Review & OSR Commentary On Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins By Kevin Crawford For The Stars Without Numbers rpg & Your Old School Science Fiction Rpg Campaigns

"Dead Worlds Lie Dreaming

Beneath the dirt of fallen worlds lie the bones of forgotten empires and the relics of peoples now vanished into legend. Countless wonders lie silent, awaiting the hands of starfaring adventurers and the curiosity of fearless investigators. What glorious citadels and eldritch marvels remain undiscovered by humanity in the present age, and what miracles lie in the silent tombs of ancient alien kings?"

Lately there's been a glut of titles that have taken up a huge chunk of my time & there hasn't been time to take up a lot of titles on the back burner for review. That's been changing with the reintroduction of that thumbdrive of my dungeon master friend whose moved outta of Connecticut. And this brings us to the  first edition Stars Without Numbers rpg. And today what kicked this off was a friend asking about if there was ever going to be an exploration of the Elder Thing's dungeons that the players had dealt with recently in our Cha'alt/Carcosa rpg campaign near the Western edge of the Delta canyon. 
This brings me to SWN's Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins which is a sixty four page book written by Kevin Crawford during the game's heyday of 2014 or so.  And the more I looked through this title the more it occurred to me that this would be a perfect book for the Cepheus Engine rpg  The fact that I'd use the  Cepheus Engine rpg for generating the sector for any ruins or space dungeons goes without saying. 

This book is a tool box full of all kinds of creatures, random tables, etc. all geared around the creation of space dungeons, ruins, & other adventure locations. The meat of the book centers around the full on creation of alien worlds & places where the whole cloth of interstellar civilization has passed on or regressed. But the tone & wealth of the book is  centered around  the  full generation, history of aliens & their  ruins amid their history  all of it! Because Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins  is a Stars Without Numbers rpg book it makes it dead easy to use it for other OSR games. 
The first thing I thought of was using Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins  with Adventurer,Conqueror, King's Rpg setting book The Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu  sourcebook.

What's remarkable about Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins  is how versitile of a product it is & what can be done with it. This a great book for a science fantasy campaign. There's lots of good stuff to steal from & its perfect to generate your own planets or even planes of ruins for exploration & or horror even. The artifacts are creepy, the creatures deadly, & the book is of course right up there with many of the Stars Without Number rpg products for quality & actual ulitity. Hell I could even see using  Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins  for creating aliens for SpellJammer style games. 

 Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins  would be exceptionally useful for the Cepheus Light rpg where a solid & quick upbeat for a set up for a set of alien ruins is needed & needed quickly.