I have been contemplating this review for a long time, which is unusual for me.  Allow me to explain:

Full Disclosure: This setting galls me on a deep, visceral, lizard brain level, and I have no desire to be unfair to it for not being to my taste.  More: I am certain I can explain very simply why it galls me so, but only at risk of triggering a massive forum flamethread, which would unfairly distract from the game being reviewed.

So, to properly, and fairly, treat this review I will be changing up my review format, instead of doing a front to back analysis I will focus on the big picture.

Second Disclosure: I have not read any of the novels that, to my limited understanding, predate the game, nor do I intend to read them... certainly not for the sake of improving the game review.  I do believe that many of the issues I have with the setting would not be issues, or not nearly as strongly an issue, in a series of novels.  


The Good:

This book is absolutely worth the money. You get a lot of product for the price, above and beyond, and very little is redundant for traveller fans.



The Bad:

The Rules adaption is rudimentary to the level of High-school GM house-ruling.



The Ugly:

Facebook: the RPG

The Setting is upsidedown, you are playing the bad guys, and the nominal bad guys are rudimentary to the point of being insulting.

Little to no effort is spent on expanding the setting to fill in the gaps around the now redundant Traveller standards.

Stupid-weird Aliens.

Sentient/Citizen Starships (and Guns!) and other shennanigans.

Limited Grasp of Transhumanist possibilities

Adventure paucity

So, I can hear you all crying out in terror 'But Spike! What does it all MEAN?!!!!'.

Relax. Its all part of the plan.  That's the short form bullet point 'table of contents' for the review.  Now I'm going to break it down for ya.

So, the Good:

This book is not a stand alone rulebook, its a supplement to the Mongoose Traveller Core rulebook (specific to Second Edition, though that's a trivial detail). As such it does not reprint most of the Traveller rules, focusing only on elements specific to the Mindjammer setting. Despite this, its a full hundred pages longer than the Core Rulebook.  Its a lot of book for the buck. True, you do get a partial reprint of character creation, as standard Traveller Characters would be... ill advised... in Mindjammer (more on that later), and you get expansions of world and star system creation, animal creation and so on and so forth, most of which could be useful to any Traveller GM.   I'd say at least half of the book is generically useful expansions of Traveller, and half is explicitly Mindjammer elements.  Its also a fairly lovely book, though oddly I'll note my PDF included color art, while the art in the physical book is entirely black and white.  

The Bad:

John Snead proves himself to be an over-rated hack of a game designer. There: I said it.   Honestly I didn't have an opinion of him prior to this, but please, allow me to explain.

In a great number of ways the Mindjammer setting is an... odd fit... for Traveller.  I may not be a true cthonic grognard of Traveller, but I am familiar with several versions of the game and a few things about Traveller are constants.  Life path creation is a big one, resulting in characters that generally range from 30 to 60 odd years of age, relatively low levels of skills and compentence, or decent competence in a limited number of skills, and so forth.  

Mindjammer assumes as a default that characters will be somewhere around two hundred years old, with potential lifespans reaching a full millennia.  

Clearly then, adapting Traveller's rules... at least regarding character creation... requires a little creativity to adapt to the Mindjammer setting, right?

What we get, instead, is a simple 'shortcut' so you get the effect of fifty odd lifepath careers without having to roll fifty odd times on the lifepath table. You have characters with multiple skills at +6 (or even +7), which is not only absurd for a playable game, but actually breaks the RNG for Traveller.  And yet: Despite this seriously broken half assed hack of the creation system, and a setting that assumes you can not just play a sentient starship, but a fucking sentient CITY... your stats remain essentially fixed to Traveller norms, so now you get a wildly unbalanced weird half assed broken hack.

No, seriously though:  Every time you roll a career instead of rolling 'survival' you roll for 'Longevity'. If you pass the Longevity check you add 50 years to your age and can assign 8 skill points (yes, yes, not mathematically equal to 12.5 careers, I know.).  There is more too it, but nothing that addresses the fact that this is a terrible and terribly simplistic solution to the problem of having 'too many careers' in Traveller.

As a minor aside: What is it with Transhuman games and forcing you to pick cutesy little catchphrase "memes" for your character?  Can't you just... you know... PLAY your character's beliefs, without having to summarize them into pithy and utterly inadequate catchphrases?


The Ugly:

These are largely subjective complaints, so if you disagree with me, well that just means you are one of those dirty bastards that actually LIKES strawberry ice cream. Seriously: You can fight me all you like on how awesome these are, but you will still be wrong.

