Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper begins with the following words: "Written by H. Beam Piper..." Although other authors are listed, those words alone made me sit up and take notice. H. Beam Piper is one of the most important science fiction authors who ever lived. (James Maliszewski's introduction is very good for the uninitiated.) His amazing stories influenced some of the greatest sf writers and visionaries of the genre. And this supplement takes these terrific stories and adapts them to gameplay for the Thousand Suns game.

The Transmissions include three full stories and adaptations: Naudsonce, Last Enemy and Ministry of Disturbance. The adaptations for each story include specifics on how to adapt Thousand Suns to the requirements of the stories, which (for example) predated modern understandings of the ubiquity of computers and therefore use other technologies to accomplish what we today would expect to see spacemen use computers for.

Naudsonce describes the difficulties of dealing with an alien species with unusual cultural and communications. The Last Enemy is an astonishingly well-crafted view of assassination in a world where reincarnation is a scientific fact. The Ministry of Disturbance takes history as its main subject, and what one leader decides to do when he sees his galactic empire beginning to stagnate.

Each of these stories is accompanied by different sorts of science fictional problems from linguistics to reincarnation, and optional rules for how to handle each of them are well-detailed in the supplement. These rules are intended to help GMs further explore the ideas of each story, and they succeed admirably. Rather than being a hodgepodge, as so many science fiction games are, these explore one idea quite thoroughly - like the source material itself. As a story-oriented gamer, this approach has no equal.

There are some minor typos, though nothing game-killing. There are no bookmarks or hyperlinks to jump directly to the material desired. However, I am so in love with this material, the format, and the stories, good lord, the stories, that I'm reviewer tilting this one up, up, up. This is exactly what should be done with the amazing stuff that is falling into the public domain now. Thought-provoking adventure and great gaming ideas!

TRANSMISSIONS FROM PIPER is not your usual supplement. What you get in 208 pages is actually three short-ish stories written by H. Beam Piper (Naudsonce, Last Enemy, and Ministry of Disturbance) each followed by "hooks" explaining how you can use the story in a game of Thousand Suns.

THE result is a book of 208 pages, of which 10-12 are "front/back" matter, 137 are stories (66%) and only 59 are "game content" (29%).

POSITIVE: The game content itself is very good and shows a real appreciation of Piper's work and how his stories can be grand inspiration for players and GMs.

NEGATIVE: I found the balance of story:game a bit upsetting. The writings of Piper have passed into the Public Domain and are readily available on the net. I just can't help but feel like I paid for something that is mostly free.

PRESENTATION: Nice and clean, though if you want to print you have to deal with the watermark background.