Review: Short review, It is good, Damn good!

For the rest of you, Omlevex is a setting and sourcebook for a ficticous line of comics set in the Silver Age when the forgotten heroes of World War two were rebooted and the major sense of what a modern comic book is began.

The book starts with a tour of Metazon, a island chain that is the source of the settings superhuman enabling substance, Omlevex. The Island is broken into various genre settings, utopian, supernatural, Cold War Communist menace etc.

Rather than describing the charcaters in a simple monster manual format, Omlevex breaks them up into individual chapters covering a specific Comic book title. Its as if you were writing a Marvel comics sourcebook and listed Spiderman, his reocurring characters, greatest and lowest moments, campaign use, notes on how to run him or her in different eras, then wrote up his rogues gallery before moving on to the X-men, the Fantastic Four etc.

As good, genuinely, stylish and cool as the book chapters are, the showpiece is the chapter on gaming in the Slver age. This covers the style in terms of dos and don'ts, quoting from the Comics Code Authority guidelines of the times, before delving into advice on roleplaying in and GMing in a Four color setting. It is detailed, concise and covers it beautifully. the author clearly knows the subject and has no lack of affection for it.

Why would you want to buy it?

1.) If you run a four color comic book campaign, the genre chapter should be in your GM binder and there are plenty of new and varied heroes and, mostly, villains for your campign.

2.) If you run a Mutants and Masterminds campaign it may be the only statted out in print source material you see until the third quarter of the year.

3.) If you run Silver Age Sentinels, The genre chapter alone deserves a good long look and it is very well suited to Empire city.

4.) Champions campaigners have more material in print than the previous two combined but Omlevex is a solid sourcebook with plenty of new heores and villains, a very comic book setting and a GMing chapter that even experienced superhero gms should check out.