Life in the Megaverse

One of my 5E shelves got converted to my Palladium games today. Most of that whole shelf went into a closet. WotC D&D. The other 5E-alikes. Event settings, version books, the spines I was supposed to keep current. Boxed. What is left on the open shelves from that family is Level Up A5E. That one earned the space. One game is enough, if it is the best one you actually have. Hardcovers and special editions sit on bookstands, face out, like a hobby store display. Dice live in clear plastic hex containers that could also be used as candy jars. Between two free-standing bookends, the collection I display is Palladium Fantasy. Around that are my SDC games, Heroes Unlimited, Dead Reign, Beyond the Supernatural, and others. Palladium Fantasy just says so much more to me than any version of 5E. The game comes with a world. Mapped, and still unexplored. A sandbox that has lasted intact and true to the original intent longer than any D&D setting I have watched go through edition rewrit...

The question is not whether a game has rules. Palladium has rules. Skills, OCCs, alignments, combat, magic—plenty of numbers. The question is where the camera sits when you open the book. Does the game fight you? Does it push the lens inward the second you sit down, until the night is about the sheet, the kit, the next feature, and what the system will let this character get away with? Or does it leave enough empty space that the world, the NPCs, and the situation can take the shot? Most modern gaming defaults to the first answer. D&D 5E is the easy counterexample because the culture around it already lives there: subclass as identity, feats on a schedule, spell lists as personality, the session as a build showcase. But it is not only 5E. It is a design habit across a lot of new games and even a lot of “storytelling” tools. Track this. Spend that. Trigger the widget. Cash the resource. Gamify the genre until the adventure is a personal efficiency puzzle with flavor text taped to ...

I keep coming back to the same start for Palladium games. Not a dungeon. Not a map with numbered rooms. Just a room, four people who should not be in it together, and some reason nobody can walk out yet. That is usually enough. Palladium Fantasy Say you have a knight, a longbowman, a witch, and a thief. On paper, that looks like a party somebody threw together because those were the books on the table. In play, it is a situation. I like putting them in a border-keep hall after a raid that went badly. The knight owns the hall, or at least thinks he does. The longbowman was paid to keep the road open and did not. The witch has been in the village the whole time, and everyone has been pretending they did not know. The thief has the only map that shows where the raiders actually came from. You do not have to roll initiative. Let them argue. Let them lie. Let them figure out who hangs if this gets back to the duke. If a fight happens, it is because somebody in that room decided it ha...

I went quiet after January. The last three posts sat there like an unfinished melee: Palladium Fantasy as pure fun, Palladium as DIY world simulation, and Rifts as space opera, part one. Then life did what life does. The books did not leave the shelf. The Megaverse did not shrink. I just stopped typing. That is a bad habit for a blog. It is a fine habit for a game. Because that is the whole argument I was making before I vanished. Palladium does not need a live-service drip of new subclasses, nine more fire spells, and another pile of magic junk to stay playable. The power is already in the character. The world is already in the core book plus the two or three sourcebooks that match the campaign you actually want. You do not have to wait for a new release, a new app, or a new excuse. So this is the restart post. Short. Useful. No apology tour. Pick a shelf, not a catalog. If you came here for the SDC games, start there. That is still the heart of this blog. Palladium Fantasy does...

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 ...

Can Rifts be played as a space opera-style game? Let's ignore Earth for now, and just focus on intergalactic adventures, star hopping, getting into trouble in deep space, fighting space pirates, and battling all types of space monsters on missions across the galaxy. Surprisingly, the answer is yes. And not only a weak yes, but a very strong yes. Let's start with the Dimension Book Two: Phase World, and this is the nexus of any space opera-style campaign for Rifts, since this thematically replaces Earth and acts as our intergalactic hub that connects everything together. This place connects infinite dimensions across a massive planet and city, serving as a transit point for travel from anywhere to anywhere. You are likely playing a strict MDC game here, and it will be a lot safer to deck out in MDC armor (even light MDC) when going anywhere, and carrying MDC weapons. There may be the occasional SDC encounter and need for weapons, but due to the high power level of everything in ...

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...