For me, much of the fun of these updated Technocracy rulebooks is in watching how the priorities and attitudes of each Convention changes from their earlier edition counterparts. The in-the-story decisions made were surprising yet believeable in how the Void Engineers of 10 or 20 years ago had to adapt to changes while still remaining recognizable as the Void Engineers.

It was also good to see characters from previous Technocracy rulebooks move the metastory forward while giving readers the proverbial tour. (There was more than one moment of, "Why does that name seem so familiar?" followed by me rapidly getting out rulebooks from decades ago to happily discover that we HAVE encountered these characters before. At the same time, a player who owns none of the older rulebooks wouldn't feel left out.)

Most of all, I greatly liked the secret behind who Threat Null is. That creative bombshell was amazingly appropriate and symbolically well-fitted to the storytelling of Mage as a whole, yet it doesn't throw an immediate wrench into every Technocracy campaign currently being played.

My only complaints were: 1 The chapter describing cosmology seemed contradictory and unnecessarily complicated. 2. I know it's the World of Darkness, but sometimes the overwhelming odds and fatalism does bog down the game to the point where no rational character would bother trying to go on. 3. The repetition of the aliens/startship troopers motif got old (to me anyway) after a while. Thankfully, the introduction of something truly original such as Threat Null helped balance that out.