Any love for Palladium games here? The games themselves, I mean, not the owners or players

Any love for Palladium games here? The games themselves, I mean, not the owners or players.

>Rifts
>After the Bomb
>Heroes Unlimited
>Ninjas & Superspies
>TMNT
>Robotech
>etc.

I briefly played in a Heroes Unlimited game. It's interesting, but also feels like the clusterfuck the system's history would imply.
With a better GM it would have been a lot of fun.

I've heard great things about TMNT (and just seeing the covers of some of its supplements makes me believe pretty much all of 'em).

I skimmed a bit of Ninjas and Superspies and I like the spy agency management mechanics.

The parts written by Erick Wujcik (RIP) were pretty damn solid. N&SS and ATB were among them.

I always thought the After the Bomb mutant animal creation rules were the best in gaming. Balanced powers with anthropomorphic advantages real well.

Half the charm of Palladium™ games is what a clusterfuck they are.

Kind of, yeah. I actually tried to make the Rifts rules more logical, simpler and structured...and it lost all its charm. I guess nostalgia really does fuck up your brain.

>I always thought the After the Bomb mutant animal creation rules were the best in gaming. Balanced powers with anthropomorphic advantages real well.
Didn't they bring those forward into Heroes Unlimited 2e?

I don't know HU that well.

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>Didn't they bring those forward into Heroes Unlimited 2e?
To a point, yeah.

>shit settings
>shit rules
Nope

The NA setting and New West are pretty legit. Everything else suffers from insane power creep IMO

Palladium threads usually never do well because everyone wants to talk about Kevin
Savage Worlds Rifts is great though

That's cuz uncle Kev is a giant crook.

>Shit settings
You're entitled to your objectively wrong opinion user.

Now look what you did.

Let's talk about Skraypers and Dead Reign and Nightbane.

Do you make characters randomly in your games?

Splicers was fucking awesome.

>Guyver + The Terminator
>Biotech vs Hardtech
>Post-apoc transhumanity

>Do you make characters randomly in your games?
For me pretty much any random character creation process is a hell of a lot of fun. Obviously the best type of that is Traveler's career path system, but they're fun for that same sort of reason: it's you coming up with an unexpected story, it's just that in the case of most games aside from Traveller the story is more immediately dependent on how you interpret those results.

I find it very fun too. CP2020 has a good lifepath and most of the Palladium games had great random events tables.

Usually when we play After the Bomb I let players decide the overall group, like farm animals, zoo...ect. then we random roll, i let them decide between 2 rolls so if they roll a mouse and sont want it they can still take the camel....ect.
By the way camels are fucking bad ass, odd ball power of being able to drink 5 gallons in 5 minutes ( i think I worded that right) us both pointless and hilarious.
I played a fox doctor once that was fun, and a dolphin that was terrible had all these water abilities, gm had told us the area before hand so my fault for being so water based......still great rules for mutants. Great setting

Do you play online?

yeah I'd say Splicers is probably their best setting

Naa kitchen table, Id be willing to play online

Oh yeah? What times and location?

I love After the Bomb and could play on roll20.net or something similar on Friday nights 6-12 am EST.

I used to use TMNT to curb the player bloodlust in other campaigns. When they started getting to trigger happy, break it out and character creation was "your characters are all part of a black ops kill team in the modern world. Pick you animal, pick your background, get your gear as you see fit."

Opening seen of the adventure was always the same. They were part of Alpha Team. A successful Black Ops unit. One of them had recently come across documents that told the Operations Director of their facility that 1-Beta Team was good to go and would be replacing Alpha Team. 2-Alpha Team was to be eliminated upon completing their next mission.

Alpha Team, on route to said mission via helicopter decides to fuck everything and go their own way. Now. By shooting the pilot in the head and crashing the helicopter.

I describe the place where it crashed (somewhere in our current city) and ask "You're on foot, standing next to a burning helicopter. You hear sirens. What do you do now?"

Everything from that part forward is me throwing the local police, gangs and military at them as they deal with every problem the only way hardened killers know how.

Its a clusterfuck fiasco of senseless destruction.

Should set them up against that team of hyper-optimized weasels or Doc Feral's special experiments.

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I could do most thursdays around 845pm Pacific time.
Never used roll20, last online I did that was not pbp was on open rpg...
So years ago

Sadly that's far too late for me on a weekday. Ah well.

Say what you will about palladium, what I'm about to say is not out of spite, even though I'm not fond of the company or the owner of it anymore.

I think Palladium is going to end up going the way of the dodo. Their releases for the past 2 years have been pretty sparse, even for palladium. In 2 years there have been maybe 5 books total, not including the Rifter, and two of those that are available are "raw previews" that are basically mockups with no art and non finished content.

And given the ridiculous mess that was the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter (why you would license a dead property like that is beyond me) and the Savage Worlds license, I don't think that they are doing very good. I mean, allowing a new version of rifts to be published by a different company was something I never thought that I would see.

And I know that this has been popular to say about the company for the past decade. But there is a lot point to it. Even Kevin, who was known for posting regular updates often on the forums has for the past year been pretty silent. And the forums are less active than I have ever seen them.

We'll see what happens.

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I love the setting of rifts, but fuck the books do not make it easy to play.

Someone else is gonna publish a new version of rifts? Who tell me now, im interested.

