Palladium Fantasy RPG Book II: Old Ones

There is this paragraph at the beginning of this book, right after describing this world "Old Ones":

In the fantasy setting of the Palladium world, magic replaces automatic weapons, nuclear bombs, and biological warfare. It is the great equalizer that can make the poor or the weak as powerful as a king or a dragon. Like any resource, and like the duality of human nature, magic can be used for good or evil.

I get the feeling we will see this again. In fact, this is one of the most essential paragraphs in the worldbuilding and the Palladium FRPG game. The fact that we have evil classes in the main book alongside the others is a massive part of this philosophy.

Magic is a resource used for good and evil.

Any revision to this game needs to keep this central theme, as one of the parts I love about these rules is that it does not judge you. You pick an alignment, and the world is your sandbox. You are not a part of an "adventurer class" of citizens. You select an occupation, race, and alignment. This is your character. You have the option to play good or evil, but not neutral.

You are forced to make a choice at the start, and it isn't easy.

I love that. You are not some smug hero with min-maxed stats, a vague morality that lets you justify anything, and a near-perfect start. You get this feeling your character is real, with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and little problems here and there, random 3d6 stats down the line, things you will and will not do, a pack full of junk, and you feel real. You are still better than average, but you need to keep working to improve.

The characters are more challenging to create than B/X, but I have more after I am done. With B/X, I am 3d6 down the line, pick race and class, roll hit points, buy gear, and I am done. The classes here force you to make several related skill picks from a list, and you are deciding if your ranger needs rogue skills, horsemanship, medical, espionage skills, or a science. You are making a decision to upgrade your hand-to-hand skill to a fighter-like "expert HTH" level or keep it at a basic level of self-defense.

This is like B/X with some of the class customization of Pathfinder 2. Not every ranger is the same, nor are any of the other classes.

This entire game has a strange Aftermath-style feel to it, and I love it. It is quirky, with hidden gems and pitfalls in the rules and systems everywhere, and some expected fantasy tropes and a ton you would never expect. It mixes Earth-style myths with alien influence. It creates a sandbox world full of good and evil and in between, and lets you make the moral choices.

It is funny how some games that are not these hyper-optimized game design examples of perfection and smooth mechanics appeal to me. Life isn't perfect, and I like things that are strange and unique, like it.

Spin up evil characters, kill the troll's war chief, and make them your army. Or play the good guys. Or play something in between and selfish. Unlike games that see alignment as "troublesome" and something that starts player conflicts, this game uses alignment to empower your character's actions. I picked the alignment; what is and isn't allowed is in the list. We all agreed on this game; it is all paid for, and let's go.

Some groups out there, and I have seen this in YouTube playthroughs, only allow good or selfish alignments, and that is your choice.

But you are free to make it.

The Old Ones

This book starts with a description of the Old Ones, the primordial beings who created the Palladium world and brought all the different life forms to it. These are almost Cthulhu-like creatures, but without the iconic forms and more just mountain-sized, constantly changing, alien intelligence, evil blobs of flesh. The Old Ones enjoy the misery and suffering of others and eat these emotions as nourishment, beings of pure magic with incredible psychic power, made of the flesh they fed on, the feelings of others.

These beings are not given stats here; they are just described, since they are one of the original forces in the universe, lying beneath the surface, manipulating the world through cults, plots, and webs.

When you get a Palladium expansion book, it reads like a magazine. You get articles, new classes, new races, little rules additions, discussions of different topics, new places, and adventures.

Minotaurs, Monk Scholars, and Illusionists

We then get a new race of minotaurs with history and discussion. We get two new classes, a monk scholar and an illusionist (with new spells). They are fun additions, some feel more like NPC classes, and I can see the illusionist being a fun class to try. Due to Palladium's all-over-the-place class balance, classes don't really need to be balanced or compared to each other; they are what they are. Some classes are OP, some are OP in a limited area, some are support classes, and some are for the bad guys, but you are free to try them.

Minotaurs are an interesting race connected to the Old Ones, who live far underground, and are a great supporting class for Old One lore.

Monk scholars feel like an NPC class, but they are these vow-of-silence style fighting type monks.

Illusionists have a shorter list of spells and feel like they could be expanded, but this looks like an interesting variant magic class for

Travel Notes

We get a short article on the speed of overland travel here, which belongs in the main rulebook but is needed to support a campaign setting. Again, the article-style nature of Palladium rules means that if you buy books, you get more and more of them. Is this a horrible way to organize rules?

Well, yes.

Is it fine in the overall scheme of things?

Well, yes.

