Palladium Fantasy, Pure Fun

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 for high-level play is garbage. Nothing is special or rare. It is all the infinite marketplace of green and blue items in the player auction house of World of Warcraft. If magic items are needed for high-level play balance, none of them feel magical.

They are more junk in a game overflowing with junk.

In Palladium? Magic items are rare and valuable finds. But they aren't needed. Most of your character power comes from you. A rune weapon? A game changer, but those won't be in every game. Again, most of your character power comes from your character, not the magic junk hanging off your body. You can run an entire low-magic campaign without magic items and still be fine.

If you took away everyone's magic items in a Palladium Fantasy game, captured them, and put them in a gladiatorial arena, their character power would not change all that much. Their inner power, skills, SDC, spells, and OCC abilities account for 80-90% of their character's power.

Or you could run a high-magic game, allow the gold to flow, and make shops that enchant weapons and armor and still be mostly fine. Rune weapons are the heavy hitters, and those should not be handed out like candy.

In the new Conan game, there are no magic items, and the character's power is increased to compensate. Imagine that! You don't need piles of magic items and junk to increase your character power, and the game focuses more on action and story. All your magic item power is "built in."

But Palladium Fantasy isn't D&D. The rat-race of item-aquisition is not that important to this game. This isn't about vulture capitalism, looting dungeons to the last copper piece, and searching the dead bodies for every last coin like ghouls. You aren't hauling piles of coins out of a hole in the ground in wagon trains. Your XP is not tied to GP. Also, unlike 5E, you don't collect treasure and do nothing with it, and then are given free housing with the bastion system.

Palladium Fantasy is about being a hero and telling a story. Not every class has to be good at combat or magic, and things "are what they are" without this MMO-thinking to "balance all classes to be viable" design thought in place.

The XP in Palladium Fantasy was tied to roleplaying long before AD&D 2E copied them, and it was never given for treasure. XP is for story events, self-sacrifice, creative play, good ideas, and good roleplaying. This is the way.

Alignment still matters here, unlike the aimless, morally ambiguous 2024 D&D. Anything can be good, and anything can be bad, even lawful good angels? Dumb. It is relativistic garbage. Demons are always evil, no matter how hard they try to market them as character options and paint demons as the heroes. Stop making the people behind the Satanic Panic look like they were right, please.

Also, I could make an argument for not needing 3,000 spells and monsters in a game, too. Every one of those clogs up my 5E character design tools, and eventually, the app or VTT becomes worthless and impossible to navigate. You mean for every small variation of a spell, like a fire spell getting a damage-over-time effect, we need an entirely new spell, and we can't let the referee and player make a ruling? We need an entirely new "water goblin" in a monster book as filler, and we can't just use the goblin that is already there and modify it?

Quality, not quantity.

D&D and 5E exist to sell you the same thing, slightly modified, over and over again. Everyone screams to "protect 5E," but the game has huge design issues that force designers to ship "more spells, more options, and more choices" instead of better ones. Why not have spells that have a few different options to choose from? No, sorry, we need nine types of fire spells at level one, and the character designers get more and more bloated.

This 5E "live service model" sucks.

We are defending a broken, bloated, terrible game system.

Even the OSR games that ship 12 spells per level, and no new ones, are better than this, since those 12 spells you get at level one are better than the 500 level one spells I need to sort through in 5E. Every one of those 12 spells needs to be iconic. I am free to modify them, like giving an ice mage "ice missile" instead of "magic missile," and maybe adding a cold effect on the spell since the mage loses the ability to cast all fire spells. In the OSR, it is my game; I am free to change it as I like. In 5E, it is someone else's game I am paying to play.

Palladium Fantasy is pure fun, free from the corporate and exploitative parts of the hobby that I am frankly tired of in 2026.