—at TL-15, a tracked vehicle is a target, while the weapons for Artillery BD are lower than the BD itself, and still cannot be used without it), and some of the equipment seems more appropriate for non-Traveller sci-fi (such as the assault cycle). In addition, the TL of a number of the items seems inappropriate for their usage. About the only good things about the equipment are that it is imaginative, and with a little work can be brought into a Traveller campaign. I think that a lot of it needs to be reworked in terms of game mechanics.

The base generation system has a few good ideas, but needs to be expanded upon and needs to be rewritten a bit in terms of TL. Oh, and it seems to assume that the average mercenary unit will have a permanent base, other than wherever it is at the moment. If the book had gone on the theory that a mercenary unit is fairly mobile, and based wherever their current ticket was, it would make a bit more sense. In addition, it seems geared towards units which have already been constructed, and constructed using the MGT Mercenary method.

Unit generation is pretty good; it has more options than LBB4 but is geared towards smaller units; it also seems to be geared towards the ticket system presented in an earlier chapter. I think I prefer to be able to generate larger units, even if most units end up the size of a company or two.

Character generation is the strongest part of Mercenary, as it presents a good selection of expanded career events and several new careers, including two new variations of Army careers. The new careers, which run the varieties of Mercenary tickets, are generally sound—except for the Guerillas. For the most part, the Guerillas seem geared more towards murderers than actual Viet-Cong style insurgents (even the Terrorist specialty seems like a professional killer than a member of Al-Qaeda). I think that these specialties would be a better fit for the Warmonger career. One other flaw is that there is no way of generating space-borne mercenaries. One further good point of character generation is that it includes more skills, and indeed gives suggestions for them in other careers (I would be a bit more flexible than even they suggested, but only to fit the skills for my own campaigns and players). The only flaw in skills is the somewhat odd slug carbines skill—I would allow anyone with a Rifle skill to use carbines with no change.

In all, MGT’s Mercenary is a good fun book, which offers a good bit of potential use for sci-fi campaigns—and, with work actual Traveller campaigns. I recommend getting it, but be prepared to do some of your own work.