I just want to do what I wish I could have done in high school: enjoy Rifts.
I specifically want to lead an Eco-Wizard/Rogue Historian squad into the Fish-Pirate-infested waters of my hometown for precious relics of the Golden Age of Man
Reminder - Uncle Kev is a crook who stole 1.4 mil to go bang traps in Thailand.
Ethan Rodriguez
Story? I only read the PDFs years ago without actually following any drama behind the scenes.
Matthew Rodriguez
"Having seen the contrasting wealth and squalor of Chi-Town, the magical intensity of Lazlo, and the technological marvels of the New German Republic, I felt as though no cityscape could awe me as they had I found myself corrected when I first set my eyes on the ruins of Duraleigh. Reduced to a salt water marsh, there are very few building ruins left standing, although there are the occasional exceptions. It was not the scant ruined buildings poking from the marsh that amazed me, however, but rather the remnants of a vast highway system that linked the cities of the Triangle together. I had seen ruined stretches of highway buried under the sands and mud of the southwest, and even traveled a highway while visiting the New German Republic, and imagined that the small highway I traveled then was but a shadow of the highways that the Americas used to be interlaced with in the past. The ruins in the Triangle only hint at how right I was. "
"The support pillars are massive, cylindrical structures that must have held at least three tiers consisting of hundreds of miles of ten-lane elevated highway. Evidence suggests that the network of roads was a series of concentric rings, all components of a larger, unified system, stretching out and around the three primary cities of the Triangle and linked up with other roadways that ran up and down the East Coast. I learned from a local tribe that they call the ruined highway system 'The Beltline,' most likely an archaic name dating to pre-Rifts times. In addition to the automobile bridges and roads, there was apparently an interlinked rail system and pedestrian transit facilities alongside the highway system. Today, it serves as neutral territory for the barbarian tribes that live in the region, and shelter for any number of plants and animals. It has been reduced to just another impressive reminder of how much promise was lost after the Great Cataclysm tore down human civilization."
---Deearn Neenok, The Dinosaurian Swamp: Notes from the Field
So... barbarian tribes building everything out of the remains of SDC and MDC Golden Age automobiles?
Tribes that take the iconography of car brands, with disputes settled on the last remaining stretches of the suspended highways, Mad Max style.
Mystics with telemechanics and repair skills who keep things running, communing with the spirit of the machines.
Ryan Flores
Hell yeah, the sourcebook actually goes into some detail on these tribes too. They follow along with the old rivalries the three main colleges had in the Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill Triangle.
>State, the technology school, are a bunch of brainlet barbarians >UNC Chapel Hill are a bunch of commies >Duke full of cutthroat backstabbers It's like poetry >t. Greenvillian
Nathaniel James
> Dinosaur Swamp is one of the best Rifts sourcebooks. Really brings back the savagery and post-apoc themes that were so diluted after the core book came out.
Because the personalities involved were better at fluff than at crunch. Also, as others have noted, Rifts in very old. It's mechanics weren't much worse than it's contemporaries.
John Morales
I love the idea of hunting for pre-Rifts artifacts and selling them on the Black Market. I think the Eco-Wizard class is also really creative. If I ran a campaign, I'd want the party to come into close and repeated contact with the Horune so they can get a Power Armored Dolphin on their side