Life in the Megaverse

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 ...

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...

After TNMT (and Ninjas & Superspies), our third Palladium game was the Palladium Fantasy RPG. By this point, I was hooked on the system, and nothing would save me from the Rifts book, which was next on my to-get list. Palladium Fantasy gets fantasy right. I love how it builds a world, fills it with classes, introduces widely varying balance levels in the classes, and sets you free. I love the skill-based characters and the different fighting styles. I love mixing martial arts into this world. The magic systems are superior to D&D and much more mysterious and arcane. No two casters are alike, or pull from the same spell lists. A warlock-style character in Palladium is a true warlock, not a D&D caster who "uses a different chart, needs frequent rests, and uses the same spell list." D&D is the perfect game for fitting round pegs into square holes, and it optimizes and simplifies far too much for its own good. All the flavor and mystery of magic is gone, and it si...

Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, page 50 So I was looking through the pregenerated characters in the Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, and I saw a 4th-level ranger with ...five melee attacks? And a rate of fire of five with his longbow? Then a sense of panic hit me. Five? Five! Where are they getting five?! Am I getting all the attacks I should be getting? This is critical in any Palladium game, and this is one thing D&D 3.0 stole from the system: the notion of your attacks per turn going up, and your damage naturally increasing as you level. Granted, in Palladium, attacks can be traded for defense, so there is a balance to the mechanic, where in D&D 3.x, they are just attacks. Wizards did a lousy job at implementing the concept they borrowed, again. So, where do these attacks come from? Let's look at Palladium Fantasy. The first two are easy: Hand-to-Hand Combat Expert starts with two attacks per round. The next one is also easy. Since this character is 4th ...

Percentage-based systems always make great solo-play games. Primarily, when used with a system like Mythic Game Master Emulator, your percentile dice are always out, and you are making rolls with the identical dice used for your skill checks. And a system with a lot of percentage-based skills will be much easier to solo, since your skills will give you ideas for situations to make rolls for them in. Palladium Gamemaster's Pack, Sample Character, Page 50 If you look at the above, that is the skill list of a 4th-level ranger in Palladium Fantasy. Now, compare this to a D&D 2024 ranger at level four. Palladium Fantasy has more skills, and they are a lot more specific than the D&D skills. While some of the Palladium skills could be grouped under one D&D skill, such as D&D's survival skill covering Palladium's Wilderness Survival, Tracking, Trapping, Skinning, Navigation, Plants, and Cooking skills, I like the longer list of skills with specific uses far better t...

The Palladium FRPG is one of gaming's most underrated gems. The advice on role-playing, gaming, and the fantasy genre in general - on what it means to be a player - is second only to Gygax's words in the original AD&D. The book itself reads like a continuation of the ideas presented in the original AD&D, the midwestern wisdom we all crave, what it means to have an alignment, how to play, how to be a hero, this is all amazing, inspirational stuff here. And the combat system is far easier than D&D. Roll a d20, and 4 or less is a miss. Roll between 5 and the armor value, and you hit the armor. Roll over the armor value, and you penetrate the armor and damage the target directly. If the AC system of D&D is a sound combat system, this is a great combat system. You can parry, dodge, or entangle an attack. After damage, if it is a blunt attack, you can try to roll with the impact. The combat is simple, heroic, gritty, has armor damage, and it just works very well. Diff...

If your eyes are not what they used to be and you find the downloadable Palladium Fantasy character sheets unusable, this is a great product. You will spend a little time learning how this works, but it is much less time than you would spend working up your own sheet (or struggling with the official ones). The printouts are way more readable than what I can write on those sheets that force you to write in 6-point type in pencil. The only downside is now I want one for the other Palladium games (Ninjas and Superspies, Dead Reign, Heroes Unlimited, etc) besides Palladium Fantasy and Rifts. There is a little room for custom skills and classes in here, so you can customize this sheet for specific characters. It gives you three printable sheets for the character sheet (double-sided), magic (double-sided), and combat (single-sided). The sheet auto-calculates everything, so you don't need to do much math, and you need to follow along with the OCC selections and skill picks with the books ...

So I sat down this weekend to run through a few sample combats using the NPCs from the  Palladium Fantasy Game Masters' Kit , and of course, I was sitting there with my "expert bias" and saying, "I know how this is going to go. I have been playing these games long enough to know how this plays, and I won't be surprised." Well, I was surprised. So on one side was the pre-gen character Haloric, a 3rd-level thief with two daggers and soft leather armor. On the other side, we have Tramon Dess, a 3rd-level assassin with many weapons (military fork, sword, daggers) and studded leader armor. The assassin has the advantage here in a few ways; first off, HTH combat assassin versus the thief's basic. The assassin has far better weapons and armor, along with a +4 bonus to strike with most weapons. This is going to be so one-sided. The thief is likely going to get one hit in. Now, I house-ruled in a fumble on a roll of a 1, and the assassin kept dropping his weapons...

This is a great book. And why play Palladium? The fans are some of the most die-hard and best around. People who don't like it, don't play it (but they complain about it a lot). Those who are left are there for the game. I ran with the  Aftermath  system as our house rules for nearly 10 years for sci-fi, fantasy, and modern games. Palladium and Rifts feel like throwback B/X games in comparison, and plus I played TNMT and Rifts back in the day and loved them. The attack roll and the defender's chance to react are very cool, cinematic, and tense rules for combat. Do they drag out combat? Yes. Are they worth it? Even more so! Very few games can you outclass an opponent in so many ways that make a difference, and a good defense is a viable combat option. Back to the book. Let's take a step back from our journey through Palladium FRPG. Let's open the monster book and check things out. Over 160 pages of illustrated monsters, followed by a further 80 pages of illustrated a...

  They have never reprinted  Palladium RPG Book IV: Adventures in the Northern Wilderness , so if you are looking for a "book 4" for your Palladium FRPG collection, you will find some of the same material in the  Wolfen Empire  book. You can also throw the old "book 5," Further Adventures in the Northern Wilderness, into the Wolfen Empire compilation, so the second edition books have a numbering gap, jumping from 03 to 07. They are leaving those open for a reason, but as far as I know, all 2nd-edition books are still in print. If you want the 1st-edition books to fill the gap, get them in PDF format. It looks like the older 1st edition books were more pure adventure books, while the 2nd Edition books switched to a mixed "rules expansion plus adventure" format. This is a good format change since you are expanding your game with each new 2nd edition book that you add. There is some content found only in first-edition books, as I read, so it is worth having t...

Wait, is this a Rifts book? That cover looks a lot like a Rifts cover to me... In a way, yes, it is for every Palladium game. This one feels like a crossover book with a lot of Rifts information and dual-statted dragons, gods, monsters, and demons of the Palladium universe. If you are strictly playing a Palladium FRPG game, this book is as close to Rifts as you can get. Every god, demon, and dragon in this book knows about the Rifts universe, but they are just a little quiet about it. In my PFRPG universe, everybody knows what happens when they open the door to Rifts. The guy who writes these articles is spending a lot of money on books. And he has forbidden that. For now. Yeah, they listen to me because I buy the shelves around here. If I say I am just playing and collecting JUST the fantasy game, all these aliens, gods, and super-powerful dragons stay quiet. Everything We Didn't Have Room For... ...in the core book. Except for the bards. Later, bards. Why did you leave the dragon...