Thoughts on RIFTS?

>The world is amazing and chock-full of wild, zany ideas.
>The setting is so bonkers
Give examples.

Developed by a total egotistical tyrant autistic thieving tool who thinks his company is ground breaking and relevant. When in fact their as relevant as betamax. I've downloaded a load of the books.... What a mess! Glad I'd not paid money for them, how did people play with them?

Florida is full of dinosaurs, and the largest civilising force in North America are skull nazis.

>Vampires rule Central America and use humans as cattle.
>Said Vampires can be killed with squirt guns filled with ordinary (not Holy or any other magical bullshit) water.

>The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are out and about.
>But for some reason confine themselves to Africa.

>Dolphins in power armor fight Cthulhu in the Marianas Trench

If by Skull Nazis you don't mean sentient floating skulls who put people with anything below their neck in concentration camps, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.

>Vampires rule Central America and use humans as cattle.
That exists everywhere.
>The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are out and about. But for some reason confine themselves to Africa.
They saw it and thought that somebody beat them to a punch.
>Dolphins in power armor fight Cthulhu in the Marianas Trench
Okay, that's fucking cool.

I fucking love this shit! The most interesting well-developed characters I've ever made for an RPG (by an overwhelming margin) are my rifts characters.

Also it has the best power armor.

Kevin is actually charming in person at Cons. Not autistic at all. I have no doubt he is a tyrant to work for.

Power armour with toes has to be the best power armour around, no contest.

Really? I heard one story where he said he'd eat his shoes before revising Rifts.

Power armor with eight different grenade launchers and maybe a flamethrower has to be the best power armor around

>also being able to fit through a door is OP

>pic related: how come I can never convince the rest of the party we need one of these. (even if it can't fit through a door)

I've met Kevin several times at GenCon he is very outgoing and friendly.

A guy in my weekly gaming group has a credit in a Rifts book and said getting paid consisted of him hounding them for months. He said Kevin is a big idea creative guy, talker and dreamer but not much of a businessman, designer or doer. Rumor is he can be a tyrant to work for and is totally uncompromising. I have no doubt he said that. I think the closer and more comfortable Kevin is around you the more his bad side shows.

But no matter what by hook or by crook even resorting to begging for money from fans he has kept Palladium
Books alive for longer then almost everyone else save Steve Jackson perhaps?

And Iron Crown Enterprises (Rolemaster), Chaosium (BRP, Call of Cthulhu), and they were founded in the same year as Hero Games.

Many of the old school companies died in the d20 glut.

Chaosium was defunct and reformed I had thought? I Don't know about ICE.

Not many Orginal RPG companies from the 70s & 80s still run continually since thier founding by thier founder.

Re: Chaosium

In 1998, following the financial failure of the collectable card game Mythos Founder Greg Stafford resigned as Chaosium president and left the company, along with Sandy Petersen (although they both remained shareholders). Chaosium effectively split up into various successor companies, each maintaining its focus on a few of the company's products. Stafford took the rights to his game setting Glorantha, setting up the company Issaries, Inc. to continue publishing this line (later licensing it to Moon Design Publications, along with the game HeroQuest).

Re: Iron Crown Enterprises

In December 2001, ICE's assets were purchased by Aurigas Aldebaron LLLC, an intellectual property ownership company backed by several wealthy individuals. The new owners licensed the Iron Crown Enterprise name and other assets to Mjolnir LLC until 2011. Starting in January 2011, licensing was transferred to Guild Companion Publications Ltd.

You're at your LGS when this guy walks up and accuses you of downloading one of his books illegal and hands you a cease and desist order. What do you do? Keep in mind that he assembles all of his publications by hand.

Oldest Table top game companies run to the present day by thier founder?

Flying Buffalo 1970 -Rick Loomis

Steve Jackson Games 1980 - Steve Jackson
Palladium Books 1981 - Kevin Siembieda

Good luck Uncle Kev!

