Sol Dec 20, 2007, 09:22 PM

Rifts...Palladium...Damn those old days (Am I a Grognard even if I am not even 30

years old, though have been playing RPGs for 22 years...?).

The system is freaking horrible. It's like a return to old 1st edition AD&D. Sure
we had fun with that system too....like in the mid 1980s, when we had fun with 80-
86 PCs, LARN, and Apple IIs (not sure there really, never been an apple guy). I
mean Kevin really needs to badly update things.

I played basically every Palladium system, even collected the rare ones (like the
original Mechanoids books, and the pre-revised Heroes unlimited
supplement...Justice something...can't remember). But lets be honest, they stink.

I mean, I had to just wake myself up one day and admit that the whole thing stinks.
In fact I think the only game they ever made that did not stink, by modern
standards, was TMNT, and some dink friend of mine borrowed all the books and never
gave any of them back (I had all of them...). I guess Robotech was pretty cool too.
But then again it gave Simbedia the idea of M.D.C., so maybe it was not in the end.

I mean Rifts...great idea! Post-Apocalyptic world where everything meets. Magic,

high tech sci-fi, techno-magic, psionics, dragons, cthulhu...I mean Spluggorth, and
a few other settings where lawsuits were involved (Manhunter, Wormwood?,
Nightspawn..I mean Nightbane...damn didn't Clive barker write that...Oh right that
was Nightbreed).

But really in practice their books were culturally insensitive (Native Americans in
the Spirit West, Japan, Africa)...(of course this being from the people that
brought you Vietnam War the game!), totally lacking of imaginative or interesting
recasting of settings (I mean Chi-town is just modern slang for Chicago), and
generally laughable (England, Rifts Undersea, South America 2) or they were a
somewhat interesting book that was really all about the power creep (Mercenaries,
Juicer Uprising, Phase World OMG!).

After reading a few of these books I can discern the following:

A. No one who ever wrote these books has ever left a 100 mile radius around
Chicago.

B. They check out books from the library, maybe even just read encyclopedia entries
on a place and then write a sourcebook on it.

C. They figure culture will not change or adapt over the next 300 years, especially
if world wide apocalypse occurs. I mean real cultural development, like referencing
anything that happens after circa 1990. Or names of cities like Ishpeming, Michigan
or Chi-Town. Star trek has the same problem, I have heard treckies joke about it.

In fact I would place the majority of the Rifts books so far (at least the ones I
read, I stopped a few years ago) into one of four categories:

Good: Rifts Main Book, Source book 1, Source book 2: Mechanoids (maybe I can't
remember frankly), World Book 2: Atlantis, World Book 13: Lone Star (maybe...can't
remember again), Dimension Book 1: Wormwood (I really liked this one),

Racist: World Book 1: Vampire Kingdom, World Book 4: Africa, World Book 6: South
America (and according to others Power-Creep too!), World Book 8: Japan (also a
total Power-Creep book!), World Book 15: Spirit West ( I mean OMG this is such a
damn racist book towards Native cultures).
Power-Creep: Rifts conversion book 1, Rifts Mercenaries, World Book 5: Triax and
the NGR, World Book 10: The Juicer Uprisings (good otherwise), World Book 11:
Coalition War Campaign (Power-Creep for the coalition, they had not been keeping
up), World Book 16: Federation of Magic (Power-Creep for Magicians!, Finally!!),
Dimension Book 2: Phase World (Oh boy!), Dimension Book 3: Phase World Source Book
(Holy C**P, It's a Power Creep supplement for a Power-Creep supplement!), World
Book 12: Psyscape

Laughable: Rifts conversion book 2: Pantheons of the Megaverse, World Book 3:

England, World Book 7: Rifts Undersea, World Book 9: South America 2 (also Power-
Creepy), World Book 14: The New West, World Book 17: Warlords of Russia (hell, this
one is probably racist too, I just remember the art sucked!!), Dimension Book 4:
Skraypers, Rifts Manhunter (if just for it's bad organization and editing).

