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General Book 9: Pirates is now out in print!

MongooseBella

MongooseBella

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Book 9: Pirates is now available in print, and we are shipping out pre-orders as we speak...

r/traveller - Book 9: Pirates now in print!

You can grab a copy here: https://mongoosepublishing.com/products/book-9-pirates

Embark on daring exploits and leave your mark on the stars! Whether leading a crew of daring corsairs or battling ruthless raiders, this book provides new rules and tools for pirate campaigns:

• Advanced character generation for creating infamous pirate crews.
• New corsair starship designs and acquisition rules.
• Privateering mechanics covering the economics of piracy.
• A ready-to-play border subsector ripe for plunder and adventure.

Screenshot 2025-04-02 111436.pngScreenshot 2025-04-02 111445.png

For Classic Traveller, the term Books has a special meaning, presenting additional rules on specific subjects, expanding on Traveller's basic concepts. Books run 48 to 56 pages and may be used independently or together, but all require the basic rules sets.
 
whulorigan said:
Other than just being the arbitrarily chosen colors of the stripes on the covers of the Published Booklets, no.
(Or at least not that I am aware of).
Click to expand...
We asked Marc this question when choosing the colour for Pirates. What secret, esoteric method was used to select colours, and what secrets of the universe did they pertain to?

Nah, they were just random :)
 
It a really nice book. I like it a lot and it pretty well recreates the look and feel of the old Classic books. Except for the images of the two ships on pgs 36 & 37 they let it down a bit compared to the fantastic ship illustrations in Supplement 7, which has always been my favourite Traveller book of all. But the old style ship deck plans are superb, The Glory Corsair ship design looks just stupid though one of these days Mongoose will find someone who can design ships and vehicles. This is one of the main reasons (too much errata being the other) that I have stopped supporting Mongoose Traveller, but this Pirates CT book was the exception that I had to buy.
 
nastutt said:
The Glory Corsair ship design looks just stupid
Click to expand...
By "looks stupid" are you referring to the ship design (i.e. the stats) or the picture? If you mean the latter, I really miss Bryan Gibson and the Bill Keith, both of whom had a great eye for this.
 
Yes the look of it, with the daft sharp wings and the horrible ugly bow, just looks like a kid's drawing of a spaceship. I might have to do a sketch of how I would make this ship look and post it on here. I think the idea is good but the design just needs a 'creative eye' over it.

Mind you some of the Classic Traveller ships are very unimaginative too especially those in Fighting Ships Supplement which I think is the only CT book I dislike.

The best ships designs for me are in Supp 7 and also IISS Ship Files, of which I need to get a new copy as I sold mine years ago.
 
I did a review when I got it that was also added to Freelance Traveller a while back. And yeah, generally not a fan of the Mongoose art style but then I am biased by learning Traveller in the early days and the black & white line art and that is what is "Traveller art" to me.

https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2025/03/classic-traveller-book-9-pirates.html
https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2025/04/traveller-pirate-character-generation.html
https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2025/04/traveller-pirates-hard-copy.html
 
coliver988 said:
I did a review when I got it that was also added to Freelance Traveller a while back. And yeah, generally not a fan of the Mongoose art style but then I am biased by learning Traveller in the early days and the black & white line art and that is what is "Traveller art" to me.
Click to expand...

Yeah I do love a lot of the old CT art. Mongoose have improved their artwork lately and some of it is really nice now, but I still dont like their ship plans much. It's a real shame the ship art and Corsair design let down Pirates because otherwise it looks like a good book, mind you I haven't read the text yet. Mongoose just keep letting these odd shoddy things through their editing and I do not know how they manage to do it. Just infuriates me lol because otherwise I could really enjoy their books.
 
nastutt said:
Yes the look of it, with the daft sharp wings and the horrible ugly bow, just looks like a kid's drawing of a spaceship.
Click to expand...
The artist appeared to be going for something like the Vargr ships depicted on p. 152 of The Traveller Adventure.

I don't think they really hit the mark. 😝

nastutt said:
The best ships designs for me are in Supp 7 and also IISS Ship Files . . .
Click to expand...
The ship plans in IISS Ships Files are by Albie Fiore, who also did the plans for Leviathan, which is arguably my favorite Traveller ship design.
 
nastutt said:
Yes the look of it, with the daft sharp wings and the horrible ugly bow, just looks like a kid's drawing of a spaceship.
Click to expand...
I'm reminded of a different game company that I did writing for where the setting called for submarines (because, water world with barely any land masses at the surface). So I did up my designs (using the game system's construction paradigm) to give stats and performance parameters ... and specified that the submarines ought to have Albacore Hull silhouettes for hydrodynamic efficiency (and stealthy quiet).

Then the book got printed, the submarines in the art works were covered in greebles that were absolutely nonsensical.

A friend of mine (who builds sonar systems for the USN) took one look at the art and said, "whoever drew that has no idea what they were supposed to be doing" ... and didn't need to say anymore.

I asked the editor why my instructions for CLEAN LINES on the hull form factors of the submarines had been IGNORED in favor of complex repeating geometries for holes, gaps, boxes and other greebles that would create massive hydrodynamic drag (and thus, NOISE) when moving through water?

The answer I got back was NOT ENCOURAGING. :mad:
They had deliberately asked the artist to make the exterior surfaces of the submarine hulls "visually interesting" ... so you could identify what you were looking at in the pictures.

The result was "visually interesting" ... and INCREDIBLY DUMB LOOKING to anyone who knew anything about water craft.
"Visually interesting" ipso facto meant "accoustically noisy" ... meaning massive sensor signature (the opposite of stealthy), in addition to tremendous wake turbulence generation in hydrodynamic terms.

It was the artistic equivalent of taking the USS Cygnus from The Black Hole and claiming it could fly at supersonic/hypersonic speeds "aerodynamically" through atmosphere "no problem" ... when that OBVIOUSLY wasn't true, because all you had to do was LOOK AT IT to know that it wasn't true.

h1RzzZD.jpeg

Consequently, it's often times better (particularly with Traveller craft) to work out a deck plan FIRST before trying to come up with an exterior to wrap about those internal deck spaces.

When FORM does not follow FUNCTION in ways that are expected, rejection will tend to be the (intuitive) result.

In aerospace design, one of the basic "rules" is that AIRcraft that have a high top speed should LOOK FAST even when they're parked on the tarmac. The notion that sleek clean lines are what are required for high speed/high performance is not an accident ... it's often what is DEMANDED by the confluence of engineering and physics to solve a variety of "need for speed" challenges.

Yes, "with enough thrust even a brick can fly" ... but a sleek aerodynamic shape will FLY BETTER than a blocky brick would/can with the same thrust, due to lower drag (buffet, wake, etc.) characteristics ... so build something sleek instead of something blocky.



Point being that game art not matching the aesthetics needed for believability is not something unique and specific to the Mongoose Traveller era of publishing. Plenty of other game studios and products have fallen afoul of the same carelessness and inattention to detail.

The good news is that Mongoose is apparently getting better at this and starting to outgrow their "not wonderful art" phase of publishing, as time goes on (and the feedback rolls in). :unsure:
 
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