Facebook The RPG:

THis is the big one, not just for me (actually its a mid-tier complaint on my personal kardeshev scale of shit-tastic ideas), but because it is so very, very central to the setting... so much so it lent its very name to the setting in a manner of speaking.  

So. Every character by assumed default, is permanently wired into the Mindscape, which among other things gives them MORE SKILLS (See John Snead is a Fucking Hack, above), but mostly severs as a permanent immersive social network. This is a very, very big deal in the setting, and manipulating the Mindscape (called Technopsi) is, well, a big deal. Complete with "Covert Ops Chips" that unlock extra cool powers to mess with people's social networks.  The game isn't even unaware of this, the idea of uploading Exomemories (which are somehow...lost?... if 'stolen'?) is linked to the idea of Instagram and youtube (if not by name).  I can't stress how big a deal the game makes of this Mindscape business, even to the point where an entirely identical system is used by a sentient planet using an entirely different technological paradigm (and I can't be the only one who giggled madly every time the Na'vi plugged their USB Ponytails into something...).  

I'm sorry: I am not enthused by the idea of playing the RPG version of social networking.  

The Upsidedown Setting:

So.  The assumption of the game is that the players will be from The Commonality, which is the core worlds, Earth, the High Tech wunderkinder of the Galaxy (that's where all the Mindscape stuff, the Sentient/Citizen Starships and the Immortal PCs comes from. Yes, playing a more normal, contemporary character is possible, but if thats what you're after: Why are you playing Mindjammer?).

The Commonality is probably the most successful Utopia ever, in that it didn't degenerate into any one of the horrorshows of historical attempts a Utopias, and no one starved to death waiting for Manna from Heaven, or whatever... instead they started to sort of mass die off due to species wide ennui. Until someone discovered an FTL drive (a mere 200 years ago, or well withing the potential lifespan of a PC), and they discovered all those savage human colonies sent out by slowships millennia earlier, and suddenly the Commonality was revitalized and had purpose once more! To convert all the non-Commonality Worlds into sharing the Commonality! Oh sure, peacefully by Memetic Warfare rather than shooting people in the face warfare.

That's right: the apparent goal of the Commonality is to strangle the everloving shit out of the very thing giving them a reason to keep on living.   The idea is that the player characters are Commonality citizens exploring the savage fringe worlds and trying to help introduce them to the awesome that is the Commonality. (well, that last part may, or may not, be part of your game but it IS a major driving force for exploration).

Mind you that its the simplest, surface level analysis of what is wrong here. If you look the supposedly 'evolved' economic system is... actually not. That the wonderful everyone is 'equal' and well provided for is a lie, and in fact the Commonality is lead by post-human immortal autocrats of the worst sort. Amoral (not Immoral, there is a big, big difference) who do not recognize individual rights but only the 'good of everyone'.

Now, I could go on for pages and pages about the economic illiteracy on display, but I'd rather not. Like so many other 'transhuman' games, they posit that we've "evolved" past capitalism... by regressing backwards!  Oddly, there seems to be a little hint of self awareness here, we get a list of all the potential economic systems the players could encounter (or be from), and one of the more primitive ones is "Interested Resource Allocation", in which people in charge control all the resources and hand them out mostly to themselves and their 'clients', with leftovers going to the common people.  But the Commonality has, supposedly 'Disinterested Resource Allocation', where everything is handed out perfectly and equitably and all that... somehow. By those Posthuman Tyrants supposedly. Yet elsewhere in teh book we learn that there are still wealthy elites who get more than their share of the resources... somehow.  In other words by evolving past the need to money we've returned to a state of man where tribal elders (posthuman tyrants) hand out goods and services to the members of the tribe... MOSTLY fairly.  Yay.  It also means that you need to learn an entire new game subsystem to buy basic equipment, as chances are your character isn't supposed to be using cash.   So, yay to that too.

I get it, man. Speculating about future trends is HARD. Its harder if you don't understand what you are trying to predict.  

So let me finish up this subsection by briefly talking about our Mindjammer Klingons, the Venu.  For a game that makes such a huge deal out of memes as identity/culture and all that, the Venu are so briefly touched on that its almost impossible to use them.  As military threats... well, teh Venu are rather like the Arawak Indians making cargo-cult sailing vessels and trying to assault modern, post WWII Europe.  One of the few starship weapons in teh game was specifically designed to make Venu warships explode based on a design instability.  

