Rifts Ultimate + Rifts GM's Guide = Palladium Rules Update

After reading Rifts Ultimate Edition and the Rifts Game Master Guide, these two books are quite likely the entire "Palladium 2017 Rules Update" that many have been asking for.

The Game Master Guide book alone is worth the price of admission; print out pages 24-48 and keep them as your "final stop" for rule clarification in any Palladium game. This covers all types of melee, ranged, damage, and other rules questions and puts them in one place. You get the WP bonuses for all firearms and melee weapon types, all in one spot! You get a section on rules and combat Q&A! We get a chapter on revised combat terms. We get a huge chapter with all the skills and updated descriptions! Print those out too!

Pages 49-84 are the updated skills list.

Pages 85-108 are the updated psionics rules.

We get a huge weapons list and indexes for almost every other class, race, monster, and thing in the game. This is the ultimate index book. We even get a decent-sized missile chart that was printed very tiny in the Ultimate book. And we have loads of GM advice, which is also helpful for any other Palladium game.

Yes! This is all great stuff, what people have been asking for now for decades, and we have it all in one place. Palladium is now moving in the right direction.

Nobody should be saying "the rules are unclear" if they have access to these books. The rules here are unambiguous, just as understandable as D&D 5E (if not more so), and all in one place. After reading this section, I have no questions and know where to find an answer.

They are also presented in a logical, thoughtful way, and they even took care to avoid printing the same rule twice! The skills for WP tell you to go back to the combat section to find the to-strike bonuses, giving them one less place to print a second version of the same rule. Bravo! I love you people!

Seeing these updates gets me excited about the future direction of all the Palladium systems, and makes what we have today all the more playable and understandable.

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