Mongoose have put out a new 2300AD book for Mong Trav 2nd edition. It's up on drivethru for 36 quid, which is probably 50 dollars.

I haven't finished reading through in detail but my first impression is it is pretty much what I would have expected from a book written by Colin Dunn (knows his 2300AD onions) and published by Mongoose (overpriced, mixed quality of artwork, basic editing errors, ripoff failure to make it standalone requiring purchase of the MongTrav 2nd ed corebook, although to be fair to them they are doing a bundle where 2nd ed is reduced to ten dollars).

Plenty of Mongoose-isms, e.g. a few pages after how we are told there is no antigrav in this setting, we have a big picture of a futuristic city with loads of flying cars with no obvious wings or engines cruising about sedately in rows, like on Coruscant. Because who cares anyway. The picture of the King colonist on p.31 is pretty ludicrous; looks like Mongoose put Squats in my 2300.

Overall there is probably enough new content that I don't feel I've wasted my money entirely. I liked the stuff about hard path vs soft path colonists - the former using tech to survive, the latter adapting themselves through genetic engineering. This is a nice development of something that was latent in earlier editions.

It states up front in the intro that there will be not one but two ship books and an equipment book to come, although are enough ships and equipment to get you started here. Info on the aliens is also pretty skimpy so you can bet there will be aliens books if the line is continued.

The original 2300AD was set after the nuclear war depicted in its stablemate Twilight 2000. Twilight 2k is getting a new edition from Free League, but we are stuck with Mongoose for 2300. Such are the vagaries of licensing, I suppose.

I'm gonna wait a while. $50 for a pdf that needs another $30 PDF to run and has no ship building section is..um....I'm gonna wait a while. Also the comments are people saying the PDF is unoptimized and chugs so...waiting. Gonna wait. Yep.

Is free Leagues' Twilight 2000 going to use the Free League dice system in Forbidden Lands and Mutant or will they be keeping it more or less like the original or doing a 2D6 version or what? In fact why would they do it when they have Mutant?

I like most of Mongoose's 2nd edition cover art, but not for this one. Left is the 1E, right is the new 2E.

Not too fond of the new interior look either.

I wish publishers would work with what they have, instead of trying for WOTC production values and achieving the product-quality equivalent of the "uncanny valley".

Good fonts and typesetting can make simple charts, tables, and plain text look really sexy. If you're going to have pictures, all you need is one really good illustration per chapter. In fact, if RPG publishers started hiring designers from the programming world (people who have to make cramped source code look good and pretty in black and white), many books would stand to benefit more than they would from higher quality illustrations.

Just checked the Mongoose website and the .pdf for 2300 revised, is $29.99.

For a .pdf.

Of an offbeat sci fi game.

Still it's not 36.00 GBP.  But still overpriced in my opinion.  Who do these people think they are? Games Workshop?

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on September 01, 2021, 08:25:59 AM
Just checked the Mongoose website and the .pdf for 2300 revised, is $29.99.

That's the old 1st edition book you're looking at. Given it still costs thirty dollars though, it is understandable you did not immediately realise this is the old version.

Quote from: Oddend on September 01, 2021, 12:42:35 AM
I wish publishers would work with what they have, instead of trying for WOTC production values and achieving the product-quality equivalent of the "uncanny valley".

Absolutely this, thank you.

The $50 pdf makes it an instant hell no, and the cover art is pretty trash. So, pass.

Quote from: palaeomerus on August 31, 2021, 09:22:32 PM
Is free Leagues' Twilight 2000 going to use the Free League dice system in Forbidden Lands and Mutant or will they be keeping it more or less like the original or doing a 2D6 version or what? In fact why would they do it when they have Mutant?

Apparently it's using the "Year Zero Engine" from Alien, Forbidden Lands, Tales from the Loop, or Mutant.

Not seeing the cannibalisation potential (so to speak) vs Mutant. Totally different vibe. T2K is hard science based, no radioactive zombies (unless you want them, ofc). Set in an alternative history where the Soviet coup in 1991 succeeded and the USSR didn't fall, followed by WW3 in the 1990s.

To be fair the production values look great and Marc Miller (one of the creators of the original T2K) is on board at least as a "consultant", but I don't much like the Year Zero rules engine and I don't particularly feel I need a game about surviving the 1990s WW3 that never was.

It would not have been that hard to cook up a new WW3, the way things are going. Maybe they got scared off by Twilight 2013's attempt at updating the backstory. There is a hilarious review on, of all places, rpg.net about how bad that game is, if they haven't pulled it for wrongthink by now.

Quote from: Marchand on August 31, 2021, 02:41:33 AM
I haven't finished reading through in detail but my first impression is it is pretty much what I would have expected from a book written by Colin Dunn (knows his 2300AD onions) and published by Mongoose..

Too many typos prevent me from recommending any print version of the RPG to anyone. There was no editor for the book. I did most of the editing for the MgT2 core rulebook, only because I didn't want to buy a print version of it that had loads of typos in it. I did not care to edit any of the other MgT2 books because I wasn't interested in them.

Another thing that irks me about 2300AD is that the main alien race villain in the game's setting is to me really just an NPC animal race to fill a random encounter with.

I watched the video. Agree the cover isn't very good and doesn't convey the setting, but it doesn't seem particularly woke to me.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on September 03, 2021, 06:48:59 PM
Another thing that irks me about 2300AD is that the main alien race villain in the game's setting is to me really just an NPC animal race to fill a random encounter with.

I guess you mean the Kafers. The original game had an explanation based on their neurochemistry that meant humanity appeared to them as the force out of their history that they feared and hated the most. Humanity was basically an embodiment of evil to them. It was implied in the early material that it was a racing certainty they were going to wipe humanity out unless we could find some way to talk to them. There were some clues about how that might work in some of the published adventures. So, definitely not space orks.

Then later on as usual GDW let the setting fall down the sink-hole of wargaming and it all got less interesting and more conventional Military SF.

But the package overall remains by far and away the most interesting SF setting I'm aware of. It's just a shame Mongoose production values are so poor, particularly relative to cost.

Quote from: Marchand on September 05, 2021, 05:53:41 AM
I watched the video. Agree the cover isn't very good and doesn't convey the setting, but it doesn't seem particularly woke to me.

Maybe you have female players in your 2300AD group that favor military campaigns.

At least they have a frilled helmet.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on September 05, 2021, 08:04:48 PM

Quote from: Marchand on September 05, 2021, 05:53:41 AM
I watched the video. Agree the cover isn't very good and doesn't convey the setting, but it doesn't seem particularly woke to me.

Maybe you have female players in your 2300AD group that favor military campaigns.

Not really sure where you're coming from here. I would have thought game cover art should convey something about the setting, rather than reflect the group playing it!

This cover art is not particularly evocative of the setting, but the fact one of the characters is female is irrelevant.