Ancient Mexico has several similarities to ancient Egypt. Theocratic rule, pyramids, pictographic writing and the tendency to be shown in a state of ruin whenever shown in film or game. Avalanche Press did a good job of showing a living, adventurer-worthy, ancient Egypt in "Nile Empire: War in Theopolis" by wisely giving the setting a very narrow focus. Unfortunately, "Aztecs: Empire of the Dying Sun" fails to do the same for pre-conquistador Mexico.
Ree Soesbee wrote this book. I mention this because my local gameshop owner is a big Legend of the Five Rings fan and thought the fact important; I hadn't previously heard of her. She has an uphill struggle in presenting ancient Mexico as a place you'd want to live. The second thing people think of when the think of Aztecs is chocolate (or possibly that game like basketball). The first, of course, is the rather messy religion. The book gets straight to point about this. The world previously had five suns. Four are now dead, and the gods need human blood to keep the fifth alive. Thus rather than being a bloodthirsty monster, the sun god, Huitzilopochtli, is merely a grim guardian with the unpleasant task of saving the world. Many of the Aztec gods are presented in a similar light, but sometimes a sanity check is needed. The love goddess, Xochiquetzal, requires a young woman to flayed at her festival. Alignment is given as chaotic good. I'd like to see Ms. Soesbee's dictionary at this point.
The book then gets in depth about the Aztecs beliefs and lifestyle. Although there is a heirarchy of slaves, commoners, nobles and priests, Aztec society is meritocratic, with everybody able to rise up through the system. Life is extremely tough, nobles being expected to work harder than commoners to prove their rank, and justice is harsh as well, with the death penalty for just about everything. Very interesting, but nothing to make me want to adventure there. The following chapter on geography is more stimulating, since it concentrates on the cities of Tenochtitlan, Oaxaca and Cholula and provides a good deal of local colour. This is useful even if you just intend to go for the traditional jungle ruins approach to the Aztecs. The last chapter contains adventure ideas. There are some reasons to adventure in Mexico here, but mainly as one-off mini campaigns. The best idea here is where adventurers have to travel north to the Aztec homeland of Aztlan to receive a prophecy directly from Huitzilopochtli himself.
What really lets the book down are the chapters on characters. The book presents two new base classes, the shaman and the nagual. The shaman is a divine spellcaster who is far to close to the adept mechanically to be interesting. The nagual, a sorceror variant, is, by contrast, an extremely interesting idea. They claim the world is an illusion, and use their powers to break down the illusion. They can use magic, and cause dice to be rerolled. The concept is ruined by the class being far to powerful. They cast spells like a sorceror, get d8 for hit points, 4 skill points per level and a base attack advancement equal to a priest or rogue! Best take the class's concept and special abilities and rewrite as a prestige class. There are two actual prestige classes, eagle knights and jaguar knights. Eagle knights are holy warriors (holy in the Aztec definition), with a code of honour. Jaguar knights are closer to holy assassins or ninja in concept. This treatment is better than others I've seen of the same archetypes, such as TSR's Maztica. Rounding off, their are some rather dull feats, spells and magic items, and, scattered throughout the book, a number of monsters, including a chihuahua.
There are a number of other problems with the book. Open game content, for those who care about such things, is poorly marked. There is no map; I had to look on a contemporary map of Mexico. There is no pronunciation guide for the Aztec names. Also, there are only 59 pages of actual text, and this is simply not enough to cover all of Aztec history. There is no mention of the Mayans, Zapotec or Teotihuacans who were so important in setting up Aztec culture (in other words, the Aztecs pinched it from them), and only a paragraph mentioning the Toltecs. Also, last time I checked, all of TSR's old Maztica campaign setting (one boxed set and three modules) was available free from the Wizards of the Coast website.
To be fair, the book presents Aztec culture in a very RPG friendly format. You could use it for any gaming system. It's just that there's not enough here to get a campaign going. Combined with Maztica setting (for more balanced gaming material, albeit 2nd edition), and a decent book on Aztec mythology and history, and you could probably run a memorable, if somewhat dark, mini-campaign. I give a 2 for style and a 3 for substance.
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