As with every Sine Nomine product, Worlds Without Number focuses overwhelmingly on the person at the session who needs the most support: the Gamemaster. If you embrace its myriad tables, you'll make worlds, adventures, NPCs, and monsters that surprise you, shaking you out of your well-worn habits.

On the player side, you get mix-and-match classes to build a variety of concepts, as well as item crafting, domain management, and long-term project rules that encourage proactivity and ambition. Any game can tell a story about heroes who change the world, but not all of them lay such a clear, enticing trail of systems that empower that sort of play.

The Deluxe Edition adds six extra partial classes (Edit: Five partial and one full class) for more concepts, heroic rules for amped up PCs, and the Legate rules that supercharge your party with a wink-and-nod to fans of Godbound. There are some additional GM tools there too, a few of which give you neat ways to twist or question your content to extract new insights.

Enthusiastically recommended. The free version is more than enough if you're skeptical or price sensitive, and allows every player to have a personal rules reference. But don't sleep on the Deluxe Edition if you like what you see.

I use my deck very regularly to get prompts and ideas for solo RPG play, and enjoy the huge variety of tools and generators on each card.

I do have one suggestion for improvement: This version of the deck (Fantasy) has the noisiest background elements of all of the decks so far. It creates a great fantasy atmosphere, but at times all that atmosphere slows down interpretation of results.

If there are more decks to come, I'd love to see a version that makes layout and quick interpretation a top priority, or allows me to reorient and stagger stacks of cards to get several of one kind of prompt, while covering the info I'm not using at the time.

The Codex is more than just a translation of old D&D spellcasting tropes into a sci-fi context. Crawford's apparent design philosophy for spellcasters (that they should be doing the impossible, rather than just outshining the Warrior and the Expert when they spend spell slots) results in a library of new classes, spells, and foci that feel magical without falling into the "quadratic wizard" trap. The most potent spells have costs and limitations that demand more careful planning and risk management from spellcasters who want to get maximum value from their spell slots.

The sourcebook is flavorful too, providing new mysterious creatures called Shadows that can be enemies, summoned servants, or figures of worship that grant cultists twisted powers. Classes are accompanied by some default backstory and flavor to help players and GMs explain the otherworldly origins of their powers, and understand how magic-users might be judged by society. And for those GMs comfortable with a bigger bookkeeping burden, arcane research rules offer paths to power with built-in reasons to adventure for the research necessary to summon permenant minions, expand Arcanist spellbooks, and craft magical items.

If you don't want magic users in your sci-fi, obviously, pass on this one. If you do want them, buy the Codex without hesitation.