Life in the Megaverse

I hope you got everything you wanted under your Rifts-mas tree this year: all the excellent books and games in this system, the worlds we create, and, most importantly, the games we play together! This year, I got a bunch of Rifts books to complete my collection that I started back in 1990, and the people in the Palladium warehouse were probably overjoyed to ship these massive orders to me. I was just as happy to get them and finally have a complete collection of Rifts books (minus the Rifter, which I have in PDF). It feels good, and this is the best Riftsmas that I have ever had! And supporting such a great company, and one of the oldest non-D&D roleplaying games out there, is a plus too. Palladium is a treasure of the hobby and a pioneer in many areas. Please keep making great books, and I can do my part here on my blog to spread the joy of these great games. I started my journey with Palladium back in college, in the 1990s, when I worked in the university computer lab as a tutor...

The first Rifts book was always a special part of my game collection. This is a book I could open that unlocks infinite possibilities and adventures. I have only felt that with a handful of games over the last few decades. The original BX red and cyan D&D books were one. Star Frontiers was another. The original Vampire: The Masquerade was another. These are special games where once you crack open the book, you enter another world. Rifts feels awesome. It is a cultural milestone and an equal of any comic-book universe. This carried science fiction gaming through the 1990s, with Star Wars d6 on the other side. Traveller was floundering with Megatraveller. Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Star Trek roleplaying, and Space Opera were mainly dead. Battletech held its own, but more as a tabletop game. Shadowrun and Cyberpunk were technically science fiction, but still very close to today. There was also Space Master, and GURPS did science fiction. But Rifts captured imaginations. I could open...

It is not a Palladium Megaverse game, but Recon won our hearts in the 1980s when Rambo was playing at the movie theater, Chuck Norris was saving the PoWs, Tour of Duty was on the television, and the Vietnam War was the stain on a country's consciousness, and the loss of innocence for a nation in the free love 1960s. The Vietnam War ended the science fiction future we were promised in the 1950s. It ended with a hedonistic, jaded, and drug-addled discotheque nation in the 1970s, lost in a malaise and gripped by inflation and an oil crisis. And a role-playing game trapped in the jungles of Southeast Asia about one of the darkest periods of modern history seems almost obscene and too controversial. Yet, here it is, honoring those who served. We got this game early, and while we never played a whole campaign, we played the system for a few one-shots and enjoyed the authenticity and design of this fantastic book. Recon is a true beer-and-pretzels RPG, one you crack open, design some char...

It is like Terminator, but with a nano-metal plague that attaches itself to humans and infects all metal we touch, and turns it into killer robots. To fight it, humanity engineers bioengineered MDC weapons and armor from bone, flesh, coral, and organic materials. Humans cannot get rid of the nano-bots in their systems and the world; they need to exist around them. All metal is death to the touch. So it is humans in bio-war-suits versus nano-bots and giant robots. Do you want to play an armored suit jockey who rides around in a naga-shaped snake-like armored suit with two plasma cannons for arms? I can't think of another roleplaying game that lets you do this, and Splicers is the only one. This is one of the most imaginative non-Rifts settings Palladium Books has ever put out, and it is cool in ways I did not expect. You can be a flesh-meled supersoldier. You can be a samurai-like Dreadmaster in some of the most powerful bio-armor ever constructed. You can be a zombie-like Scarecrow...

It's like Rifts, but you play the good guys. Rifts Chaos Earth is a fascinating game. This is an alternate timeline game set way before the current year Rifts, yet still compatible with most of the game. You are the "Earth Defence Force" or NEMA, and you go around doing heroic things in a newly ruined world. You get to meet the Dee-Bees, users of magic, and aliens for the first time and decide how first contact goes. There is no Coalition to step all over you. You need to protect and serve the innocent SDC populations of the world. And there is no set timeline you need to follow; you can pull in things from Rifts, but nothing that depends on that timeline. For example, there is no Coalition, so you will never use those soldiers, mechs, suits, or tech. There could be places like Atlantis or Phase World. There are MDC demons. It is primarily up to you what you want to pull in, and this being Rifts, you could rift in something that is not supposed to be there, and cause a lo...

The idea of Palladium Books putting out a zombie RPG is a fascinating one. This one I have never played, but I love this game and its punk, street, grunge-infused, almost street-art style. The art in here is beautiful and hovers on the edge of counter-culture, mixed with the classic Palladium line art. Where other zombie RPGs tend go with boring zombies, Dead Reign treats zombies as a world of possibilities, offering a variety of walking, crawling, running, and talking dead that amazes me. These are the best zombie designs in gaming: imaginative, fresh, cool, and you never know what to expect next. This is also not a "zombie virus," so there is no infection mechanic for getting wounded. This is also not a "chemical zombie," so exposure to a toxin does not create them. The zombies seek life force, draining PPE and giving them a metaphysical element. This is another fresh take on the genre I like, and it makes zombies less dangerous as infectious agents and more harmf...

If Beyond the Supernatural is Palladium's answer to Call of Cthulhu, Nightbane is the answer to Vampire: The Masquerade and the White Wolf universe of the 1990s. Instead of being a vampire or werewolf, which were fun in their own right, you can be anything in this game. Anything wild, vampires and werewolves included, but you could have a typewriter for a head, guns for arms, a minotaur, a snake-erson, or be a fictional character, some pernament space man with a rodent head, anything. You have a human side to you, and then a nightmare form. It is never clear which side is the "real you" - your human (facade) side or your your morphus. Your origin is "just out of highschool or college" so your training is limited. Your morphus side has supernatural strength, and can likely punch through doors and do all sorts of cool feats. Psychics also walk in the worlds of Nightbane, so things are a bit mixed up. You could totally make vampires, werewolves, fae, demons, ghosts...