To give you a numeric comparison: As near as I can tell (the game is remarkably silent on this) the common outfit for commonality characters is something called a P-suit. This is just your sort of everyday explorer jumpsuit. It provides 11 points of armor.  The Venu Trooper armor (worn by their footsoldiers and combat troops) only provides 13 armor, and unlike the P-suit... is actually 'armor'.   More explicitely the top end armor for the Commonality provides 36 armor, while the top end Venu armor... provides 18. Half.   So we have a laughably weak 'threat' that lacks any level of detail necessary to use them as anything other than faceless orcs destined to be mowed down by vastly supperior player characters.


No attempt to fill in gaps in the setting:

By virtue of being a different setting with different technological assumptions, a great deal of Traveller has been rendered obsolete, such as most of the Starship technology (weapons, sensors, etc), as has much of the character level equipment.  The problem is that I'm assuming Sarah Newton has not spent a great deal of energy writing a bunch of guns or starship weapons or anything of that sort... and neither did John Snead, which leaves us with greatly truncated equipment in both the personal, and ship chapters.   Never mind that this violates one of my long standing personal axioms for developing a setting (eg People are tool using animals, and thus a culture is largely defined and signified by the tools it uses. Example: Consider the difference between a Katana and a Saber...)

A glaring example is the Covert-Ops chips for the Mindscape. One chip. Does everything. THat's its. Boring.  Its a binary on/off switch for Mindscape Abilities.

Thats... really all I have to say about that.


Stupid/Weird Aliens:

This is a personal quirk I have regarding aliens.  I know that in the seventies especially there was a trend in Sci-Fi to speculate (perhaps as a reaction to stupid TV 'humans with funny ears' aliens) that in a universe of near infinite size that aliens would probably not look much like us, or think much like us etc, there almost seemed to be a race to make the most bizzarly incomprehensible aliens possible.

There aren't really any playable alien races in Mindjammer, but there are three (I think?) alien races demonstrated, and they seem to follow this 'weirdly incomprehensible' paradigm.

I hate that paradigm, not least of which because it is logically insupportable.  Again, i could go on for some pages about this, so again, I'll try to be brief.  Species develop in response to challenges caused by their environment. Knowing that environment leads us to anticipate the form life might take.  A barrel land cephalopodic tentacled mass is a response to... what?  The Lowhigh use Infrared to both see and talk? That's inefficient. A fucking cup is a fucking cup no matter how weird your alien thinks, or if that's too shaky for you, a god damn rock will still be a god damn rock. Two plus two will always equal four, no matter how 'alien' your alien is.

There are some damn powerful arguments from real scientists that an upright bilaterally symetrical bipedal form is actually among the most efficient and likely natural form for a sentient life form to take, and similar arguments could be made for visual perception in a range similar to our own, forward looking at that.   In other words: The human form as a template actually makes evolutionary sense for most environments sentient life could evolve in.

Sentient and Citizen Starships:

Look. I read the Ship Who Sang and enjoyed it (way back when I was 9, but still). Its a poignant and bittersweet little story about a man and the ship (or rather the pilot cybernetically wired into the ship for stupid reasons) who loves him.  But we accept the premise without much question because it is necessary for the story to move forward, and its a short enough story at that. For a gamable setting things need to be a bit more thought out.  

Sentient ships as an emergent and accidental facet of advanced computational technologies? Sure, and one that leads to potentially interesting questions.

But why would BUILD your ships... ALL OF YOUR SHIP... as not only fully sentient, but full blown citizens?   WHY???

Ok, so maybe you aren't understanding the problem here.

The Commonality Navy (or whomever) builds a starship and gives it full citizenship rights.  Said ship, as its first act, decides it doesn't want to be a warship, doesn't want to get shot at, and has no intention of working with the Navy (or whomever) to find a job suitable to its temperment. In fact, it immediately demands to be released so it can explore teh galaxy on its own, thank you very much.

What do you do?

Do you force it to serve? that's slavery.  Charge it for the ship that is its functional body? Same thing. Slavery.  Design it so that it automatically WANTS to serve, voluntarily? STILL SLAVERY... now with a creepy helping of mind control and brainwashing.

So instead of having a useful tool, you now have a slave doing the job a dumb tool could have been doing without any ethical issues whatsoever.  Good job.

So we THEN run into a second issue, in that your sentient starship (or city) Player Character is also playing Facebook The RPG (that is: Has access to The Mindscape) and as a result in all probiblity has a human sided/shaped Avatar body they can use to do Player Stuff when they aren't busy being a starship.   Call me crazy, but that makes the entire idea of being a Starship rather... not.

