Even if you have minimal to zero interest in the Deceived as antagonists or player characters this book is worth purchasing. It contains a huge amount of delicious, well written setting material about the Mummy: the Curse setting in general, and about the Shan'iatu and the Nameless Empire in particular.

It also contains numerous powers that are usable by any mummy, and an excellent continuation to the pre-made adventure from Guildhalls of the Deathless.

The art quality is some of the best I've ever seen from a White Wolf/Onyx Path product, and for RPG artwork in general.

I will admit, Vampire the Requiem had a tone issue in its first edition. Everything had a shade of bleak to it, and some of my players were turned off by the pretentious tone of the core book and many of its early supplements. However, Blood & Smoke has been received with great approval all around so far. The tone draws in that one player in my group who normally loathed reading the setting sections of these books due to the passion and style to be found.

The mechanics and small touches are a universal improvement to the original set, and more accurately reflect Requiem as a game in its own right rather than a poor successor to Masquerade. It has its own identity now, and it revels in it in a way I see in few other RPGs.

Buy this.

I never read or played Nobilis 1st or 2nd editions, but Nobilis 3rd edition is excellent. It is not like most RPGs, in a number of ways, but I feel it gives more freedom than the average RPG as well. I have never felt more capable of designing a PC whose concept is whole and compelling than when I used the diceless systems in this book to create sample characters.

Others have said all of the big details better than I have, so I will leave it at this. Buy Nobilis, read it over a few times, give it a chance. You won't regret it.

This book has made Mummy infinitely more playable and easy to run, at least from my perspective. These additions also make it a good purchase for people who were skeptical about Mummy when limited to the content available in the corebook. It contains a number of missing mechanical bits and a great deal of social context that allows the setting and the characters within it to make a great deal more sense, and are fun in their own right on top of that.

The Guilds are fascinating organizations, and any concerns about how they might continue to organize and operate across the ages are basically addressed throughout the book. Their powers are elaborated upon, finally, and a great deal of the capabilities they were said to be known for in the Mummy corebook have been made available in some form or another. There are also all sorts of goodies that were not hinted at in the corebook, which expand on the material there in potent and useful ways.

So, what keeps me from giving this a five out of five? There is a certain lack of uniformity in the layout and presentation of the Guilds. By this, I mean that there are certain pieces of information and mechanical materials that certain Guilds received, but others did not. For instance, only the Maa-Kep and Su-Menent received new Relics, and we are still left mostly eyeballing how to balance the mechanics of new ones. Only one or two Guilds have detailed analysis of how they operate in specific regions of the world. Little things like this detract from the entire experience, though you can generally extrapolate from what other Guilds received and what information is presented in general to fill in the gaps.

Still, despite its flaws, Guildhalls of the Deathless is a wonderful addition to the game and I heartily recommend it.

Did having to do extensive math to determine character advancement bother you? Look no more, God-Machine Chronicles has rules for flat XP costs.

Did you want rules for procuring services like bodyguards or private investigators with your social merits? God-Machine Chronicles has rules for that.

Did you want a default setting to drop mortal characters into and plenty of advice on how to run games within the context provided? God-Machine Chronicles has that.

God-Machine Chronicles has so much to offer every player and Storyteller of every World of Darkness game.

My only complaint is that a few editing artifacts from previous versions remain, and need to have an editor go through them and correct.

The review below me gives a much more in-depth accounting of the game in all its details, so I will not waste my time reinventing the wheel there.

What I will do is give a couple bullet points as to why I believe Mummy: the Curse is one of the best products to bear the White Wolf logo, and why it is an amazing product for Onyx Path Publishing to have on its resume.

1) Innovative character design. By starting the players out at the apex of the power scale, they get to experience their characters playing with the might of gods... for a time. It gives them a taste of the elder powers the vast majority of White Wolf games never last long enough or produce enough experience points to allow players to fiddle around with, without this overwhelming the game. You only have these powers for a brief time, during which you will feel compelled to accomplish as much as possible in the little time you have before your raw cosmic might ebbs away.

2) Innovative campaign design. Mummy introduces a 'Framework', or a set of suggested ways to play the game, in the ST Handbook. I will not spoil them, as the material in the ST Handbook is meant to be for the GM's eyes only, but these suggestions give people who might have difficulty coming up with a way to run this unusual game of purpose, vengeance and self-discovery a tent pole to center themselves around.

My only complaint is that some of the material that feels like it should be in the core book is to be found in supplements that will be published later this year. I would not go so far as to say this is an incomplete game, but this may be a turn off to some people.

Still, all in all, I stand by my initial statement.

Ever wonder why someone would make a bargain with the Abyss? Why someone would use the admittedly substandard method of immortality in the Tremere Legacy from the Mage Corebook?

Did you ever want to play an Apostate?

This book is for you. In fact, even if you never wondered about these matters, you should still look into it if you are at all a Mage fan. It will provide you as a storyteller with a great deal of material to work with, but don't mistake it for just an antagonist book!

As a player, you could get just as much out of it with the right mindset.

There is a little something for everyone in this product. The details and characters within can be used as presented, or cherry-picked for the purpose of implanting them into other, existing settings.

The mechanics are, for the most part, wonderful, and answer a great many questions that have plagued fans of Exalted for years. How would guns look? Well, you have those rules now.

Spaceships? We have those too.

Other things, well, you'll just have to see.

For those who bought the subscription: we know how worthwhile this book is already even when we had to wait four months for it to come in piecemeal.

For those who have not bought this: the Autochthonian setting is almost in all ways superior to the individual Directions of Creation taken either seperately or as a whole. This is a setting in which mortals matter without depriving their native Exalts of chances for heroism, glory, and dramatic failure. Heroic mortals are one of the key backbones upon which life can exist in this otherwise hostile alien environment. There is truly no limit to the possible diversity of games one can tell within the steampunk magitech confines of the Realm of Brass and Shadow without ever touching Creation or other realms of existence.

This is the book all Alchemicals fans have been waiting for since that Manual of Exalted Power came out. The wait was more than worth it. The wait for the other parts is going to be even more worth it.

Part I alone defines a setting so nuanced and well detailed that you could replace Creation with it entirely and you would rarely miss out on anything for doing so.

This is a world where mortals have meaning; this is a world where the Exalted are champions, not rulers.

This world is a living, breathing titan of ritual and machine.

And it can only get better from here.

The fanbase of Exalted has been waiting for this book for months, and the material within since the Manual of Exalted: Infernals came out in the first place. It is everything the writers promised it would be, and so much more. If you are into Exalted, and love Infernals as much as I do, then you can get this book and be content that even if you never purchase another one again, your experiances with it will be long and fulfilling.

I never did get my hands on the original version of Dreams of the First Age. They really need to mark this as 'Revised' to get the point across that this is not, in fact, said original.

Now that I've gotten that tidbit out of the way, I must admit with great delight that this purchase, combined with Return of the Scarlet Empress, made the end of my summer vacation worth all the wait for the releases. The folks freelancing for White Wolf outdid themselves in both the quality of the Charms in this revision, and for the original work done when Dreams first came out.

It is a must-have for anyone with any sort of interest in the First Age.