I know there are a good few books I am not covering, but hey I did eventually stop
buying or even flipping through them (around about Rifts Russia, thankfully before
they assuredly butchered my homeland of Canada).

I guess in the end, I have for the past 17 years heard people constantly say "I
really really love the setting. It is one of the freshest and most intriguing
settings out there..." to quote Grimcleaver. I even had this idea bouncing around
in my head for the 10+ years I was off and on again playing and running Rifts
games.

But you know, no Rifts is not a good setting. It was original and intriguing in
1990, but 17 years, and 46 supplemental books later, it is a tired and frankly
badly designed setting, outside of maybe 6 books.
To put it another way only 13% of the books that they produced, in my opinion,
were actually any good, and had interesting/original ideas behind them.

I mean, compared to say...Shadowrun (which has terrible problems with power-creep

among others), Rifts if both generally, and sometimes terribly, racist and not all
that original in it's approach to what-if history. It also frankly has a lot of
really stupid and laughable supplements like Rifts: England (I mean did we really
need a Psychic King Aurthur?).

I hate to say it, but I really think that the setting is not all that good.

There are way better ones out there, and frankly you could probably think of a
better setting yourself, if you spent sometime reading speculative post-apocalyptic
fiction of the last 25 years. Really, we just need to let it die. Or finally
convince Siembedia that it has to go through a complete overhaul, setting

PART II

Actually over the years I have heard way more complaints about the MDC system than
probably any other part of Rifts, except for the power creep factor.

The racism. Well it is there. Trust me. Just look with a even partially critical
eye and it pops up.

Africa, all a wasteland of simple tribal people. Other than the Crocodile Empire,
which is not really even approached, and is what...a subsidiary for Atlantis. Like
there are no engineers or other well educated people, or even a country that at one
time had a thriving nuclear weapons program (South Africa). This is the typical
American/Western look at Africa as a place of tribal peoples and not advanced
people. I mean the continent has deep, deep, problems right now, but who knows in
60 years (or in other words at the time of the cataclysm) what might change.
Instead Rifts falls back on the old standby racist approach to Africa. Why could
there not have been a reborn Carthage, a African run tech empire. Oh yeah, because
they can't build technology over there....aka...racism.

The West books were terrible racist towards Native American cultures. I would have
to flip through the books again to find specific examples, but as I recall the vast
array of native cultures (over 400 different languages alone!) are boiled down to
either traditionalists, which live like circa 1800s Lakota or Shoshone, or modern
traditionalists. Sure it's not as bad as Peter Pan's "What Made the Red Man Red",
which is probably one of the most offensive and racist bits I have ever seen in a
film, but the Rifts books are still racist for sure.

Like I said, I could go one with more examples, but these two were the first to
jump out.

Sure the one cool thing about Rifts was, you could use any setting but if you
published online versions of D20 rifts rules, Palladium will sue you...so maybe not
so into drawing upon other settings eh? It is a cool idea, but it was developed in
a very clumsy fashion.

And I still stand by my statement that the vast majority of their setting books
were terrible and showed little to no development or investigation of the places
that they were set it. Basically Palladium took the two or three most common myths
or legends about place "X" (England, South America, Africa, the Western US, ect.)
and either made power armor about them and/or monsters about them. There was no
thought such as....hmmm "how would culture in this area develop and change between
now and the year 2070 and from 2070 to 2300?" Or even though such as "how would the
rise of magic and the cataclysm effect cultures differently and lead to different
cultural reactions"? Shadowrun, Deadlands, and quite a few other post-cataclysmic
games investigate these ideas as well as the variety found in aboriginal-first
nations (Werewolf the apocalypse also did a decent job of the latter).

Palladium just shows a total lack of originality in their approach to settings as

well as classic ignorance based, American racism.

In the 1990s this was inexcusable.

In the 2000s it is a disgrace.

This is why I strongly disagree with the statement that Rifts has a awesome
setting.

It has an awesome idea.

It has some awesome settings.

But mostly the setting that was/is published is junk.