For my money, Mike Kaluta’s cover art for Lords of the Known Worlds (1997) is everything good and appealing and mysterious about Fading Suns in one glorious illustration. The problem with a cover that good is that the interior art doesn’t have a hope of holding a candle to it. Its fine – mostly crisp and clean and properly evocative, but a bit of a let down after the cover. Kaluta is a tough act to follow.

Anywho, Lords is one of many splatbooks in the Fading Suns line (again, Holistic was following a model based on White Wolf’s Stortyteller games, even eventually releasing a live action rulebook), this one focused on the five major noble houses of the setting. You have House Hawkwood (cough Atreides cough), Decados (Harkonen, basically), Hazat (space Zorro), al-Malik (space Caliphate) and Li Halan (holy space samurai), all presented with painstaking attention to lore and politics spanning hundreds of years. You’re either going to love this or your eyes are going to fall out from boredom. I generally have less tolerance for lore dumps like this than I used to, but in flipping through the book, I find I still had a fondness for it. The political struggles of the houses form the major backdrop for the campaign, after all.

There are some brief rundowns of the minor noble houses, which serves to distill them to their primary function (Shelit are cyborgs! Van Gelder are assassins!). I’d have preferred a little bit more detail on them, to be honest. There are also some outlines of alien powers, but that section feels entirely like an afterthought.