Ever since college when I actually started having the extra money to do so, I've been drawn to game stores and hunting for unique supplements. Adventures, gazettes, simple collections of maps — each has its own attraction for me. As such, I have ended up with a wide variety of books, pamphlets, and PDFs each of which holds a particular fascination.
Open Design's recent release of Sunken Empires: Treasures and Terrors of the Deep encompasses the perfect storm of history, art, and implementation that makes a supplement not only a useful tool for gamemasters to terrorize their players from time to time but a great read as well. From the forward by David "Zeb" Cook to the chapters on dealing with the deep and its denizens, the book held my attention to the very end, which is a rarity in any supplement.
Beginning with Cook's introduction, "A History of the Aboleth," I felt I was being let into a tomb of previously unknown horrors. I honestly can't recall if I'd heard of the Aboleth as a creature prior to reading Sunken Empires, but now I know it has a place in the occasional nightmare realms players may find born of my own freakishly random firing neurons. The story of how the creature came about provided crucial clues to crafting hooks and monsters without filling in absolutely all the details — leaving the rest to the players encountering such vile critters.
Brandon Hodge takes things from there, weaving a storyteller's spell upon the reader and introducing them to the aspects of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu from tales both ancient (Plato's tales of at Atlantis) and relatively recent (H.P. Lovecraft adapting Mu into the Cthulhu mythos). Hodge then takes it a step further to create the lost city of Ankeshel and the modern cities of Upper and Lower Cassadega exploring the submerged ruins and learning a few of Ankeshel's mysteries.
After that, he provides all an enterprising GM would need to torture entertain his or her players with hints of powerful artifacts and spells from the distant past just waiting to be discovered by an enterprising band of adventurers. We have the half-merfolk Maerean peoples working both above and below the waters as well as new paths for other races and classes. I was particularly fascinated by the description of how Monks are entranced by undersea ruins --"drawn by the promise of lost knowledge and paths of enlightenment cultivated by ancient civilizations." I'd not considered monks in that light before and yet I may start doing so now
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