Life in the Megaverse

Many newer designs treat experience like a receipt. You went into the hole, you took the coins, you bought the next piece of the kit, and the number on the sheet went up because the wagon got heavier. Palladium does not owe you XP for treasure, and I keep forgetting how much that still bothers people who grew up being paid that way. The character is already the character. The oath, the job, the code, the skill list that only matters because the world outside the fight is still running. None of that needs a shopping trip to stay true. You do not become more of a priest because you hauled copper out of a basement. You become more of a priest because the village is still a village in the morning. Magic items in these books are rare, and they change the story when they show up. They are not the story. You are not filling item slots, so the math works next Tuesday. If a rune weapon hits the table, the campaign just grew a new problem, and everybody at the table can feel it. When people say ...

Heroes Unlimited still has the best alignment system in superhero gaming, and most tables treat it like a box they check to get to the power catalog. I keep doing that myself until the first scene that will not resolve on a blast radius. The powers are the fun part. The code is why the night goes anywhere. You find that out in a place the power list cannot finish. Late news. A high school gym after a game that should have been nothing. The scoreboard is still on. Somebody in the bleachers filmed a kid stop a collapsing bank of lights with his hands. The clip is already circulating. The principal wants the gym cleared and the story to die. A parent wants a name. A coach wants the kid off his roster before morning. The kid is still in the locker room because he does not know which door is safer. Same power. Different night, depending on what they wrote down. Principled walks out and owns it before the clip hardens into a rumor. Scrupulous walks out and then spends the week trying to ...

What I like about Palladium is that it does not sell you the lie. The lie is that every class is a complete adventurer. Every occupation can stand in the same hole, swing at the same monster, and contribute equally to the same five-room crawl. If a class cannot do that, it is a trap. The designer failed. The player got cheated. Balance the baker until he can tank, heal, and drop a fireball, or do not print the baker. That is a crowdfunding 5E book. A Baker class drops, and immediately there is pressure to make the chef equal to the barbarian, the fighter, the wizard, and the cleric inside the same loop. The party is assumed. The dungeon is assumed. The only question left is whether the new kit can keep up with the old kits. The stretch book will not stop at the base class. It needs subclasses so the baker can contribute. College of Cakes: you frost a layer, and the kobolds forget they had a job. Order of the Rolling Pin: extra attack, bludgeoning, and a rider that knocks a goblin prone...

One of my 5E shelves got converted to my Palladium games today. Most of that whole shelf went into a closet. WotC D&D. The other 5E-alikes. Event settings, version books, the spines I was supposed to keep current. Boxed. What is left on the open shelves from that family is Level Up A5E. That one earned the space. One game is enough, if it is the best one you actually have. Hardcovers and special editions sit on bookstands, face out, like a hobby store display. Dice live in clear plastic hex containers that could also be used as candy jars. Between two free-standing bookends, the collection I display is Palladium Fantasy. Around that are my SDC games, Heroes Unlimited, Dead Reign, Beyond the Supernatural, and others. Palladium Fantasy just says so much more to me than any version of 5E. The game comes with a world. Mapped, and still unexplored. A sandbox that has lasted intact and true to the original intent longer than any D&D setting I have watched go through edition rewrit...

The question is not whether a game has rules. Palladium has rules. Skills, OCCs, alignments, combat, magic—plenty of numbers. The question is where the camera sits when you open the book. Does the game fight you? Does it push the lens inward the second you sit down, until the night is about the sheet, the kit, the next feature, and what the system will let this character get away with? Or does it leave enough empty space that the world, the NPCs, and the situation can take the shot? Most modern gaming defaults to the first answer. D&D 5E is the easy counterexample because the culture around it already lives there: subclass as identity, feats on a schedule, spell lists as personality, the session as a build showcase. But it is not only 5E. It is a design habit across a lot of new games and even a lot of “storytelling” tools. Track this. Spend that. Trigger the widget. Cash the resource. Gamify the genre until the adventure is a personal efficiency puzzle with flavor text taped to ...

I keep coming back to the same start for Palladium games. Not a dungeon. Not a map with numbered rooms. Just a room, four people who should not be in it together, and some reason nobody can walk out yet. That is usually enough. Palladium Fantasy Say you have a knight, a longbowman, a witch, and a thief. On paper, that looks like a party somebody threw together because those were the books on the table. In play, it is a situation. I like putting them in a border-keep hall after a raid that went badly. The knight owns the hall, or at least thinks he does. The longbowman was paid to keep the road open and did not. The witch has been in the village the whole time, and everyone has been pretending they did not know. The thief has the only map that shows where the raiders actually came from. You do not have to roll initiative. Let them argue. Let them lie. Let them figure out who hangs if this gets back to the duke. If a fight happens, it is because somebody in that room decided it ha...