Every role-player has games that just sit there on the bookshelf. They lurk, their spines staring accusingly at you as you pass. “Why won’t you play me?” they mutely inquire. You know you want to.
But still you don’t, and apart from their annual lift off the shelf for one more guilty read-through, they remain alone and unloved. Perhaps it’s because of an inability to enthuse the other players in your gaming group, other commitments, or because you simply don’t know where to start when it comes to running a whole ‘nuther system. There’s a whole host of reasons why these games just don’t get the love they deserve.
For me, the accusing spine that glares at me more than most is Rifts, that venerable tome from Palladium Books. It’s difficult these days to talk about Rifts without at least glossing over the legal idiocy that has plagued it throughout its long life, so let’s do that first just to get it out of the way.
Rifts is, first and foremost, a system derivative of everything. We have Nazi Cyborgs, Mech Warriors and Giant Manga Robots rubbing shoulders with tropes of classic fantasy (cheekily called Tolkeen). This is a system which, from a legal standpoint, deserves to be sued to Hell and back by everyone from Tolkien Estates to Phillip K Dick and Studio Ghibli. Yet it hasn’t been, and the world (quite frankly) is a better place for it. The ability to patent ideas, concepts and imagination will be the death of civilization, I swear.
This makes Kevin Siembieda’s legal battles over “rights” regarding Rifts all the more ridiculous. In his time, he has ordered fan sites be taken down and claimed that he somehow owns the concept of a “Rift” (despite the fact the word and definition has been around for, oh, hundreds of years). It’s my opinion that, despite the fact that he writes awesome role-playing games, he doesn’t make the best business decisions, and that’s all there is to it.
There. Gloss done. On to the good stuff.
The world of Rifts is near-future modern day Earth, with one minor twist. Well, when I say minor…. The Golden Age of humanity ended when Rifts in time and reality itself opened up, spewing forth other-dimensional beings and worse. The shape of the land changed as magic re-awoke (not that it was ever truly asleep in the first place) and dinosaurs once again roamed the earth. Thankfully though, that’s all in the past.
What we have now is a world shaped by chaos where a Coalition State keeps an iron grip on what remains of the old Earth human Empire and tries to hold back the tide against pretty much anyone else, and there’s no such thing as good guys any more.
Rifts is perhaps best described as “Survivalist horror in the Warhammer 40k world of Judge Dredd.” Except it’s more than that. Rifts, more than any other non-generic system I’ve encountered, can be pretty much anything you want it to be. Want to play a group of heroes fighting against the Coalition for their rights to a Free State? Psionic cops rooting out mutant scum in Chi-Town? Glitter Boys fighting radioactive dinosaurs in the outback? You’ve got all that, and more.
The rules system itself is common to all those in the Palladium line. It’s best described as functional rather than elegant in that it gets the job done without too much fuss, and doesn’t get in the way. The system for handling huge-scale damage (called Mega-Damage – each point is roughly equal to 100 normal damage points) works well enough in-play, and I’m beginning to yearn for a similar system in 4e D&D where it’s easy for high-level monsters to have thousands of hit points. Ick.
We have a plentiful supply of Occupational Character Classes ranging from streetwise City Rats to Coalition Grunts and Glitter Boys. There’s Cyber Knights (high-tech Paladins) and all manner of Borgs, Crazies, Scholars and Scientists. If that’s not enough, there’s wizardly Line Walkers, Techno-Wizards, Mystics, pyrokinetic Bursters and much more.
The character classes themselves are gloriously unbalanced. At one end of the scale there’s OCCs such as the Cyber-Doc who gains moderate skill bonuses and not much else. At the other there’s the Glitter Boy in his faux Mech Warrior power armour. To my mind that’s a huge strength of the system as the GM is free to permit different character classes based on the preferred campaign style. Whether you want high-explosive large scale warfare or street-level action, there’s OCCs that provide. In Rifts, as in any RPG, only the foolish GM would open up all the options.
