Well, now, what have we here? We started with d20 Modern, we proceeded to d20 Future, and now we're going to finish up with d20 Past (James Wyatt and Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel). We now have d20 rules for every conceivable point in time.
Although, playing in the past seems to mostly involve not using some subset of the modern rules. Set a game before cars, don't use the driving rules. Set it before modern medicine, lose access to the Surgery feat. Maybe just ban the techie class for any game set before the 1990s.
d20 Past only covers that part of the past that is technically part of the modern period (1500-1945) and suggests that if you want to play a medieval (or earlier) game you should just use D&D, but there really doesn't seem to be any reason you couldn't use an even smaller subset of the d20 Modern rules. . . assuming you actually need to. Most of the core book's ranged attack feats are compatible with bows and crossbows, and there's plenty of nuance to melee combat. The main thing that's missing is feats, talents, and class features that focus on riding animals. Unfortunately, d20 Past fails to correct that. You can play a cowboy or dragoon, but you can't actually do any fancy riding tricks. A bit of an oversight, to be sure, but at least there are naval combat rules suitable for any period from the classical to the contemporary.
I am, however, being a bit misleading by suggesting that d20 Past is making a serious effort at extending the game to the entirety of the past. It's only 96 pages long and while that's arguably enough for a serious rules-focused supplement, this particular book instead continues the d20 Modern tradition of including multiple alternate settings.
So far, the alternate settings have been one of the best part of this series. Not necessarily because any of them are particularly ground-breaking, but because of the way they encourage you to look at the game's rules - this is a system that's meant for rules-hacking and worldbuilding. There's something special about that. It's how I always used D&D, but it's nice to know the authors are explicitly cheering me on.
The best way to look at d20 Past's three sample settings is as the gaming equivalent of soup stock. By themselves they make for a pretty unsatisfying meal, but they serve as a base to which you can add other ingredients and whatever you wind up making is going to owe a lot to that original flavor.
The three settings are "Age of Adventure" (17th century, inspired by Dumas and pirate fiction), "Shadow Stalkers" (late 19th century, and inelegantly split between Victorian horror/mystery and the American West), and "Pulp Heroes" (1920s-1930s, and really, it bit off more than it could chew re: genre). Their chapters are almost identical in length and they're all structured roughly the same way - campaign overview (including a brief discussion of which d20 Modern rules you shouldn't use), antagonists/monsters, exactly three new classes, and wrap up with 2-3 short adventures. Taken as a whole, they are all pretty mid, but each one has a few highlights that would tempt me to come back and use this book as a reference.
"Age of Adventure" had the book's best adventure - a bit of courtly intrigue based on an actual historical incident, The Affair of the Diamond Necklace. and it probably could have supported an entire 96-page rpg supplement all on its own. It is perhaps unfair to compare the wholly fabricated stories in the rest of the book to the complexity of reality, but it was the only adventure in the book to feature a fleshed-out antagonist and compelling supporting characters. Next to it, all the others seemed a bit perfunctory.
The "Age of Adventure" also probably had the most essential collection of classes - Musketeer, Shaman, and Sorcerer. None of them especially stood out to me as being notably great, but as a set they expand the possibilities of the d20 Modern core more than their counterparts in either of the other chapters. Which makes sense, really. As the earliest of the historical settings, it's the farthest away from the core's assumptions.
"Shadow Stalkers" has the advantage of being a direct prequel to the core book's "Shadow Chasers" setting (somehow, in the intervening 120 years, they graduated from stalking to chasing), and it was moderately thrilling seeing the origins of the Fellowship (think - store brand version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Watchers Council). The Mesmerist has the best flavor of any of the book's extra classes, losing points only for having its first level be the weakest level-up option since the Commoner Class in the DMG. Also, while it wasn't as strong as the diamond necklace adventure, "Dead Men's Hands" is about a vampire who comes to an old west mining town and starts picking off the gunslingers and card sharks one-by-one, and that's a pretty great setup.
Finally, "Pulp Heroes" is hurt a bit by having the broadest genre of the three settings, but racing a Nazi expedition to the Fountain of Youth is more or less the Platonic pulp rpg adventure.
Politically, d20 Past does okay for its age. It explicitly calls Manifest Destiny a "racist view." It makes more of an issue about female characters than would be considered best practice these days, but its conclusion is "They should be able to choose whatever occupation, class, or advanced class they please, although their choice may put them outside the norms of society." I'm ambivalent about the suggestion that you remove the penalty to Disguise for women posing as men, mostly because I suspect "disguising yourself as another gender" is a game mechanic that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, but I can't deny that a woman disguising herself as a man in order to access male opportunities is a classic genre trope and I wouldn't want to deny players the chance to play out that fantasy.
(And I am absolutely not going to touch "Slave" as a background occupation. I am entirely too white for that discourse).
Overall, I really liked d20 Past. It's the least generous and least essential d20 Modern book I've read so far, but it delivers value from its very existence. The cover alone screams, "hey, dingus, you can use our rules to play Victorian occult detectives, WW2 drama, or fantasy pirates." And that reminder alone is worth the price of admission. Everything else is just bonus.
Ukss Contribution: It's funny. This book is probably the closest any book has come to my tehcnological and cultural assumptions about the world of Ukss, but that mostly means that all the best stuff is already there in the setting's background. So I'll choose the thing that diverges most from the vanilla fantasy canon - in the Age of Adventure setting, ghouls can transform into hyenas. It's fitting - carrion-eating undead becoming carrion-eating animals - and it's an unusual fantasy image. I'm not sure if Ukss' hyena-shifters will be undead, but they will definitely be anthropophages.
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