This post is about Design Mechanism’s Mythic Babylon. Šukāmu Press is not involved with either that company or the creation of this product. Instead, I mention it here because it’s a fantastic resource for gaming in Ancient Mesopotamia, and will be of interest to anyone who has purchased or enjoyed Babylon on Which Fame and Jubilation are Bestowed.
See this earlier post for more of my thoughts on this work.
As both a small publisher and a consumer of RPG material, I love print-on-demand.
When a product is designed with the POD format in mind, the result is essentially indistinguishable from a book with a large, professional print-run. Yes, I own more than a few POD books that are poorer quality than they should be. But most of those are older, or designed by amateur or small publishers who haven’t figured out all of the tricks to making it work.1
Over the past year, I’ve noticed that DriveThruRPG/The Lightning Source’s POD products keep getting better. I think part of this is down to the volume of material they’re now selling in the on-demand format, but also because designers are getting better at adapting to the idiosyncrasies implicit in it.
All of that out of the way, I received the softcover2 of Mythic Babylon on Thursday. It’s fantastic, and comes highly recommended.
If you’ve been avoiding POD material, or if you’ve had a bad experience with it in the past, I’d encourage you to try it.
1I know I’m still learning…
2 I’m also a big proponent of softcover over hardcover for RPG material. But that’s another subject for another post.
Šukāmu Press 