In a way though, there’s too much, and that’s one of the reasons why Rifts still sits on my shelf. It’s overwhelming as a system. It’s like every idea, ever, has found a place in the core book’s 256 pages, and it’s difficult to even know where to begin. Add in the (randomly laid out but excellently written) Word Book supplements and it’s easy to face Information Overload head-on.
Whenever I suggest running a short Rifts campaign, I get the reply, “We’d rather play TMNT instead.” This is much the same rules system as Rifts but lets the players create mutant animals using one of the best semi-random character generation engines ever made.
One of these days I’ll let them generate critters in TMNT, them dump them into the Rifts universe.
Ha! I’ll have my way yet!
Greywulf
I’m a business analyst/programmer who lives and works close to Sheffield in the UK. Among other things, I’m a writer, photographer, 3d render addict, Linux advocate and role-player. In my time I’ve been a Computer Science lecturer, journalist and contributing author for Linux Format magazine. In addition to my website, Greywulf's Lair, I can be found on Twitter and Linkedin
I really love the RIFTS world but I can’t stand the horrible rules. The Palladium system is a mess, if you ask me. If I had a lot of time I would probably try to do a conversion, so that I can use the background in one of my preferred systems, but I fear even thinking about doing something like that will be enough to face a lawsuit by Kevin Siembieda.
I played a lot of Palladium when I was younger, but ironically played mostly TMNT. I tried Rifts when it came out, and I liked it more than Torg, but the game was a GM ADD nightmare. I was in High School at the time, and could not get a Rifts game focused on anything, because I would toss anything shiny into the game, and there are so many shiny things in Rifts, that you will lose your mind.
That said, I always eye up the Rifts products, thinking that as a more experienced GM, I could pull something off.
As for me the game that sits on myself and mocks me is Underground.
You know, I’ve gone back and forth on this one. I, too, played it a lot as a kid and loved it, but only because I didn’t know any better. Nowadays, I would love to play it, but it would have to be with a bunch of solid players, an experienced GM, and some ground rules.
Yeah, I could dig it.
@Stargazer Yeah. Kevin has done more to damage the spread and support of his own games than anything else possibly could. My first draft of this post was much less polite, but I toned it down. As you said – don’t want to get sued, eh? Silly peep.
@DNAphil Same here. We played the heck out of TNMT. My favourite character was a Cheetah with a Speed of 176. Ah, happy times. I have a much easier time getting my players to run a session or two of TMNT than I ever have of Rifts. Add in the Rifts Overload Problem (R.O.P.?) and it’s easy to see why it’s consigned to the bookshelf.
The basic concept of Rifts is cool, but it is way too overblown and, well, silly. The world starts to collapse under the weight of “oh but we could add another cool ancient empire/space invader/evil mastermind here is this corner.” And the rules are, politely, a huge mess.
TORG managed the extra-dimensional invasion of Earth in a much more interesting and coherent fashion (though it had its flaws too_.
I loved Rifts. I bought it as soon as it hit the local hobby store back in the day. It was a hot mess like other Palladium games, but the art and the possibilities were too enticing. I’d like to have the books back..
Where are you, chris hillman? We’ll start up a game…
I have way to many Palladium books on my shelf. I have Dead Reign, Rifts, Palladium Fantasy, Heroes Unlimited and Beyond the Supernatural, more than 30 books in all. The only systems that come close in number of books owned are D&D 3e (50+, add Pathfinder to this and it’s at least 60), Mutants & Masterminds 2e (8) and D&D 4e (8). Every other game I own is 5 or less books. Yet of all those Palladium books I’ve only used them in an actual game once, maybe twice that I can remember. My group just could not get into the rules. On the surface the rules for Rifts seem simple enough, but with 1 hour plus character creation (that’s if you have a good handle on the rules) and so much information spread out over so many books, it is an overwhelming system.