Laugh at him and ask where my fucking Robotech RPG Tactics Wave 2 shit is.

brap in his general direction

Go on take the money and run

bad rules, good setting

It was 98% done! So how is it that they still owe us 30 sculpts of the 43 odd that should have been done? The money robbing moose knuckle!!

I'd tell him to go frack himself, he's had my money for Robotech Tactics for years so he gets no more until I get an agreed timescale and product in my hand!

great setting and at first the rules were a lot better that other stuff put out at the time. BUT they kept adding books and rules. It became a joke that when the new book came out you could start a new adventurer that was more powerful then the one you been playing the last 2 years weekly. Sadly that joke was true many times. If you just playing out of the one main book you should have a great time

I like Rifts there are so many types of campaigns you can run.

I've run: Coalition Soldiers on the Tolkien Front, A Wormwood game where PCs never left Wormwood, A N. American Merc campaign set in PA 90 before the CS had cemented power. A vampire hunters/ Dr. Reid's Rangers resistance gurellia campaign hit and run against the vamps

Is "Tolkeen" a reference to JRR Tolkien?

I assure you things are coming to a boil and the sculpts are mouthwatering and mindblowing. I can't show them to you because the haters on kickstarter and the rest of the internet have hurt my feelings and I just got hit by a car again.

I hope one of two things happen:
He chokes on a dick causing the company to fold or a fan friend/staff chokes on his dick and the family sues his company into the ground!!

The Rifts board game Kickstarter will be this Spring: facebook/RogueHeroesPublishing

Poorly balanced. A lot of fucking work for the GM. Rules are found all over the place and across countless source books.

All in all, a great game. You should play it.

I will back it for 1 dollar and then troll the ever living shit out of about Robotech Tactics.

There will be many a $1 for Robotech trolling! Honest Kev isn't running it pah!

>Dolphins in power armor fight Cthulhu in the Marianas Trench
Tell me more. Tell me much, much more.

It's licensed to a 3rd party.

I GM'd a campaign using Savage Worlds Rifts. The power level is insane, the augmented SW character generation is a blast, the lunatic world background is well... lunatic, "Blaze of Glory" is the coolest rule in gaming.

Everyone really enjoyed it.

Pinnacle is planning to do a second kickstarter for more Savage Worlds Rifts material. It must have made a lot of money.

Haha. Yeah Carman's a 3rd party honest! Lead writer for Robotech, just happens to work on lots of other Palladium Games books just happens to licence Kev's baby for a boardgame..... There are no words for how obvious this charade is

I think its legit. No matter what it won't stop shit posting.

I hear Jackson is also and and a pain to work with.

rifts as a setting a fucking mess. it can be fun but breaks super easily.

i LOVE palladium though. its a nice system that can be really flexible.

From talking to a man who worked with Jackson back in the 80's, I got the impression that he was, at the time at least, a very agreeable person.

I think it's more like constructive bookkeeping eg a con job. Kev is shilling it hard, but been sitting on his hands humming the Robotech theme watching the $$$ trickle away....dead game so sad...Had such hopes

Ah. My source was someone recent, when I asked someone why their product wasn't available in his RPG PDF store (which doesn't contractually allow companies to revoke access to purchased products like wotc did). They had a rather large list of reasons they refused to work with the man, based on their past experiences with him.

You can not kick in Gerwalk mode.

It says so in the rules, that were cut-and-pasted (literally, with scissors and paste, Kevin don't do no fancy-ass computer publishing) from the original Robotech RPG book. Thing is, there's no such thing as Gerwalk mode in Rifts, and that's the biggest demonstration of the problems with the system. Lots of great ideas, but little attention to the details, so things end up not quite working together.

That said, with a good GM to smooth out the problems, it can be hella fun.

The good sides include the bonkers setting, the massive trove of books, and the occasionally autistic level of granularity.

