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CroatianAlzheimers
Jun 15, 2009

I can't remember why I'm mad at you...


Oh, poo poo. I totally forgot about the GenCon thread.

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Talen_Soti
Mar 30, 2010
Ahh, Rifts. The first RPG I ever GMed. We had a lot of 'house rules' to cover the poo poo that K forgot to put in. Like perception and noticing things. Fun times. I was pretty active on the old mailing list ran by 'Gabriel' easy back in the early 90s. Under the handle RifterDan and TalenSoti I made some RCCs and a lot of robots and power armor for the system. Looking into my palladium collection I still have original posters for NightSPAWN along with the NightSPAWN RPG book. I collected many of the books and have first printings for everything from world book 10 juicer uprising to the ultimate edition. If anyone wants me to look up anything just ask here or PM me.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Oh, hey, how long has this thread been here? My first RPG was finding TMNT in the local library, so I-

MadScientistWorking posted:

the most hilarious class design is actually the one inspired by the Nokia N-Gage.
Wait what :stare:

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


Alien Rope Burn posted:

The whole IP paranoia is weird. This is a company that was built initially on the Weapons, Armor, and Castles series of books, which were basically reproductions of existing historical material converted to Dungeons & Dragons. Granted, yes, they're supposedly for "any system" but it's not really written for anything but D&D and its close relatives; they were basically the d20 supplements of their day. The Palladium RPG doesn't fall far from the D&D tree, either.

Maybe he was terrified of getting Arduin'd and it just never went away. :(
Actually, this one's pretty easy to explain if I recall. Back when Palladium made that Nightbane RPG (in the mid-90's, at the height of the oWoD prime... not really a horrible game by Palladium standards and a pretty good "superheroes with fangs" deal as such go, but that's getting off topic) they got sued by Image Comics over the "Spawn" trademark. I forget if the details ever came out, but Palladium had to recall the books and reprinted them with the "Nightbane" title instead, and considering that I'm pretty sure the company has never been highly profitable it was probably a painful blow even if they didn't pay any settlements. More importantly, Siembieda apparently got some bad lawyer advice (or... knowing him, more likely misinterpreted good advice) that anyone would steal your trademark if you didn't violently enforce it, thus why Image sued them, so naturally he went crazy in protecting his IP at all costs.

Admittedly I'm not sure how much of this is anecdote or not, but speaking from hazy memories of the early internet era it pretty strongly coincided with Palladium going after MUDs, fan conversions and supplements, and other things that used RIFTS rules/IP.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
The one thing I never really understood about Rifts is beyond the bonuses you get for having a stat over 16, what did your stats actually do? Like, I have a strength value, but if it wasn't above that threshold, it didn't really have a purpose other than saying what my maximum carrying amount was, and other stats didn't even have that to go with it.

Babylon Astronaut
Apr 19, 2012
Has anyone played Palladium FRPG 2e? I've read the book countless times, and it's full of good art and inspiration but I don't see how it's functional RAW. I just can't make heads or tales as to what a combat round would play like. I think missing the rules that govern the table play is a Palladium thing I can't get over.

The wildest thing is how it rolls for ability scores. Each race uses a different amount of d6's to roll abilities, and 12's and 18's explode.

Giant Tourtiere
Aug 4, 2006

TRICHER
POUR
GAGNER

Atlas Hugged posted:

The one thing I never really understood about Rifts is beyond the bonuses you get for having a stat over 16, what did your stats actually do? Like, I have a strength value, but if it wasn't above that threshold, it didn't really have a purpose other than saying what my maximum carrying amount was, and other stats didn't even have that to go with it.

That was one of the great mysteries of Palladium RPGs, to me. If you didn't get into the bonuses your stats may as well have been 3s and 4s for all the effect they would have. We briefly tried bodging together some rules for attribute checks but eventually just moved on to other stuff entirely.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Asimo posted:

Actually, this one's pretty easy to explain if I recall. Back when Palladium made that Nightbane RPG (in the mid-90's, at the height of the oWoD prime... not really a horrible game by Palladium standards and a pretty good "superheroes with fangs" deal as such go, but that's getting off topic) they got sued by Image Comics over the "Spawn" trademark. I forget if the details ever came out, but Palladium had to recall the books and reprinted them with the "Nightbane" title instead, and considering that I'm pretty sure the company has never been highly profitable it was probably a painful blow even if they didn't pay any settlements. More importantly, Siembieda apparently got some bad lawyer advice (or... knowing him, more likely misinterpreted good advice) that anyone would steal your trademark if you didn't violently enforce it, thus why Image sued them, so naturally he went crazy in protecting his IP at all costs.

Admittedly I'm not sure how much of this is anecdote or not, but speaking from hazy memories of the early internet era it pretty strongly coincided with Palladium going after MUDs, fan conversions and supplements, and other things that used RIFTS rules/IP.

I read his official reasoning somewhere and it had to do with "protecting your hard work" and whatever which yes, sure, but he was being like the NFL: asserting copyright over things he could not have, like game mechanics themselves as we've discussed elsewhere. He also failed to register some of his important so-called trademarks until the 2000s when perhaps he finally realized that 'unregistered' means 'not'.

