Foundation Transmissions expands upon the core mechanics presented within the Thousand Suns core rulebook. It presents new tool-kits for creating great new things to add to your adventures and campaigns plus new options for running military-inspired games. These tool-kits coincide with how the game is designed, as a sandbox with plenty of options. While it may sound a bit cliche, Foundation Transmissions is the ultimate sourcebook for anyone playing Thousand Suns.

OVERALL

Foundation Transmissions is an excellent combination of direct mechanics and tool-kits for adding new goodies to your game. The weapons, armor and robot tool-kits are excellent for players looking to really add their own flavor to the game and the addition of scheming allows you to look beyond combat. For GMs there are pre-generated planets and a new race. For everyone, there is a new look at creating teams that include characters of different ranks, something you would expect a space exploration team to have. It truly contains all the right mechanics and tools needed for long-term Thousand Suns campaigns.

RATINGS

Publication Quality: 10 out of 10
Rogue Games has a tendency to create simple books with a clean layout and presentation. They are easy to follow and pleasing on the eyes when reading. Foundation Transmissions sticks to those principals with its high-quality publication and even higher quality presentation. It is the presentation of the mechanics that truly stand out, although the illustrations help as well. Not only is it a great tool-kit, it’s a concise and fully detailed tool-kit that doesn’t require interpretation. There are many possible approaches to take for a tool-kit oriented sourcebook, this one definite took the right path.

Mechanics: 10 out of 10
Foundation Transmissions is all mechanics, pretty much. Each section contains its own set of mechanics being introduced or expanded upon compared to the core mechanics. The true perfection of these mechanics is how they are put together when using the tool-kits. There are so many options that you may be afraid of bloat. However, everything is presented in a standard and fairly generic method that the options don’t become bloated and you can see how much effort was placed on balance. When creating your own weapons and armor, you want to make sure you can easily match up your description to those of the tool-kit (and thus the given mechanics). Foundation Transmissions does this beautifully.

Value Add: 10 out of 10
If I could rate this higher, I would. However, 10 is the highest so I’ll stick to 10. From the mechanics and presentation, Foundation Transmissions is all value. There is literally something in it for everyone. You want to design your own weapon? Now you can. You want to design your own armor? Now you can. You want to design your own robot sentinel? Now you can! This is the perfect book to be married with the core rulebook, that’s how valuable it is.

Overall: 10 out of 10
Foundation Transmissions is an awesome sourcebook and tool-kit collection for Thousand Suns. It really sticks to the basic principal of presenting a sandbox setting with lots of flexibility. Especially since the core rulebook is filled with tool-kits as well. This is a definite must have for any Thousand Suns player.

All the advertising blurb, the cover text, even some of the opening remarks on the first couple of pages, suggest that this is an excerpt from a mythical galactic encyclopaedia which your Thousand Suns characters might find useful. Useful this book is, but not that way: it's a collection of articles aimed at players rather than characters, rules additions in the main.

Now, Thousand Suns is more of a toolkit for running an SF game (especially one in the space opera mode) than a full-blown game, and this book continues in the same vein with a collection of well-considered articles about various aspects that you might care to add to your ruleset. Beautifully presented and illustrated, it's well worth a look.

The first article, Moving Through the Ranks, looks at how to link military advancement to the character development inherent in gaining experience points during play - something useful if your game is based around the activities of a military unit. It includes ideas about how to incorporate rank into a role-playing game without getting bogged down in the kind of hierarchy that military organisations thrive on, and is well-explained and mechanically sound although some of the text sounds more as if it came from mechanical translation than a human being's pen!

Next comes The Ways of Scheming, which is an ingenious if mechanistic way to simulate in-character plots and the use of influence to accomplish them. Whilst most people are likely to be comfortable role-playing their acts of intimidation, threats and blackmail, it could prove useful for the GM to 'book-keep' more elaborate plots, or for the moderation of plots against, rather than by, the characters.

This is followed by the introduction of a new race, the mysterious Aurigan. Clearly intended to be NPCs rather that player-characters, there is plenty of scope for adventures involving them and a lot for the curious to discover. Next comes brief single-paragraph notes on The Planets of the Core, rather thin but useful enough for characters who come from or wish to visit these planets. The fifth article is an extensive one about weapons, designed to enable you to describe just about any death-dealing device you care to imagine in appropriate game terminology, and this is followed by a companion piece on Custom Protection... with all those weapons around you probably need some! Similar detail is then given to robots, with plenty of detail should you wish to incorporate them in your game - or even play one!

The final article, A Spacefarer's Introduction to Lingua Terra, is rather fun. Based on Esperanto, it's an attempt to lay out the basics of a possible intergalactic language, with sufficient material to allow for muttered asides, notices, etc., to be concocted to give an added air of the exotic to your setting... but no swear words!

It's an interesting collection, worth casting your eye over to see if any of these components would be useful in your game. A good editorial eye might improve it, not so much glaring errors but a certain clumsiness of expression makes some of the articles hard to follow and a bit clunky, but overall a useful addition to your toolkit.