After the Peak by Al Seeger

The tone of After Peak is a post-apocalypse world somewhat realistically set after all the oil is gone (therefore energy shortages). This gritty beginning then takes two left turns. The equivalent of Noah's Ark starship crashes on the planet (giving hope to new energy sources at the price of alien animals wandering around) and a "veil" of energy sweeps over the planet clensing out all radiation and chemical spills but leaving behind a magical (or psionic) field that followers of Light or Darkness can access by doing certain deeds.

As you can see, some cliches of the apocalypse are avoided (no Loony-Tunes Gamma World charm), no stone-age barbarians (Thundaar the Barbarian), and the magical-miracle-psionic driven Veil is so new that not many have figured it out.

An alien and Veil-bestiary, an economic trading system, advice on character generation for any RPG system, which skills and weapons are common or exotic, and MADS-system generated characters round out the substantial PDF.

The overall systemless setting holds together quite well. For example, a creature's abilities are listed as:

Level: Low (out of Medium, High, Powerful, and Strong) Defense: Medium Spirit: High Toughness: High Combat Attacks: 1 unarmed, Low damage Combat Tactics: Low

The Light and Darkness (GM decides if it is magic, psionics, spirits, or other) depend on a number of acts the character must do to reach various tiers (ranks). Several minor acts gets to Tier 1 (such as giving to the poor), several major acts gets to Tier 2 (such as give all your possessions to a stranger), and several great acts gets to Tier 3 (such as selflessly putting yourself in harms' way). All that is for Light. Darkness acts are appropriately disturbing.

Each rank gives access to more powerful abilities (such as summonging Veil beasts).

The campain information gives Wisconnsin as an example setting, but the PDF also includes information on your own setting: "First look at what you know. What has changed? What beasts are around? What has the Veil changed?")

Note that the PDF is scanned jpegs, the size is 152 or more megabites and takes a good 20 minutes to download even on a T1 connection.

If this information grabs you, then this systemless setting of realism world view with elements of science fiction elements and Veil demons could provide years of campaigning.

This is a pretty interesting book, with lots of good ideas, let down by the awful construction of the PDF file. It uses pages saved as JPEGs instead of text which blows up the file size to over 150Mb and has no bookmarks. This makes it slow and unweildy to use on a netbook, which for a setting reference is rather poor. Having said that, the actual layout is fairly pleasant to read with a good smattering of nicely done line drawings. So why post this comment? In the hope that small press PDF only manufacturers will take note: there are lots of pdf tools out there, simply saving your work as low resolution jpegs and cobbling it together into a PDF is not making the most of your opportunity to sell an ebook. Not having bookmarks in an otherwise really really slow to page through book is inexcusable.