Exalted Essence (Roleplaying Game)

In the Second Age of Creation, the Scarlet Empress has mysteriously disappeared and her empire is at the mercy of squabbling houses of Dragon-Blooded. But more importantly, the souls of the Solar Exalted have finally broken free and started to be reborn into the new age.

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Overall: I like this book a lot for emphasizing what you need to actually make Exalted playable and giving you all of it. Unless I fall into a gaming group with sharply different priorities than my current one I’m unlikely to ever use it.

Ultramodern(5) by Chris Taveras Dias (Roleplaying Game)

Ultramodern is a sci-fi skin for Dungeons & Dragons, and I actually used an earlier version of the game to run a campaign based on the Phantasy Star video game series in 2019. (I used a free version for that campaign, and backed the Kickstarter for this hardcover book on the strength of that.) The fact that you basically need the D&D 5E corebooks and knowledge of that ruleset to make it work is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, everything is familiar. On the other, it limits the ability for it to stand alone and escape the assumptions of D&D.

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Overall: On one hand, this commits one of D&D’s big sins of trying to be everything to everyone in one big system. On the other, if you’re familiar with D&D and you like that style of (fantasy heist adventures) gameplay, this is a solid way to port that into a sci-fi setting, and you can pick and choose which sets of rules you want to fit your chosen setting appropriately.