The downsides include the woefully obsolete system, the austistic level of granularity, the often insane or inexplicable design decisions, and some fans who are a little TOO fond of the coalition.

It's what Numenera would like to be but can't.

The whole theme of Rifts is man's attempt to augment himself: through technology, cybernetics, magic, genetic engineering.

This is against a backdrop of a post apocalyptic earth ravaged by dimensional invaders of every stripe. From the harmless d-bee peon to literal demons.

>The whole theme of Rifts is 'Kevin Siembieda thinks this thing is cool, and will go well with the other 8 million things he thinks are cool'.
FTFY.

Uncle Kev isn't the only one that thinks it's cool.

And that affects that statement how?

Kevin is far from the only Rifts writer.

Goofy setting, goofy system, but both can be fun if you know how to use it.

It's like every Saturday morning action cartoon toy line got cooked into a punch-drunk gumbo.

Nah, Numenara wants to be Phantasy Star IV.

Yes it's a meaningless critique. Of course Kevin thinks it's cool or he wouldn't print it using the tried and true B&W 2 column layout.

They're just Nazis who use a skull motif on all their stuff. They hate non-humans, magic, and reading.

>They hate non-humans, magic, and reading
So they're the Dark Souls community?

A.R.C.H.I.E. 3 is a literally bipolar AI in control of an underground military facility from before the cataclysm. In order to help him spy on the surface and covertly strike at his enemies, he built a series of robots that call themselves Shemarrians. They pretend to be a race of cyborg amazons from another world. This is an effective cover story, because within the context of Rifts Earth there's nothing implausible about it.

The Coalition States are Nazis if the Jews were 30ft tall demons eating people.

The Coalition States have every reason to be human supremacists who are hateful toward magic and non-humans. Humanity was nearly wiped out.

The threats of monsters isn't the reason the Coalition government behaves the way it does. It's the excuse they use to make their people go along with it.

They're already the dominant power in North Americana, and about as secure as any nation on Rifts Earth can hope to be. Prosek pushes his people to be more xenophobic and militaristic to increase his own personal power. Not because he actually believes it's necessary to safeguard humanity.

Free Quebec is even more human supremacist than the rest of the Coalition, but still got sick of the Nazism. They seceded to escape Prosek's oppressive authoritarian regime.

Fun game. Role playing as a Saturday morning cartoon on acid.

Play a glitter boy. The world will be your Temple of Boom.

I'll probably back this just for the minis. The only Rifts minis we have now are the ancient pewter models and some downloadable flats with generic looking CGI art.

The coalition are Nazis because they usethe existence of 30 ft demons as an excuse to use the harmless cactus people and bug eyed aliens as slaves and keep the people isolated and terrified.

Also because Emperor Prosek is intentionally imitating Hitler.

The Borg OCC doesn't start with any cybernetics, and tend to avoid implants in favor of natural powers.

>This. It was the first RPG I ever played, god help me.
Same for me. For the first two or three years of my gaming experience, I only played Palladium RPGs. Mostly Rifts. With that background, my first impression of D&D 3.0 was being really impressed by how elegant and balanced the rules were.

I couldn't go back to original Rifts now. So I'm really happy about the Savage Worlds conversion. SW wouldn't have been my first choice, but any modern system would make it more playable.

Savage world's is a massive improvement, but I wonder if it's possible to make a working rifts ruleset that actually reflects the flavor of the original system.

It was designed to be very simulationist, very granular and to have heroes start fairly close to their intended power levels. So how do you capture that in an updated rule system?

>if it's possible to make a working rifts ruleset that actually reflects the flavor of the original system.
I sorta doubt it. Maybe if you can find another simulationist game that focuses heavily on both vehicle and inter-personal combat. Maybe there's something scifi that can be adapted. You'd need something that scales well over an absurd scale, from sword fights to battleships, which keeps the stats uniform throughout. Humans have five hp, tanks have fifty thousand. Something like that.