They claim that everything you need to play is in the core rules, and technically that is true, but it won’t be much of a game. So then you need to buy one of the sourcebooks, but once you do you find that you still don’t have but a handful of creatures/villains to use, so you buy another book. I personally think you need a minimum of 5 books to run a halfway decent game of Rifts. I’m sure there are those that would disagree, but I find it hard to believe. When a game pretty much requires you to house rule a great deal of it, there is a problem. The system is a nightmare for a GM.
Then with all of the options available for players, it becomes a nightmare for them to create a character. It is just so much easier to use Savage Worlds, Cortex, D20 Modern (this includes Monte Cook’s World of Darkness and Cthulhu d20), or M&M to run a Rifts style adventure. The sad part is that using multiple systems to run different aspects of the Rifts/Palladium worlds is just easier than using the Palladium system.
The only games from the system that are pretty easy to handle are Dead Reign and maybe Beyond the Supernatural. Of course DR is pretty new and they did right by putting everything you need to play in the core books. If you don’t own anything but the core books, you are only missing out on unnecessary, though still quality material. This also mostly true for BtS, but with the exception of the core book, all of the source books are out of print anyway. Although I do think they are bringing them back.
So why do I own so many Palladium books? Because I love them. They are some of the most enjoyable RPG reads I own. They are incredibly imaginative and in many ways some of the most original and creative books on the market. Reading through the books gives you a real sense that among the poorly organized mess is a living breathing megaverse of potential.
If I had a dedicated game group that was willing to commit the time to learning the system and helping me houserule over the warts, I’d give the Palladium Megaverse a definite shot of becoming our game of choice. Alas that is not to be and so Rifts and the rest of the Palladium system books sit there on my shelf awaiting the annual read through.
FYI, a couple of years ago there was a freelancer on the Palladium boards that said he was proposing a Rifts lite type of book, but it was not a definite at the time. Recently on an episode of Gateway to the Megaverse someone who freelances for Palladium said that the books is being worked on and may become a reality.
The big problem I’ve always had with everything Palladium is that it all just seems so… I don’t know, first generation RPG. Maybe it’s because I’m not all that nostalgic when it comes to gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I have the deepest respect for our hobby’s roots and its early efforts but games like Rifts are so dated. When I look at a rule-set like Palladium’s I feel like I should be writing up an adventure with a typewriter and passing out hand written character sheets.
Even the Rifts setting just seems like a painful attempt to combine every genre and every “thing” into one setting. It feels so “forced” and artificial; to me it just lacks any sort of real creativity, just an incoherent mash of genre with half-assed rules thrown in. The only redeemable quality I find with Rifts is how fiercly its creator has fought to protect its “originality”, which just cracks me up (I love a good laugh!).
Anyway, just my two cents.
If I could buy the whole Palladium verse, I would. Then you’d see a total rework of the system. I would not, however, try to balance any of the R.C.C.s. It doesn’t take an especially strong GM to determine what is not allowed in the game, if the GM wanted to have a balanced party.
You know, the only reason people hash on the system is because it is a system that hasn’t changed with the times. I can remember plenty of fun nights, whether I was playing Palladium, Rifts, TMNT, Phase World, or Heroes Unlimited (I easily played over a thousand hours of Heroes Unlimited). Through all that, it was fun. Back then, I didn’t complain about the system at all. I would play it again, with the right people.
Good article, Greywulf. It got some good discussion and opinions.
Thanks everyone for commenting!
Palladium… we had our fun. Now I must move on…
Loved Rifts, TMT, Heros unlimited, and all of Palladium RPGs. Infact i am starting it back up with some old time friends. Its been over 20 years but ill let u know how it goes LAWL
RIFTS has two major flaws, one of them is Siembieda. No, seriously, they are 1.) It seems that the marketing scheme was to constantly up the power level in the next book. Glitter Boys were uber-powerful in core. Their gun was a joke a few books in. 2.) There was no sense of place in the books. There was a lot of filler. The difference between a pyramid and a millennium tree? Not much. The whole world was just a jumbled mess with no sense of place. By comparison, TORG was much better. In fact, while TORG had flaws, RIFTS was the poor man’s TORG.