Talking to Myself

After launching d20 Modern, Urban Arcana, and d20 Future, Wizards of the Coast decided to create another product line for RPG players who want to set their games during the Renaissance era to World War One.

Dubbed as d20 Past, this soft-bound book offers three historical time settings, from a swashbuckling era of the Renaissance, to the New Frontiners of the Wild West and the Neo-Nazi fighters of WWI.

I was rather disappointed with the length and substance of the book. The other d20 Modern books were launched as hard bound books, with over two hundred pages filled with rich materials. But it seems that the publishers decided to make a budgetted product this time.

d20 Past could have been written as a supplement filled with rich settings and information on how to play different historical eras/timelines. But the writer was forced to compress everything, just to fit it all into a soft-bound book.

There were a lot of potentials but none of them were explored to its full extent. The renaissance setting could be played using the D&D system (minus the demi humans). The Wild West setting was a hybrid of cowboys battling undeads, and the old Ravenloft or TSR's Masque of the Red Death Campaign. And the World War I setting features the pulp fiction heroes battling neo-nazis, with weird scientists creating their bizarre inventions.

After all the hype and promotion, I was left disappointed with the contents of the book. Everything is open-ended and you still need to tie up a lot of things (plus a lot of research) before you can build a decent setting for your d20 past campaign.