain the 'nuts and blots' of the upgrade.

But, this game was my first love and this most recent update reminded me of my youth and the many hours I played Traveller with my friends and the subsectors I generated for them, populated with my imagination. Good times!

The update looks great and the game plays much the way it used to play. The starship deckplans are a great addition!

I now understand failing a survival roll under the upgraded rules, can make a charcter more interesting (provided I didn't actually die!)

And now, maybe Free Trader Beowulf will install a turret and kick arse this time!

I absolutely hated this. I spent the last half of it just wishing it were over. But keep in mind that I ran it solo. Even after buying it, I'm not certain I want to run players through it. However, I could see where some people might like it if they just wanted to use it as a spring board to come up with their own ideas.

I should also mention that this is the exact type of adventure I always say I would love to go through, arctic adventures and caving adventures, due to the beauty and especially the added challenge of the elements. But that itch wasn't satisfied with this one.

Basically, it's just a slog(grind) across an arctic wasteland where there is no food. It's essentially a cross country trek in a glorified RV for 95% of the "adventure" with only a couple planned encounters. It pretty much says that at best you can forage a bit less than you need to survive so that you're constantly moving towards starvation regardless of what you do. There's almost no way you'll make the trek on foot as the temperatures get down below -50 degrees C and I never saw them rise above freezing even on the warmer days. You're going across a distance of about half the United States (Dallas to San Francisco for example) and you're doing it in what is implied to be several feet of new fallen snow. Basically, if your vehicle fails you, you're dead because you'll never reach any place to find food assuming somehow you can manage to not freeze to death. Plus, on foot the journey one way (not counting repeating it coming back) would take months on foot, with no food may I remind you, and possibly no water since I didn't see a lot of fire wood to melt snow with. And there are several oppurtunites for the vehicle to be damaged.

The big boss fight at the end says a lot about the people who wrote this. You go up against a creature that can one shot kill you with a few points to spare if you have a 14 in STR, DEX AND END. So, the average character will be one shot killed every time. 8d damage per hit. Oh and it has an armor of +16 so any weapon that can't do at least 3d can't ever harm it. And it's going to ignore the first 16 points of any damage you do do to it! So, your average 6d weapon hit is only going to do a point of damage or 2 to it. You on the other hand are probably not going to have time to don armor for this fight. And it has 160HP. So, you're going to have to hit it something like 80 times while it's killing a party member every round. (Actually, it has poor aim which helps. So, you just lose a party member every OTHER round!)

You're clearly not meant to actually fight it but are supposed to somehow outsmart it. You're SUPPOSED to just tell your players how to avoid this thing because otherwise it's just a total party kill, period. The suggested ways to defeat it in the book are absolutely ridiculous. For example, you can dump fuel in it's way. Right! Because you just happen to carry a few gallons of gasoline in your pocket for your electric powered RV out here in the middle of a glacier (to really do this right you need about 50 barrels of gasoline to saturate the ground around the whole area so hopefully you're playing a wizard that can summon this). The GM is totally going to have to just make the impossible happen for them to avoid this encounter. You can probably drive it off with grenades as apparently it doesn't like vibrations, but you would have to throw a grenade to find this out because there's nothing that would suggest this is a possibility before you actually do it. And I'm pretty sure this creature can destroy your vehicle/way home/life line.

And keep in mind that this is #2 in the Marches Adventures. #1 was really made for new players just starting the game and this is suggested as their second adventure. Maybe you can convince these new players to never play again with a total party kill! It's relatively certain new players aren't going to last any time at all in this adventure unless you seriously dumb the whole thing down a LOT!

But a lot of what really annoyed me about this thing was that you're constantly having to roll for the weather and driving hazards which are in completely different parts of the book, and after doing it a few dozen times, I still don't know if I ever did it right. Complex rules like this that are the foundation of an adventure need to be spelled out clearly and on one page so you don't have to flip from one side of the book to the other every two minutes through the ENTIRE game over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.... I'm pulling my hair out just thinking about it! This stuff should have been in a flow chart. These rolls ARE like a third of the adventure by itself as they constantly affect what's going on! Not to mention that the weather rolls that I happened to roll were not "fun" or even challenging, but rather just forcing you to back track and lose a day of progress or more on a journey that was already long and monotenous and "where are we magically obtaining food from at this point?".

