Another 13 Shades of Darkness is a supervillain sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds. The zipped file is slightly over eight megabytes in size, and contains a single PDF. The book itself is fairly massive, weighing in at two hundred thirty-three pages. Unfortunately, navigating the book isn’t as easy as it should be; there is a table of contents, but without any hyperlinks. Worse, there are no bookmarks at all.

Another 13 Shades of Darkness presents thirteen new supervillains to use in your M&M game; and in fact, it gives a lot more than that. Four additional villains are given that were in a previous adventure, to say nothing of almost twice as many new monsters and supporting cast members. Add into that the new base layout and description for the Ordo Ultima (the new supervillain team presented here), a number of new devices and spells, and four adventure ideas, and this book is packed with stuff!

The artwork here is nice, but altogether the layout feels a bit plain. All of the pages are laid out in a plain white, with the text presented simply. Maps, pictures of various characters (usually at the start of their entry) and similar illustrations help to break up the white space, but there’s still quite a bit of it throughout the book. While this does help make it more printer-friendly, there’s still something of a sense that the visual style could have been presented better.

The new villains range from thugs to godlike individuals. Six of them are individuals with no connection to any groups or other individuals, and they run the range from Misery, an ancient being who feeds on human suffering, to Code Name: Wifebeater, who treats his thug activities like a startup business. After this comes the villains of the Ordo Ultima. These guys are clearly meant to be the main villains of the book; as the majority of the new content revolves around them and their leader, Professor Purgatory. Already the star of some previous Plain Brown Wrapper Games materials, Professor Purgatory believes himself to be an angel, seeking to return to Heaven. As such, until he can, he works to purge the world of sin, which is everywhere. At “merely” a PL 18, this is a villain who, even indirectly, your PCs will love to hate. He combines the worst qualities of overwhelming arrogance, religious lunacy, and incredible power. Even if your group never meets him, many of the people in this book have felt his actions even when not personally involved, so he could easily cause trouble for your PCs without ever having met them.

Well over fifty pages are described to describing the hideout (or at least, one of them) of the Ordo Ultima, Professor Purgatory’s group. Set on a dead world, there’s a massive threat brewing there that even the Professor doesn’t know about, and while it may prove to be his undoing, the consequences are massive enough that even people on Earth may feel the ramifications if a group of heroes don’t put a stop to things.

The supporting cast are all people who have had their lives somehow touched or altered by at least one of the villains described previously. From heroes who work to stop them to old victims, to people who happened to be bystanders, there’s a lot here to work with regarding those who get affected by the actions of these evil individuals. Similarly, there are over a dozen new spells and items, most used by these bad guys for their nefarious schemes. Finally, four new adventures are laid out for PCs to undertake (many of which, surprisingly, don’t involve the over-arching Ordo Ultima, making for a nice change).

The stats and writing are mostly solid, but there are some errors that pop up throughout the book (just what is Violator Red’s PL, for example?). For the most part, these aren’t so bad, but they seem quite inconvenient when they do occur. Still, for the most part, this is solid work. While things like the lack of bookmarks and minor errors make a damper on what is otherwise a great product, there’s still a huge amount of material here, making it a virtual guarantee that you’ll get an incredible amount of use out of these villains for your M&M game. Another 13 Shades of Darkness does a great job of bringing new evils to your campaign.