Of course TSR used to be more sue-happy on early-internet people too, but they had more problems with folks posting large sections of rules or whatever, and eventually got over this. None of them ever matched the Scientologists.

Slimnoid
Sep 6, 2012

Does that mean I don't get the job?

Zereth posted:

Wait what :stare:

In the Rifts® Ultimate® Edition®, there's an O.C.C. called the Elemental Fusionist. It's based on a class from the N-Gage game Rifts® Promise of Power™ that no one bought because no one had an N-Gage.

This is a thing that happened.

Hobbes
Sep 12, 2000
Forum Veteran
Dinosaur Gum

Babylon Astronaut posted:

Has anyone played Palladium FRPG 2e? I've read the book countless times, and it's full of good art and inspiration but I don't see how it's functional RAW. I just can't make heads or tales as to what a combat round would play like.

Combat in my PFRPG campaign boiled down to the dwarf realizing there was a little combat maneuver in the rules called 'Simultaneous Attack.' This allows a character, in lieu of attempting a parry/dodge/other defensive action, to give up their next action in the combat round to swing back at their attacker right now. In this case both parties just have to roll above the low threshold to hit a target that's not trying to get out of the way or block, so both just end up wailing on each other.

Cue the dwarf knight doing this to everything, every attack, every round. Then one day he decided to play a thief and chose to stick to his usual tactics, which provided a near record time for character death. Oh the joy of 9th grade Palladium campaigns.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Zereth posted:

Wait what :stare:

The N-Gage had "advanced classes" you could level up into (unlike normal Rifts, which just has races, classes, and classes that are also races - it's confusing). One of these was the Elemental Fusionist class, which is a wizard that melds two different magical elements together for unique effects. When they did Rifts Ultimate Edition, they did a tabletop version as well. I'm not sure why it gets so much mockery, I mean, if you're going to have a videogame that puts in a new element, why not put it back in the tabletop game? But I guess anything related to the N-Gage just gets mockery even if it's not bad or anything (or, at least, no worse than any other Rifts class).

Asimo posted:

Admittedly I'm not sure how much of this is anecdote or not, but speaking from hazy memories of the early internet era it pretty strongly coincided with Palladium going after MUDs, fan conversions and supplements, and other things that used RIFTS rules/IP.

Actually, Palladium enforcing their IP with legal action predates Nightspawn by about three years with the Wizards of the Coast lawsuit, so any dodgy legal advice probably dates back to that. I imagine they feel they have to keep up the precedent they set with that. I actually looked up the firm that represented them for the Trion Worlds lawsuit, and that seems like a large, professional firm, so I imagine some of it has to do with Siembieda's attitude towards the whole matter as well. That's just my gut, though, I have no strong evidence to back that up.

Atlas Hugged posted:

The one thing I never really understood about Rifts is beyond the bonuses you get for having a stat over 16, what did your stats actually do?

Nothing, unless a rule calls for them (which is uncommon at best). An Mental Affinity of 3 generally has as much rules effect as a Mental Affinity of 15. They're just a roleplay aid at that point, really.

There are some secondary stat effects - Hit Points and Potential Psychic Energy are based on Physical Endurance, Inner Strength Points are based on Mental Endurance - but nothing too substantial compared to other games. The hand-to-hand damage rules for supernatural creatures being based on Physical Strength is the biggest effect I can think of.

Babylon Astronaut posted:

Has anyone played Palladium FRPG 2e? I've read the book countless times, and it's full of good art and inspiration but I don't see how it's functional RAW.

Palladium RPG is actually better in the 1st edition than 2nd edition. It's still vague as gently caress, but there are fewer elements, so it's easier to interpret into a workable game. 2nd edition added a lot of lovely or vague rules from other Palladium games to make it compatible with Rifts and its ilk, and suffers for it. (The art is much better, though.) Most Palladium games before Rifts Ultimate Edition are written in the form of early-eighties games, where rules were just something you generally threw into a game without too much handholding. Explanations of play, turn order, and other clarifying stuff that's standard to RPGs now just doesn't exist in a lot of Palladium games.

DarckRedd
Oct 11, 2009

Alien Rope Burn posted:

But I guess anything related to the N-Gage just gets mockery even if it's not bad or anything (or, at least, no worse than any other Rifts class).

Honestly, I'd say the Elemental Fusionist is one of the better Rifts classes out there, in terms of design. The premise is that you are an elementalist who fuses two opposed elements -- fire and water, or earth and air. You choose one pairing to specialize in, which affects your abilities. On top of that, at each level you gain a new power from a list that's unique to the class, and generally not too atrociously destructive. It almost shows the influences of 4e.

This makes it way better than most Rifts classes, which either get crushingly powerful abilities from spells, psionics, cybernetics, or nothing but a few skill bonuses.