Mind you, just about anything a player character owns could in fact have a fully sentient mind, complete with Commonality Citizenship, as part of it... including their guns and armor! Yeah... I want to be wearing fully sentient armor complete with full citizenship. That sounds... not fucking insane! Sure.


Limited Grasp of Transhuman Possibilities:

I'm going to go on record and say that this is, at best, a very weakly transhuman game compared to, say, Eclipse Phase.  While we DO see an... interesting... erasure of the limits of our definition of humanity (that is: artificial minds (starships), fully created life forms (from gene-spliced frankenstein critter-people, to sentient robot-citizens), its actually much less interesting that EP, not least of which because all those artificial sentient minds are little more then engramattic copies of once living people rather than ex nihilo programmed life.

Then there is a near total rejection of the physical aspects of pursuing a transhuman existance. Trans- and Post- humanity is almost purely defined by intellectual advancement, which is to be fair, very well detailed and explored.  A synthetic life (sentient robot) PC uses the exact same rules an organic, natural human... except that they automatically pass endurance athletics checks. Well. Exciting!  

So all these interesting alternate 'types' of humans... these many flavors of transhumans are, at the end of the day, little more than palette swaps.  

Not that I want to make this about Eclipse Phase (which has more than its own share of problems) but that cutesy little four phrase tag on teh cover (Death is a Disease: Cure it, etc) is about three times as Transhuman as all of Mindjammer when you get down to it.   Its worst failing is that Mindjammer presents a mature and settled Transhuman society, leaving us no questions to answer, nothing to explore about what it all means... about how we define humanity, if you will.

Adventure Paucity:

This one is a... well its a bit of an odd duck here.  I understand that there are published adventures (using mostly the FATE version of the rules, but adaptable to Trav) and clearly novels have been writen, so how can I claim a paucity of adventures?

Well...  given the vast inflation of numbers (skill totals, armor protection and various weaponry stats (infinite ammo for example), its seems very much that Mindjammer makes it exceedingly difficult to present any number of rules based challenges to player characters.  Everyone is hyperskilled and with access to absurdly potent gear, which channels all possible avenues of 'challenge' into a narrow subset of potential 'adventure' lines. Its not that there aren't, or can't be nigh infinite adventures, just that they will all look almost exactly the same.

Consider the Mindscape again.   In theory there SHOULD be a potential adventure challenge based around this hyperconnected Player Character type going to some primative fringe world where they can't be connected to their Mindscape, they can't access their Halo Skills or certain (useful?) exomemories... right?

Nope. Mindjammer's got you covered with the Personal Mindscape Interface, a pocket sized doohicky that transmits a ten meter radius Mindscape, sufficient for you to access all your personal Mindscape Needs.

So, one of your characters is a Starship, and the players are negotiating with a subterrainian people... and the Starship Character is the one with the Linguistic's skill! How do you solve this? Oh! No Problem!!! Your Starship ALSO is a human scale character thanks to their Avatar!

Oh? You've aroused the ire of an entire planet of Savage Primative Humans! Well, good thing your guns have infinite ammo, your armor is nigh impenetrable, and you have enough skills to be better at savage levels of violence as anyone raised in a savagely violent society!**

On and on this goes, with almost any concievable downside already covered by the setting to ensure that nothing should ever disturb your placid, zen-like, calm...

Which, for a game, is boring as three motherfuckers.


Edit: To Clarify the sentence marked with ** is not an exaggeration. Commonality Guns have infinite ammo. Commonality Armor IS nigh impenetrable by Traveller standards, and your characters are almost garaunteed to be better than the best at multiple skills than anyone from a non-commonality world, which knowing PCs, means at least one combat skill per player.  Seriously, I reread my review and realized how hyperbolic it sounded and so I just had to point out that in this particular case... its not.    Weirdly it doesn't feel like a powergamer's paradise, yet that's exactly what the numbers seem to produce, innit?

So, don't be coy, Spike! Love it? Or love it to death?

I will admit that this book did drive me to lots of thinking and pondering about various esoteric elements of game design. One early prototype of the review was the idea of posting long essay discussions on topics like evolved economic systems, the nature and styles of transhumanism and so forth, then hyperlink back to those essay/threads when I did the actual review.  

So, as a thought provoking setting I actually have to give it a Love It to Death.  Like, with an Axe.