Mongoose Traveller Core Rulebook MGP 3800 Part 4 Encounters and Dangers

This chapter is rather dense, in that it has a lot of rules and tables and not a lot of fluff.  It starts with animal generation, which is fairly close to it's Classic Traveller roots, however the "Triphibian" has been removed, there are not any attacks that are like a human weapon  and armor doesn't go all the way up to Battle Dress.  All that being said you still get the Classic Traveller sort of animals.  A change is that Animals have STR, END, DEX and INT like a character, but have Instinct instead of EDU and Pack instead of SOC.  Damage is figured the same way for an animal as it is for a character, vs the animal having a generic hit points as they did in Classic Traveller.

After animals we have the now obligatory disease, poison, temperature, weather and falling rules.  These are pretty much what you would expect in a modern RPG, with no surprises or strange mechanics in use.

Injury and recovery.

A character that has taken damaged is either wounded or seriously wounded.  You are seriously wounded if have taken at least one point of damage to all 3 characteristics.  If one of the 3 is at full you are just wounded.  If you are seriously wounded you need first aid and/or surgery, because unless the GM is using random first blood, you are going to have a negative END DM and will get worse, not better, using natural healing.   First aid, if applied in the first 5 minutes after the wounding, heals twice the effect of the roll, as a standard medic check.  First aid on your self is a "Difficult (-2)" task.  If you a playing in a campaign where you need to be wearing Combat Armor or Battle Dress a lot, pay the extra 10,000 credits and get the medikit installed.  Having your own personal Medic 3 around will save your life, assuming you have at least one point of something left.  Getting one for your Vacc Suit is a good idea as well.

NPC.  The book says there are 5 types of NPC in Traveller, allies, contacts, enemies, rivals and patrons.  This isn't quite right because there is also mooks and bystanders, plus the McGuffion or two, but in general major NPC are one of those 5.

Allies

Willing to go way out of their way to help a character, but don't push it to often.

Contacts

While an ally will give you a gun, a contact will tell you were to buy one.

Rivals

They want to give the character a hard time, and maybe see them dead in the ditch.

Enemies

They are much like rivals, but lean much more to towards the dead in the ditch sort of thing.

Patrons

A Patron in Traveller wants to give you a job.  The Core Rulebook comes with 7 patrons, which are well done, with the Classic Traveller look and feel.  Make a note of this.  This is will come up again, with a rant attached to it.  After the 7 fully fleshed patrons there is a set of d66 tables for doing a quick and dirty patron/mission generation.

The chapter closes out with a set of generic encounter tables and sample mooks

Next up,  Equipment