Hit point-like MDC was quite gamist though. I made a fairly simple homebrew that converted the armor mechanic into a DR-style mechanic. But that only works if penetrating MDC shots dont automatically kill you - they just automatically pierce you wherever they hit.

MDC is only inherently "gamist" if you assume that armor isn't ablative. I think either ablative armor or damage resistance both can claim to be simulationist to varying degrees.

Those would be the key elements to any rifts replacement system, yeah. I wonder what comes closest? I feel like the core mechanics of savage world's, but with a number of modifications could come close, with a fair bit of extra detail for systems like damage, magic, training and other subsystems, but with more common mechanics than the core rifts rules.

Can you think of any game that uses the same attribute and skill systems for vehicles and characters?

There must be one. That'd be a place to start: something with the scalability to reach Rifts levels planned right into it.

I mean WOD does, I guess. Cars get 8 strength or whatever, depending on their speed. But it's not really any more modern than Rifts, and it's geared away from combat.

>Can you think of any game that uses the same attribute and skill systems for vehicles and characters?
Eoris

Ramon Perez is legitimately my favorite artist

Mine too, brother. Love his black and white Rifts stuff. Made it come alive.

The art is really one of the saving graces of RIFTS. If a book comes out with bad art, it just doesn't land with me - like the standard cover of Black Market, for example. On the other hand, one of the totally inane releases like Australia that is filled with great art ends up being super memorable.

I don't think there's anything inherently unrealistic about MDC working like hit points. Armor in Rifts is like wearing a tank. It makes sense you have to break through it to get at the guy inside.

Having said that, I do think that the difference between MDC and SDC would be better represented with some sort of DR system. Anything in Rifts can be destroyed by a sufficient number of pokes from a vibro pocket knife. Which kinda defeats the whole point of MDC.

tank battles arent attrition battles

>Can you think of any game that uses the same attribute and skill systems for vehicles and characters?
Mutants & Masters treats vehicles pretty much the same as characters. It's also designed to try to balance characters with radically different abilities.

Superhero systems in general would probably be good to look at. They all have to try to address the problem of how to have Superman-like characters and Batman-like characters on the same team.

One thing I liked about the savage worlds system is the "roll to hit/roll for damage" aspect, though it doesn't really work well at the extreme ends of the scale where you start getting large monsters or vehicles that would require some attrition to take down. Mixing that system with a more standard HP system instead of SW's idiosyncratic benny tracking seems like it could make it a little more simulationist.

I kind of wonder if being inherently imbalanced is a part of Rifts? Not to say any characters should ever be useless, but at least in things like a combat scenario, it might be okay to have some be simply more powerful than others. The difficult part would be achieving a state of "different power levels, but still all contributing".

(To be specific: when I say "okay to be unbalanced" I'm talking about avoiding a system like 4e, where a lot of effort went into making characters at equal levels extremely similar in terms of direct combat damage and effects. That would be an example of what NOT to do with any Rifts update)

It's fine to have some characters suck in combat and shine in other areas. The problem with Rifts is if your group has two combat focused characters, there's a good chance one of them will completely overshadow the other.

Why don't they just admit to being full robots then?

The shemarrians don't know the truth, and ARCHIE keeps the whole thing going because he's bored/

>Prosek
Hilarious. I can't not imagine a fat, red faced Czech when I read this name,

System's not all that great, and the setting is basically just everything that was cool in the 80s and 90s; the aesthetic of the new stuff slowly rolling along with the times just makes the setting look like even more of a mess than it used to be.

Were they any good books based on rifts?

Novels?

Yes.

Misdirection. No one is asking question like "Who built them?" or "Who's really controlling them?" No one who discovers any of ARCHIE's other operations will have any reason to suspect the Shemarrians are connected.

Also because ARCHIE has a human idea man who fills in for his lack of creativity. That guy suggested hot warrior babes.

Pic related is father and son of the Prosek family.