Freelance Traveller

Mongoose Traveller Pocket Rulebook

reviewed by Jeff Zeitlin

Traveller Core Rulebook Pocket Edition. Gareth Hanrahan
Mongoose Publishing http://www.mongoosepublishing.com
192pp, softcover (reduced form-factor)
UK£15/US$19.95

I previously reviewed the Mongoose Traveller Core Rulebook, and everything that I said about that product applies to this one, save that (1) this rulebook is half the size (5-1/2 inches by 8-1/2 inches, matching the size of the original 1977 Traveller release) and (2) softcover, instead of hardbound. There are minor layout and artwork changes, some of which suggest that Mongoose took my comments on the flaws of the original to heart (for example, artwork no longer appears to be greyscreened by tables or text, but instead the background for tables and text blocks is opaque and overlaying/obscuring artwork), but by and large, any reference to a page or table in the Core Rulebook is valid for this version as well, and many pages are identical in both editions.  The top and bottom margins of this book are noticeably larger than would normally be expected, suggesting that Mongoose started with the camera-ready layouts for the Core Rulebook, and simply downsized them. They could have saved a few pages by starting from scratch and laying out for the smaller form factor, but doing so would undoubtedly have taken far longer, and very probably raised the cost of the final product. The convenience of not needing to care whether you have the Core Rulebook or this one for references is also a plus to the way that Mongoose chose to do it.

At half the cover price (US pricing) of the full-sized core rulebook, this is an even better value than that product is, although for aging eyes like mine, the small size of the text in the sans-serif font makes reading perhaps somewhat more difficult than it ought to be.