Life in the Megaverse

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...

I went quiet after January. The last three posts sat there like an unfinished melee: Palladium Fantasy as pure fun, Palladium as DIY world simulation, and Rifts as space opera, part one. Then life did what life does. The books did not leave the shelf. The Megaverse did not shrink. I just stopped typing. That is a bad habit for a blog. It is a fine habit for a game. Because that is the whole argument I was making before I vanished. Palladium does not need a live-service drip of new subclasses, nine more fire spells, and another pile of magic junk to stay playable. The power is already in the character. The world is already in the core book plus the two or three sourcebooks that match the campaign you actually want. You do not have to wait for a new release, a new app, or a new excuse. So this is the restart post. Short. Useful. No apology tour. Pick a shelf, not a catalog. If you came here for the SDC games, start there. That is still the heart of this blog. Palladium Fantasy does...

The best compliment I heard about Palladium Fantasy is that "It isn't D&D." I love the system; it is as far away from D&D as you can get and still be in fantasy. The casters are all different, powerful, and no two work the same way. All are OP in what they do, and completely worthless in some situations. Magic items are both powerful and completely unnecessary in a game. There are times I tire of the constant "garbage collection" in games like D&D, where magic items are overly relied on to the point where you build around them, collect junk, make wishlists, and where magic items are critical to your build and damage output. Every +1 to something counts. Every item slot needs to be filled by a magic trinket or bauble. All armor needs to be magic with special abilities imbued. Make it stop! I am sick of the MMO-ification of tabletop RPGs! I don't want 3,000 magic items in my game! It is fake; the game is balanced around it, and everything it needs ...

Can Rifts be played as a space opera-style game? Let's ignore Earth for now, and just focus on intergalactic adventures, star hopping, getting into trouble in deep space, fighting space pirates, and battling all types of space monsters on missions across the galaxy. Surprisingly, the answer is yes. And not only a weak yes, but a very strong yes. Let's start with the Dimension Book Two: Phase World, and this is the nexus of any space opera-style campaign for Rifts, since this thematically replaces Earth and acts as our intergalactic hub that connects everything together. This place connects infinite dimensions across a massive planet and city, serving as a transit point for travel from anywhere to anywhere. You are likely playing a strict MDC game here, and it will be a lot safer to deck out in MDC armor (even light MDC) when going anywhere, and carrying MDC weapons. There may be the occasional SDC encounter and need for weapons, but due to the high power level of everything in ...

Many role-playing games fall into the trap of deciding what you will do with them. D&D is one of these games, where the entire experience should be played one way. The equipment list is engineered for dungeon crawling; all abilities are focused on dungeon crawling; all classes are rigged to dungeon crawl; all spells are crafted for dungeon crawling; the experience system is built to reward dungeon crawling; and the monsters are even perfectly designed for the dungeon crawl. As a result, the game feels perfect for dungeon crawling. But little else. There was a time when game designers considered the world first, designing systems that encompassed the entirety of a realistic, dynamic world, with no thought of it being a game, and began the design from there. Palladium is one of those games, and its default ability to simulate an entire world in its lingua franca is why we love it. While it can be dungeon crawling, and Palladium can simulate that activity inside this world, the game a...

Here is an excellent tool for your GM's Toolbox, the Palladium Fantasy book Land of the Damned One Chaos Lands has one of the best random monster generators for any Palladium Game, sitting right there on pages 108-121. This can be used for both SDC and MDC games; just say it is, and it will quickly create a random monster for your game. These are primarily for Palladium Fantasy , but nothing is stopping you from using them for all your other games! These are mainly intended for the random things crawling around the Chaos Lands, but they work just as well for any random creature you may need crawling around a dungeon. Just roll it up, flavor it as an undead, slime creature, minor demon, impling, animal, creature of magic, chaos beast, or any other random monster you may need to fill out an encounter. This is especially useful for Beyond the Supernatural and for making random creatures, either as boss monsters or those random things that skitter through alleyways. You could use the...