I looked at this more or less by chance and found a stack of useful ideas for the genre. It deserves more attention, I think.

This is a setting I bought sort of on a whim, not expecting much but a good read, and I was sort of blown away. The fluff is fantastic, and the mechanics of time travel make it actually possible to run a game, rather than being instantly sidelined by some sort of PC shennanigans. I really like the setting. I've now bought this setting three times, once in pdf and twice in print for table copies. Love it.

I found this not only entertaining but packed full of the information required to get involved in the game, and formatted for easy transferring to the Fantasy Grounds tabletop I use. Very little wasted space in repetition, I am excited about trying out this setting. This is the first time I have encountered a game involving time travel to this extent and the mechanics are clearly spelled out.

TimeZero is just what it says on the tin, a a supplement aimed at using the Savage Worlds ruleset to run time travel adventures. The focus is very strongly on time travel as the way to get to the adventure, rather than as a problem solving tool - it's possible to meet yourself, or live the same day over again until you get it right, but if that happens, something has gone horribly wrong.

There's a fairly detailed setting included, focusing on the efforts of the TimeGuard to preserve the timestream from assorted meddlers, most notably the sinister Triad, but the book supports a number of different styles. Whether you want to focus on carefully researched political intrigue in the court of Louis the XVIth, or racing to stop the Nazi werewolves from assassinating Good Queen Bess, the book has you covered. There are explicit setting dials for things like the existence or non-existence of psychic powers and how much futuristic equipment the characters are lugging around. And while the book is designed around Time Agents using portals to get around, there is some support for "madman with a box" style play.

The crunch is generally solid - the edges and other player options are appropriate to the genre and balanced with the core Savage Worlds rules. the real standout is the concept of hypnotraining - characters can swap a limited number of skills and edges between adventures, allowing them to pose as fighter pilots one adventure, and pirates the next.

TimeZero is a spectacularly gameable setting, and it should be easy to steal stats and the like from other Savage Worlds books as well. It's certainly worth a look.

Umberto Pignatelli (Beasts and Barbarians) knows how to write material that honors Savage World's motto of "Fast, Furious, and Fun." TimeZero is a good example of this. There have been a lot of Time Travel games over the years that have had either bogged down in justifying the "science" of time travel or put so much detail into the historical aspects that is stops being a game. TimeZero walks that fine line pretty well, giving a plausible time travel method and permission to make the history just as detailed or loose as the gaming group wants it to be.

New Savage Worlds material is often made or broken by the new edges and hindrances offered for the specific game world. This material in TimeZero is a real area of strength. The edges seem to avoid the power creep that plagues some other third party SW material, but still manage to impart flavor to the game and many of them seem to be the kinds of things that will elicit "Ooooh, Cool!" reactions from the players in my group. Likewise, many of the hindrances would lend themselves to the creation of interesting and unique characters.

Likewise, the world that Pignatelli has created is both complete and leaves plenty of room for players to be important movers and shakers. The central enemies in the game are loosely defined enough to allow for variety, while still providing a specific threat. The addition of limited parallel worlds, rogue time travelers, and alien enemies gives the Game Master plenty of variety for enemies as well.

The quibbles here are pretty minor. There are a number of awkward phrasings that seem to stem from translation problems, and in at least a couple of places specifically mentioned historical events are wrong (although some of these may be typos: Charles Lindbergh's plane was the Spirit of St. Louis, not St. Luis). For gamers who are also history buffs, and one would presume that would be a significant group to whom this game would appeal, these kinds of mistakes could be distractions.

Overall, this game is a very welcome addition to the SW fold. My rating would actually be 4.5 if we could give half stars. I look forward to additional material in this line.