The whole thing is pretty much a basic premise and instruction telling you to "wing" the rest. I suppose if you want to use this as a foundation for an adventure you might make it into something, but do you really need to buy a module to tell you to create it all yourself? I really think most game masters would be better off creating their own adventure rather than running this one. You're going to have to dream up your own encounters anyway!

This was a blast to play through! This was my first time playing Traveller after hearing about it for years and owning books from previous additions.

One of the things that makes this such a great adventure is there are significant oppurtunities for heroics - if you like playing the good guy, but you may have to pay for your heroics.

Probably the biggest problem I had with this adventure was that when you reach the summit you have to cross a deep lake a distance of two American football fields while lugging big cases or presumably negatively bouyant ship parts (which it doesn't tell you how heavy or bulky they are while you are hauling them up the side of a mountain!). Oh, and you don't know what's in the water with you while you try and make this 200 yard swim with engine parts and your full pack of gear on. Hope you're an olympic swimmer! I don't see any way to deal with this other than inflatable rafts, which you DID think to remember to bring with you up the side of a mountain even though there was no warning you were going to have to traverse a lake at the top, right? You remembered your raft big enough for the whole group AND ship parts, right? Not only are you lugging ship parts up the side of a mountiain, but now you need to lug a boat up the side of the mountian TOO! Not exactly realistic. The module does suggest players could build a boat, but out of WHAT? There's some rocks! There are some bushes. There aren't even any trees to chop down and make a raft out of! There is NOTHING mentioned in the scene of the module that could possibly keep the group and their gear afloat! We had to return back to the bottom of the mountain and start over, although it didn't really cost us anything except 4 days of time due to climbing the mountain twice. And we left the ship parts at the top to make room for inflatable rafts on the return ascent. The adventure designers should have thought this one through a lot better, but if you're the story teller, you can fix the story pretty easy after reading through the whole module to see what I mean.

Also, the crew is disarmed by customs when they land on the planet. The module probably should have allowed them to obtain a hunting license with the planetary government. After getting to the summit and realizing they had to go back to town to get boats, I had them do a couple diplomacy checks to see if they could get a license for their long arms, and if not their hand guns before going up the second time because you're out in the wilderness and you have NO IDEA what's out there with you just in terms of wildlife alone! It's a frontier world! Other than the political situation, I'm surprised everyone isn't packing heat like in Alaska!

I ran it solo for myself and that went better than I would have expected, although I didn't let myself read too far ahead and made my decisions on how my characters would act before playing out the scene. I had so much fun; now I want to run it for a group of players! I did miss a few things and had to go back and correct a few minor things in scenes running it solo but it's pretty good for solo play and I think a great adventure for new players.

Now that I've read through the whole thing, I think I could run it 10 times better for a group than what I experienced, which was pretty good on its own. One thing that I DID question about the main story is HOW thin exactly is the atmosphere. After reading through the whole thing, I think the atmosphere is WAY thicker than I was at first lead to believe, which made a difference in the story due to the mountain climb. After reading through it I would play it out as if the atmosphere is like being up in the Colorado mountains around 8,000 feet (at this planet's sea level) so that the summit in the game (even though it's a relatively low elevation) is about the atmosphere of being on top of Mt. Everest. I originally thought the atmosphere at sea level was thinner than the top of Everest or equal to it, but that's not the way the adventure plays out. The way the adventure plays out, you wouldn't need any special breathing equipment on this planet (other than at the higher elevations) any more than you would going to Durango, Colorado. So, when they say "thin atmosphere" they just mean thinner than sea level on earth, but WAY thicker than at the top of Mt. Everest. I think the module should have spelled out that you don't need special breathing equipment on this planet at any of the settlements. My group went up the side of the mountain pretty much wearing SCUBA gear because I'm thinking "if the atmosphere requires special breathing equipment at low elevation we might as well be in space at high elevation". Then you really are hauling way too much gear up the side of the mountain.