If you are a completist, you will likely say this belongs in the main rulebook. But if you go back to the time, even books like the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide read like a long series of related articles. This is how it was done in the old days: you read magazines and threw together your game out of what you wanted to use, tossed out the things you didn't, and hung everything together on a framework of ability scores and task resolution.

These days, we demand games to be pinnacles of clarity and organization, presented so that there are zero questions when an edge-case situation arises. In the old times, games were a hobby, and ideas were shared in magazines, core books, expansions, modules, house rules, and third-party products.

Back when I started playing, there was no Internet. Even BBS systems were scarce. No one had home computers. Local groups shared information through newsletters published in hobby shops. Fanzines were popular. Dragon magazine and other game publications came out every month and were devoured the moment they arrived.

The "game" was never really a defined set of rules anyone could point to and say, "I play by this book."

The core books were where you started.

When you entered a group's game, the dungeon master was the literal keeper of the lore, including all the supporting material the group liked to use in its games. This was a mythical level of knowledge and power, and elevated the group's DM to a level more than just today's DVD player sort of "run the adventure" dungeon mastering. You had to be Gandalf and were seen as one, and great DMs with collections of lore, house rules, and source information were neighborhood legends. And every group and game was different.

The fight against this started with tournament modules and convention play, and that is how we got to today with official rules and sanctioned play. Corporatization and mainstreaming of the game took over.

Palladium sticks to the old ways, with rules as modular articles, and this is very true to how we played and organized our games back in the day.

Atlas of Timiro

The book then turns into an atlas of a typical "starting kingdom"- type area that reminds me of the Specularum area of Mystara, and it comes with a ton of maps and city descriptions. This is a fantastic resource, with page after page of fantasy towns that go down to notes on the individual buildings.

I like that some towns are just run by thieves and miscreants. There are bad places in this land run by bad people, liars, cheats, and they will do anything to keep their rackets running. We have rich and poor, tolerant and intolerant, and the entire area does not feel like your typical "fantasy painting" game world. There are a lot of messes to clean up and many that will never be.

We have forts and maps, and force totals in each, which is nice coming from an ACKS background.

I really like this section. It is easy to compare this to the atlases I am used to, and my eyes glaze over as I ignore the endless lists of buildings and maps, wanting more premade story-type content. But every town here is a mini-sandbox, and you are supposed to create your own stories, so while very dense and informational, the work is up to you to make all this come alive instead of having someone write you a story of "X does this to Y, now go adventure in Z!"

Instead of buying vegetables at the store, this book gives you rich soil, seeds, a plot of land, water, fertilizer, and a long growing season. Again, this is how we liked to do things back in the day. These days, we get a lot of premade stories and content, and you don't need much imagination to come up with a plot and an adventure. Back then, having all this information and background data on an area meant we could weave endless stories and plots with what we were given here.

A lot of people say Palladium is terribly organized and complicated.

It is a wonderful time capsule that preserves many of the old ways and gives you the tools to play the way we did back then. It was more work, but then again, we weren't spending hours on social media each day, so we had the time to use our imaginations and create stories.

Adventures

Amazingly, the book does finish with a section of adventures, dungeons, travel missions, and all sorts of interesting situations that can happen here - and they all tie into the area's lore presented earlier. There is a good mix of missions and situations of different lengths, with maps and monsters, treasures and locations, and NPCs to meet along the way.

Are they organized well? Not really, but if you have been following along, you will know why. They are sort of a journal of the designer's play sessions, detailing what "the first group" did during these adventures, along with sidetracks, other missions they took, and detours along the way. They end in a big battle in an Old One temple with a grand finale, and then the book ends.

The endnotes say the original group had a year's worth of gaming in this book, and there are plenty of places to make your own. The Old Ones ties together many of the stories, locations, characters, and adventures here, so it is a fascinating book and, if you slow down and read for understanding, a fantastic peek into the past.

Unlike today, where we expect an adventure module to take us through a movie-like experience, the older games were more like sandbox adventures where you were given a massive box of Legos, and you built your own incredible stories and conflicts. Here, yes, you are given a string of scenarios, but you don't have to play them in order (or at all) and can use them as background for your own stories with the Old Ones.

I like the new games, and the Castles and Crusades game feels like the best implementation of a classic D&D-style experience. It is filled with fun and nostalgia, is balanced and organized, and hits all my nostalgia checkboxes. Old School Essentials rocks as a B/X clone.

So why play this?

Well, for the same reason, I would play Super Mario Bros. or the original Legend of Zelda game. One could say they are primitive experiences and not worth playing, but to many of us, they would be wrong.

Once you know why, you know.

Originally published 3/23/22 on the SBRPG blog.