This product is designed for Mongoose Traveller. It contains 6 each of Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals. A 6 strong Free Trader Crew, a 4 man Scout Crew, the entire complement of crew and marines for a Broadsword Cruiser, 6 independent npc's and 48 sketchy 'red shirts' for incidentals. Overall I make it 145 npc's in total.

A very useful product, reasonably priced and a massive thanks for the entire Broadsword crew and marines!

A truly excellent resource for the Traveller GM, this suppliment is professionally produced and well-organized. The NPC characters are well-thought out and provide plenty of adventure hooks and plot points. It is well-worth the price.

This is a really good collection of ready-made, fully fleshed-out NPCs. Specific to Mongoose Traveller, it adapts easily to other variants. Similarly, it is your prerogative as a GM to tone down or flesh out character specifics, but the NPCs presented have enough information to give them personalities, motives, and good descriptions.

Really great collection of NPCs, many of them collected as crews (traders, survey team, mercs) and, in one case, an entire marine platoon. I really like the look of the Psionic Tactical (PsiTac) Team. Enhanced by the exceptional typography and layout work I see in almost all Spica products.

Simply put, variety balanced with connecting themes. Starting with allies a GM can give a group help, hindrance and possibilities with minor effort. Character profiles offer enough insight into the various characters possibilities while the portraits provide that needed first impression. Money well spent.

Populating my settings with interesting non-player characters has always been a problem for me, mainly because I have a tendency to become repetitive with my descriptions and to offer the players only "more of the same" instead of new original ideas. As you can imagine, I was very much looking forward to ACER.

ACER has about 50 pages of content, with 6 each of Allies, Contacts, Enemies and Rivals, 6 "individual nonplayer characters", plus the crews of a free trader, a detached duty scout and a mercenary cruiser, plus a PsiTac team (an excellent idea), an entire Marine Striker Platoon and 48 Red Shirts (combat values only).

All except the Red Shirts come with stats, important life events, money and equip- ment and a description of their appearance and personality. Many also come with really good illustrations that fit their descriptions very well - very nice pictures to show to the players. What I also like very much is that the descriptions did not repeat the usual cliches, the characters feel like plausible "real people" with belie- vable stories and quirks - and no silly names.

I will of course have to tinker with these characters a bit to fit them into my set- ting, but this will in no way be difficult, and the descriptions did already give me a couple of new ideas for plots to introduce these characters into the setting.

It is not difficult to see that I really like ACER, and why, I think.

ACERS brings with it to the GM, or the player useful, 3-D NPC's as allies, Contacts, Enemies, or Rivals, just like the title says it does. These are not cut-out mediocre generic 'strawmen' to be shot full of ribbons by the Travellers/ Player Characters, but plausible, realistic sophonts in the Traveller/ Hard sci-Fi 'Verse your players can encounter. As one of the contributors, I am biased of course, But I find the rest of the project I was not involved in meets the high expectations and superior work SPICA Press has established itself in the SF RPG marketplace. I am also proud my name is within this product, and pleased at the end product, which I have also purchased.

Shiny side up!

Sincerely, 'Liam Devlin'/ SSG Daniel W Hammersley