I don’t own a lot of remnants of the D20 boom any more, just a few select books, for the novelty and quality of the ideas rather than for anything mechanical. Tynes’s D20 Call of Cthulhu, for example. The least remembered of these is a D20 Modern setting called Dark Inheritance, which I bought at GenCon. I absolutely adored this back in the day, for its weird mix of genres and modern occult vibe, plus I always thought D20 Modern looked like an interesting system. So in my constant effort to blog a bit more, I dug around till I found my copy, pulled it out, and am spending some time reading it and blogging my thoughts. This is not a review, because I haven’t played it, although that’d be a kick — it’s just a once over. No promises on how often I write these.
The original book was published in 2003; I believe there’s also a Spycraft version, published a year later. It is not available in PDF. Noble Knight has a copy of the D20 version, and it occasionally shows up on eBay. The publisher is Mythic Dreams Studios, which appears to have been mostly Chad Justice. Chad is no longer working in the industry and Mythic Dreams only had these two releases, despite plans for other books as per an advertisement in the back of this one. Still, one solid 200 page campaign book isn’t bad.
The other writers are a range, career wise. Alphabetically, we have Edward Milton, Jason Olsan. Aaron Rosenberg, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Jeremy Tibbs, Wil Upchurch, and Sam Witt. There’s no indication of who wrote what, but I’d bet that Ryder-Hanrahan wrote at least some of the words that sparked my imagination back then. The cover artists is a dude named Mark Sasso, who sets the tone with a painting of a shadowy figure stepping forward out of what appears to be a fire. Sasso’s gone on to what looks like a decent career in and out of the TTRPG space, with some fantasy-inflected design work for the WWE and metal bands like Dio.
The interior art is B&W, mostly spot illos. The book is good 2000s TTRPG design: clear layout, in-world fiction broken out into sidebars, nothing to complain about. This is definitely the era when people expected big metaplot and lots of fiction in their game books.
OK, let’s dig in.
The table of contents calls the first few pages an introduction, but it’s a story vignette. We have a bunch of mysterious figures hanging out to do some sort of mission in Jerusalem. One of the figures goes by Nimue; one is carrying a sword which is warded against airport security. It is extremely clear extremely quickly that we’re in a modern occult setting.
Long story short, the group of semi-reluctant allies are there to reinforce a mystical seal of some kind and it goes horribly wrong, and, uh, Temple Mount is destroyed. Just to reinforce, this is intercut with a perspective from a few weeks in the future of someone figuring out what happened. OK, so this might not be something I’d run straight out of the book these days, just because I don’t think I could navigate the political waters with grace.
Then we get to the actual introduction, sorry to doubt you, book. First of a line of products, works with the core D20 Modern book, here’s where you’ll find new roles and setting and classes and such. Cited inspirations: Hard Boiled, Replacement Killers, Pitch Black, and Hellboy. Also, because everyone was ambitious back then and probably because Legends of the Five Rings had been so successful at capturing player input on Rokugan, players were encouraged to report their campaigns to Mythic Dreams with promises of helping to establish future direction.
It also becomes clear that the intro fiction wasn’t just a vignette, it was the visible branch point of the Dark Inheritance world. In 2003, dimensional barriers were ripped apart, Jerusalem was “transformed into an urban horror,” and the existence of a mystic underworld on Earth was revealed. The vibe is very cross-genre: “Promethean Order warrior-mystics fight Eight Heavenly Dragon triad gangsters in the dark alleys of Cairo, trying to recover… a relic that was stolen from the Louvre.” Science labs are trying to figure out magic. This kind of blend is what excited me about the book originally — the introduction seems to have done its job.
The other important thing the introduction establishes is that PCs are the descendants of gods and monsters, aka Titans, with special genetics that unlock superhuman potential. I am generally not a fan of superior race lore these days; it’s fine for the purpose. They’re battling the demons that now keep trying to mess up our world. Clear and easy and it establishes a reason for PCs to work together.
Finally there’s a glossary. As was the fashion at the time, important information about lore is introduced here. The critical thing is that there are five Legacies (or lineages) among the Titans, which sound a lot like the equivalent of D&D races; likewise there are things called Allegiances which are the organizations that already knew about the Titans. The Prometheus Order already mentioned is one of them.
Next time, Chapter 1, Ways of the World: the big lore dump.
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