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Lost Eons is a a Solarpunk sci-fantasy game by David Blandy, and was included in the Bundle for Ukraine from March 2022. The world is recovering from a climate catastrophe, ages down the line, where you play post-human characters who grow stronger through mutations.

General

• The purchase is split into 3 books, one for players (44 pages), one for GMs (28), and a setting book (that I forgot to download).
• The game is "... an innovative FKR inspired mashup of Blades in the Dark and 24XX, with an improvised card-based magic system". Seems neat! I don't know what 24XX is though
• I don't know what Solarpunk means, but I'm probably gonna learn!
• "Imagine a world after capitalism" - God I fuckin' wish huh.
• I always like seeing the things used as references for a game. References and Touchstones are such a great way to try to get on the same wavelength. Hey look, Traveler is in here.

The Player Guide

• Quick descriptor sections and Lines and Veils covered right up front.
• In Blades fashion, success is rated on the 1-3 fail, 4-5 mixed success, and 6+ success, with 2 or more 6+'s being a critical.
• It says +, because you can roll additional dice of larger sizes. In the first example of play, before getting into character creation, it mentions a player adding a d8 to a roll.
• You roll a d6 by default for any check (called your Soul Die), then you add a second dice for your Skill rating, which appears to be different sizes. If your character is hurt and impaired, the d6 base die becomes a d4 instead.
• This feels like it makes injury REALLY punishing. After all, it's hard to do your best when you're not feeling your best. It's really interesting.
• Oh! This also applies to when you help or receive help! That's sick!
• AND A DOUBLE OR NOTHING MECHANIC YOU CAN INVOKE ON A FAILURE?!?
• Failing a Push Your Luck, the double or nothing approach, has Severe Consequences. The book gives some examples, but I love "Chaos: The party's situation goes completely out of control"
• I love lifepath-like skill stuff. Backgrounds in D&D, straight up lifepath character building. Lost Eons gives us something akin to Backgrounds, but also the "Pick a skill" to put a point in" from Blades in the Dark. You get 2 free skill points to distribute, one is tied to your Personality and one is tied to a Formative Event, to help you think about your character's background.
• There is an example Personality table a page or two later.
• Mutations are how you get Abilities. Some are derived from the society you were raised in (it doesn't seem like it's assumed you're all from the same locale), while others are part of your Archetype's progression.
• Different Archetypes have different damage tracks. There are 3 wheels: Armour, Resiliency, and Wounded. You fill them in that order.
• At first I thought this was going to be like Lancer's thing, where if you depleted a thing, you'd go back to full and reduce your core status by 1, bringing you closer to death, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
• Magic is accessible to everyone. It uses a 52 card deck. The suits represent different "Elements" while the faces represent words or aspects. Each player gets 1 at the end of a night's rest, to represent fate, chance, the weirdness of the world, and so on. You can use your Channel skill to roll to use it. Some abilities let you get more than 1 card. Unused cards are collected by the GM before the shuffle and redeal.
• If your character isn't one of the "Spellcasting" archetypes, using the spell period requires you to roll on a minor detrimental mutation table, because untrained channeling of magics can have some consequences. If you dedicated your character to casting, it doesn't do this, unless you like, Fail a roll.
• You can also become a spellcaster later by undertaking a Major Detrimental Mutation, to sort of force yourself to attune to the world's Essence.
• I do like how they give you some sample ideas and tables to build your societies from. This book is great at being concise with important information. Plainly written a lot of time, and then columns don't feel too cramped.

This game is really interesting and it's really cool to see how they're tackling the post-heatdeath-of-the-planet thing. After the rising sea tides, after everything we have wrought, and how the people that survived would live.

GM Book

• I don't expect to go too deep into the weeds here. I'm not trying to get too granular on these reads but we'll see if anything jumps out.
• Oh I was wrong above, it's recommended that they all come from the same Haven. This even talks about shared mutations. BUT I get a strong feeling that each player can and maybe should make their own Society within the Haven, because people aren't a monoculture. So maybe some shared mutation from like the Haven due to it's shared underground space, but different people live differently.
• Each page that denotes a new chapter usually has 3 simple sentences that sum up a lot of the like, vibe of the section. For the "Locations" chapter, for instance, it says "Warp a forest. Weird a swamp. Add a lost haven". I like these as like, little tone setters.
• THIS TABLE ON PAGE SIX IS FUCKING SINGING TO MY NUMENERA HEART! "Atmosphere and Appearance". For quickly genning up the vibes and look of a place. They give slashes to separate two items, so you could do an either or, or both on whatever item you roll.
• Game calls itself a "Point crawl" as you travel between major locations, there are several random occurances. Reminds me of "Points of Light" that was used to describe the D&D4e setting, where it's a few places of safety and a lot of weird wilderness between.
• In a VTT, this is an easy do, but in person you might need two decks of cards. One for the magic deck, and one for a Doom Deck, which is a like, bad consequence that you can draw from during travel and other incidents. Some of the happenings are beneficial, like Major Beneficial Mutations!
• The last 15 or so pages are about treasure, designing adventures, creatures, flora, anomalies, and a bunch of predesigned adventures

This book is well laid out. There's a LOT of tables for inspiration which is cool, and it clocks in at a breezy 72 pages. I dig it's vibe, and ealing with post-post apocalypses is one of my current jams (hey there Numenera). The game strongly encourages you to think about a world after our current climate disaster has time to ebb. Is the surface still inhospitable? Are there new resources to be found? Did some people survive out here? What are they like? How did animals and plants change? Super neat, dig it a lot.