Also, there's some significant climbing rolls in this module and the game doesn't seem to give any good rules for climbing. And what skill do you use for that? Profession(Mountainer)? It will probably be Athletics(Dex), but that's pretty generic for a very specific skill. Although, it's actually more of a very difficult hike than it is an actual mountain climb though. I imagine the incline of the mountain to be about 35 degrees in most places, enough to make it a dangerous hike for those unprepared but not so much a full on mountain climb except potentially in a few spots. My characters over prepared before knowing what they were getting into because I didn't read ahead due to running it solo. They also only had one out of five character with some climbing ability, which encouraged them to over-prepare. The rules do kind of mention that if you can get one person up a climb they can basically haul everyone else up (In the few places where you're actually climbing instead of hiking). So, I imagined them using that to their advantage and taking every safety precaution and using the extra time spent rules. Lots of pitons were used in strategic locations to limit fall distance as the group ascended as a team. And you definitely want the proper gear for a climb. Otherwise, the climb can be rather deadly if you don't take it serious.

The whole mission can potentially be accomplished without combat although there are a couple places where you could get into a fight. And fight or no fight, there's several oppurtunites for your characters to die here although a lot of them would be due to heroics.

There is no floor plan for the ship in the module, although I think it's a Scout/Courier Type:S from the core rule book. I just noticed they duplicated this ship as if it were something new in High Guard Update.

A third-party sourcebook on hobgoblins for D&D 3rd Edition. The book provides a fairly detailed treatment of hobgoblin culture, behavior, and tactics, as well as a solid hobgoblin fortress for adventurers to deal with. However, much like other books in the Slayer's Guide series, this doesn't innovate very much, and the treatment ultimately remains very close to the D&D core hobgoblin. The book also seems particularly light on new rules options, even compared to other Slayer's Guides; there's only a basic hobgoblin PC writeup, two hobgoblin spells, and some generic hobgoblin NPCs. (Originally posted on Goodreads)

A bonus note on this PDF edition: while the text is perfectly readable, most of the artwork is very blurry. Doesn't affect the usability of the product much, but it is a shame for the artists.

Love the theme of Paranoia and am pleased with the purchase of the new Red Clearance Edition. I'm not a huge fan of the card portion though, since playing on line with my friends was way more challenging that it needed to be with that mechanic.

2300 was one of my most favorite hard sci-fi settings of all time, allowing you to play everything from an Alien themed game to something more akin to Outland. Was super excited when the core rulebooks were updated and revised by Mongoose, as I enjoy their other Traveller items. I'm glad this was made available to us in digital format, as I mostly play remote, even long before the last few years mostly due to distances between myself and my friends/ family.

A generic dungeoncrawl on a small ring-station. Could work pretty good if you inject it into a campaign with an evil megacorp that is doing combat-drug experiments. Features angry test-animals and cannibals, and also the most confusing map I've ever encountered in an RPG.

its just three forms repeated. literally an xp form, termination, a cerebral cortex one, and a generic charatcer sheet. not what I expected

What a joy. All the greatness of Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition with fantastic artwork and layout for $1.00? WOW! I bought this for a friend as a gift, and I plan to use it as prize support for 2d6 (not all of them Traveller erhm...) games I run at conventions. It's a no-brainer.

Mongoose is often criticized for the prices of its books. Given that they are made in England, and shipped to U.S. and furthermore the production values and art are so high, well, sorry folks ... it's what it costs.

But entries like this give new players a helluva a lot to see and a chance to sink their teeth into the system.

Comparied to the horrid production values and art of earlier Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition materials, each of these books is simply marvelous. (This is NOT a slam on the Cephues Engine System books that followed, many of which are amazingly fun ... see Cowboys vs. Xenomorphs and Attack Squadron Roswell).

If I were Mongoose trying to build my player base, I would do what the 1E/Cepheus Engine fans are doing and take the core system and use it for other genres. "Splat Books" if you will for post-apoc, gangsters, Old West, horror, and more. Keep the page could super low (say 23- or 64-pages) by ditching all the blah-blah wording and give the core nuggets for those settings. Heck, I still have my old Chaosium copy of Thieves' World which had Classic Traveller stats for all the characters.

More competition is good, and I'm glad to see CE and other systems are causing Mongoose to fight like hell with great production value books and good storytelling and settings. More slim easy-entry books for a few dollars, please! (Heck, $10 as a price point would be ideal).