The Shadow of Yesterday: The World of Near (OOP)

300 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.

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.