World of Near

Publisher: Arkenstone Publishing300 years ago the old world was destroyed, only to be reborn as a vivacious pulp fantasy milieu full of cruel wickedness and exotic perils – but also love and hope. The Shadow of Yesterday is a classic indie fantasy drama game, armed with a Creative Commons license and a fresh west coast take on fantasy roleplaying. Stylistically it most resembles a Ralph Bakshi fantasy movie, if I had to sum it up in one sentence. It’s structurally close enough to your typical fantasy adventure game to relate to, but with all the bells and whistles you’d expect of a proge drama game, too, making it one of the first and most prominent hybrid designs of the story game era. A must read for anybody who’s into fantasy adventure games, as a provocative challenge if nothing else.
The Shadow of Yesterday was originally self-published (in two separate editions) by its creator Clinton R. Nixon in the mid-’00s. This is a third standalone edition of the game, put together by yours truly in 2009. Due to the Creative Commons nature of the game anybody can pretty much join in the fun whenever with their own takes, but for now this stands as the most current and comprehensive treatment available on the subject.
As a dedicated setting sourcebook the World of Near is a fundamental starting point into the game. Alongside its sibling rulebook Solar System, the two books include everything you need to play The Shadow of Yesterday. It’s a big book dedicated to dramatically inspiring character and scenario ideas, with ten major cultures, eight major magical cosmologies, hundreds of character build options and so on, what you’d generally expect of a major fantasy rpg. More neat setting stuff than you can really hope to use in play, really.
The PDF version of the book is available at your chosen price point, and I encourage everybody to download and take a look. I feel that the world of Near is an unique fantasy setting that has the potential to delight fantasy hobbyists the world over; it has a certain energy that so often lacks in paint-by-numbers schlock fantasy, so much so that it inspired me to try to capture the storm inside the flimsy covers of a book.Price: $10.00
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