Sothis Ascends is not the first RPG supplement to use the past as its inspiration, but the choices it makes for the material within are what set it apart from the countless shining knights and Nazi-blasting heroes that line the shelves: Egypt during the reign of King Unas, last of the Fifth Dynasty; the entirety of the Mediterranean during the Bronze Age Collapse, as civilizations fall to plague, natural disaster, and marauders from the sea; Europe and North Africa at the very start of the "Dark Ages," as the world comes to terms with the death of Rome and the ascendance of monotheism.

Mummy: the Curse casts the player characters as amnesiac immortals from a lost empire, but Sothis Ascends is the book that finally hammers home the sheer scope of a story centered around characters who have lived through the span of human history. It's one thing to say that your character knew Egypt during its earliest days and quite another to play an extended flashback or even a full campaign set two thousand years before Christ. Sothis Ascends paints history with all the life and color it deserves, never straying into dry textbook territory but instead weaving occult secrets into its descriptions of peoples long dead.

If you love history, this book is a love letter to Egyptology and the lesser-known eras of the past, all wrapped up in a surprisingly gameable package. This book isn't one with mass appeal, but if you're part of the niche target audience (like me!) you'll love every single page.

As someone who loves the deep history of Mummy and is excited for the upcoming Dark Eras setting, this book is a must have. The settings are rich enough that you could run other lines in them as well.

Another great output from Onyx Path.

It says in the description it has a wealth of information for Storytellers, and that's important, because the book is mostly for Storytellers. Players can get a lot of ideas for their background for it, and it would be essential if they were playing a game set in one of the books' distant ages but otherwise there isn't much for them.

For Storytellers, however, it's a grand tome. The first three chapters detail the first three Sothic Turns and what the world was like during those times. The Cannibal Hymn, the first turn, is for many Mummies the first time they've awakened without historical 'baggage,' being a time before most of the enmities developed and the diaspora is agreed upon. The second chapter, the Mighty Despair, takes place around 910 BCE with Egypt no longer a place of greatness, at least to the living relics of Irem, and explores the surrounding areas of Africa and the Middle East. At this point the usual Antagonists of Mummy make appearances, along with other enemies like the enigmatic, Life-stealing Strangers. The next chapter, Return to Dusk, expands the areas Mummies and their cults have reached, more in Europe and eastward. I should note that the topics involved in these chapters involve a lot of cultural and religious issues that are handled respectfully by the writers. The fourth chapter gets into the concept of the Sothic Turns, how to plan Chronicles to take advantage of all of them, and a loose overview of what it means for mummies during the fourth one, in the present.

The fifth chapter is the last and longest and is the final episode of the SAS pre-made adventure that has taken place in previous books. The chapter is about 50 pages, more than twice the size of some of the previous chapters. I know some people don't like the Storyteller Adventure System so this can be an issue but even if you aren't using the adventure it offers a lot of characters and challenges that could be slipped into existing games.