First off, and most exciting, is the new Mythic Rome book for Mythras stealthily rolled out. It's available in pre-order on The Design Mechanism's site, with PDF available for immediate download. The PDF on first read-through strikes me as a consolidated, cleaned-up version of BRP Rome, which is absolutely a good thing. This looks like a very comprehensive, focused sourcebook for gaming in Ancient Rome and sets a great precedent for Mythras, one which was already given a high benchmark by the high-quality Mythic Britain sourcebook last year.
Next up is Tools of the World Shapers, a White Star sourcebook from DYS Games, which have also produced other great sourcebooks for WS, including Between Star & Void, the indispensable tome on star knights. After an initial read-through I can say it's a meaty addition to any campaign where the GM wants more tools and features to mod out your campaign with. Notable sections include a copious number of cybernetics, equipment design rules, and "gifts" which provide a way of introducing weird powers in a non star knight framework.
Third, but hardly least, is Ultramodern5, a 5th edition toolkit for D&D which lets you overlay rules, classes and other mechanics to allow for futuristic, modern and other contemporary game settings. It is very much a toolkit, so in theory you could run straight modern or near future SF with no issues, or mix and match to create weird science fantasy or other campaigns as desired. The book looks very useful and I will provide a proper review soon.
I'd be interested in reading your review of Ultramodern5. I bought it and found it to be pretty much terrible but it seems everybody loves this book. Weird...
ReplyDeleteI'm interested too. At the price point it was worth the risk...but I have seen their other book (Amethyst) and while I think it's an ambitious idea and an interesting setting, I also think they tend to play fast and loose with their rules adaptations. That said....I do like how they handled the cultural/background options so far in UM5. Sometimes its all about being first out of the gate, or the only game in town....if UM5 is all we have, then that's going to give it a boost up by default. Same thing happened in the D20 days, when lots of 3PP publisher produced terrible to okay modern sourcebooks for D&D 3.0, but after WotC released D20 Modern they all went the way of the dodo....difference here is that it's unlikely we'll see WotC ever bother with a Modern version of the 5E system.
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