It's already out, check the archive thread. It's the Savage World system, published by Pinnacle Entertainment. They had a kickstarter for it last year, and from what I understand they basically ran it them selves and left Kevin Siembieda out of it other than gaining the license from him.

Also there was the hilarious crash and burn of the gRifts board game. The Robotech RPG Tactics guys trolled the shit out of it and shined floodlights on how unprepared Rogue Heroes was for making the game. This was the point I knew that it was going down in a flames.

You know that was made into a mini by Ral Partha?

Looks more like a tiny man riding a cybered regular-size rat though.

Minis just don't translate well.

Anyone have the core rule books in pastebin?

There's 47755432246789655 of them.

>Any love for Palladium games here?
No, just derision.

oh

I like the game, but shits mad old

Just saw that, that is hilarious.

Yeah, I think palladium is done. They've floated along based on good will form their fan base for a long time, but that good will is pretty much dried up.

>Erick Wujcik

After he died Palladium should have died. He wrote all the good stuff the company put out. Kev has been milking him for decades and getting most of the credit.

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>Any love for Palladium games here? The games themselves, I mean, not the owners or players.

Little bit. I can't stand the owner, obviously, being one of the Catalyst people who got kicked out of the Palladium booth at GenCon several years back for having the termenity to be a BattleTech player interested in RT:T.

Still, the RIFTS setting is one of the best and most interesting settings I've read, insofar as it's evocative as *hell*. I've got a guy in my BT campaign who's looking at running a Savage Rifts setting (which isn't my choice, since I'm not that much of a SW fan, but getting to play and not GM is a nice enough change I won't quibble), and I finished varnishing a scratchbuilt SAMAS power armor for my PC last night in between BattleTech mini commissions. Still not sure how I'm going to base it.

>being one of the Catalyst people who got kicked out of the Palladium booth at GenCon several years back for having the termenity to be a BattleTech player interested in RT:T.
Okay, I need some background here. What did Kev do this time?

I'm honestly interested in Splicers, but I've never played with the system before. How much of a shock would it be to someone who is used to 3.P/WoD?

I've got a strange boner for biotech integration and the society it could make, so reading their books has been lots of fun.

Been a fan of Palladium's worlds since 1991. Been looking for different systems to run them in since 1992. I've had a hell of a good time running Savage Rifts for the last eight months or so. My party just hit Legendary Rank, so I'm working on some Legendary Edges for them.

If you're still looking have you considered Hero? I have run a few campaigns with it over the past decade and a half.

Pretty much just what it says on the tin. Back when I worked for CGL, several demo agents went over to the Palladium booth to look at the RT:T minis they had in the cases. We were talking to one of the booth people about when the stuff might someday come out (IIRC, this was the year they brought the kickstarter stuff to GenCon to sell instead of shipping it to the backers), and Kevin came hustling over, outright shouted at people, and told everyone wearing or carrying CGL-branded stuff to get out of the booth and if we came back he'd call security, since we were going to, "illegally use his miniatures" (direct quote). It was all over in 20 seconds or so (felt longer), so nobody thought to get it on film.

Some other CGL demo guys went over there later in the con and he outright called security on them while they were shopping for RIFTS stuff; the CGL ownership had to go basically vouch for them to bail them out so they wouldn't get thrown out of the convention. We were asked from then on if we were going to go to the Palladium booth, make sure we weren't wearing BattleTech gear.

tl;dr: Kevin is dangerously insane

Right? It's confounding. Palladium is not a particularly good set of rules but they carry a distinct feel all their own which breaks under organization and logical revision. You cannot just play Palladium settings in D&D or BRP without losing something. You cannot even combine them to properly emulate Palladium. GURPS Palladium? You might get a good game but it won't be the real McCoy and the best Palladium experience is just that.

Congrats, you can make better miniatures than Palladium can.

If you can squint sufficiently, here's the official SAMAS minis to compare yours to. This is the largest image of it on the internet, because Kevin is incapable of properly marketing, well... anything, really.

Jegus. I hadn't heard about this, but it sounds right up his alley.

I can't help but notice lots of people discussing the Rifts® Roleplaying Game by Palladium Books® without using the proper symbols following each mentioning of the Rifts® Roleplaying Game by Palladium Books®
Don't you know that's there for a reason? Otherwise people might try to use the Rifts® IP for their own nefarious schemes. Likewise what would happen if the Rifts® Roleplaying game didn't warn that you shouldn't practice magic and violence at the start of the book? People would then not only steal the Rifts® IP but also start killing people with magic.

Oh Kevvy you so silly.

Nope: you just can't have a palladium thread without spergs spergin' out.

>erick wujcik wrote all the good stuff
>quads don't lie

Wow. So crazy and yet so unsurprising. Kevin's had a screw or two loose since the 1980s.

what's that gif from?

Not that much of a shock, I think. Both systems have a lot of crunch and fiddly small numbers about everything, but PF is more logically organized whereas Palladium is more contradictory and kitchen-sink... but that's mainly in Rifts and when you try to combine Palladium properties.

On their own, TMNT, ATB and Splicers are fairly consistent and not too hard to understand.

I tried to get into the Robotech RPG once, but stopped reading and never looked back when the book kept saying you couldn't do shit that happened in the show all the time because it "wasn't realistic."

The Last Starfighter.

Where's the knee spikes? It's not a Coalition unit without skulls and spikes.

The rest of the salt in the thread aside, that's a real nice mini. Double thanks for the parts list.