It says a lot that Siembieda did not come up with the class himself.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Alien Rope Burn posted:

The N-Gage had "advanced classes" you could level up into (unlike normal Rifts, which just has races, classes, and classes that are also races - it's confusing). One of these was the Elemental Fusionist class, which is a wizard that melds two different magical elements together for unique effects. When they did Rifts Ultimate Edition, they did a tabletop version as well. I'm not sure why it gets so much mockery, I mean, if you're going to have a videogame that puts in a new element, why not put it back in the tabletop game? But I guess anything related to the N-Gage just gets mockery even if it's not bad or anything (or, at least, no worse than any other Rifts class).
Yeah, that seems pretty ordinary. I thought it was inspired by the N-gage itself, not a class which appeared in the Rifts game for the N-gage.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Zereth posted:

Yeah, that seems pretty ordinary. I thought it was inspired by the N-gage itself, not a class which appeared in the Rifts game for the N-gage.

Yeah, no, it's a fine class. Rifts has plenty of lovely classes, especially from the core (Vagabond, City Rat, Coalition Grunt, to just name three), you'd honestly have to work pretty hard to make a worse class than some of the ones the game already has anyway.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



It says something that when I thought somebody was claiming Rifts had a class based on a failed videogame console slash tacophone, my thoughts were not "that must be a lie" but "how the gently caress does that work".

clockworkjoe
May 31, 2000

Rolled a 1 on the random encounter table, didn't you?
I ran a game of Rifts a while back for some friends as a joke. One of my friends had never played Palladium before. He did not care for the experience. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2011/09/genre/horror/rifts-the-eliminators/

Parkreiner
Oct 29, 2011

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Most Palladium games before Rifts Ultimate Edition are written in the form of early-eighties games, where rules were just something you generally threw into a game without too much handholding. Explanations of play, turn order, and other clarifying stuff that's standard to RPGs now just doesn't exist in a lot of Palladium games.

Yeah, I think somebody on rpg.net noticed a couple months ago that apparently none of the (older?) Palladium main books actually explain how skills work. The actual mechanical process of "roll percentile dice looking for a result under your skill total" is completely unmentioned and just left to inference.

Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 16:37 on May 13, 2013

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Slimnoid posted:

In the Rifts® Ultimate® Edition®, there's an O.C.C. called the Elemental Fusionist. It's based on a class from the N-Gage game Rifts® Promise of Power™ that no one bought because no one had an N-Gage.

This is a thing that happened.

My copy of the Rifts Ultimate Edition not only has the Elemental Fusionist OCC, but also has a full color insert ad for the N-Gage game, which was still expected to do well during the printing of the book. I've been meaning to try and emulate it, but the thing that always strikes me about the ad is that the juicer in it looks like a big douche, he's got like thick blond 80s cartoon short hair.

Also when I was a wee lad we also ran the poo poo out of Palladium of any kind, and also make all kinds of houserule fixes to try to make the game functional. My biggest personal memory is that our attempt to fix the huge bonuses to hit that everyone had was just to switch from rolling D20s to D30s. Ah, youth.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

clockworkjoe posted:

I ran a game of Rifts a while back for some friends as a joke. One of my friends had never played Palladium before. He did not care for the experience. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2011/09/genre/horror/rifts-the-eliminators/

That's pretty goddamn inspired.

Parkreiner posted:

Yeah, I think somebody on rpg.net noticed a couple months ago that apparently none of the Palladium main books actually explain how skills work. The actual mechanical process of "roll percentile dice looking for a result under your skill total" is completely unmentioned and just left to inference.

Yeah, when I did my Rifts FATAL & Friends writeup, I noted it doesn't ever mention how skill rolls are done. It details skill penalties, but not how you check for success or failure.

Of course, given how low your chances are at most starting skills, maybe detailing skill bonuses would have been more important...

SavageMessiah
Jan 28, 2009

Emotionally drained and spookified

Toilet Rascal
I always "liked" how saving throws are basically never explained and the base values for them are buried in the combat terms glossary that's copypasted into every palladium book.

Also I've always been amused by Kevin's love of bizarrely specific percentages such as '23% of all people of race X hold Y viewpoint'.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Did anyone else ever notice the "25 XP for completing a successful skill check" thing in the XP acquisition chart? My characters would always backflip everywhere.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

SavageMessiah posted:

I always "liked" how saving throws are basically never explained and the base values for them are buried in the combat terms glossary that's copypasted into every palladium book.

What's worst are the saving throws that basically have no equivalents. For example, soul drinking weapons have a Save vs. Soul Drinking. The thing is, since this save is never mentioned again, nobody and nothing gets a bonus to it. Oh, and it's a Save or Die save, effectively...

And then you get saves like Electrocution, Pain, or Extreme Temperatures that nobody gets bonuses against aside from Physical Endurance (maybe) because they're not standardized.

Oh, wait, women get +2 on Saving Throws against Pain. So there's that.

SavageMessiah posted:

Also I've always been amused by Kevin's love of bizarrely specific percentages such as '23% of all people of race X hold Y viewpoint'.

Yeah, it's a bizarre crutch. It makes me wonder, of all the factions and people in their post-apocalyptic universes, exactly who is busying themselves with random demographics about cyborgs and juicers. I was recently reading a certain Palladium book that breaks down a given military faction into units of 128... and then gives percentages of the composition of those 128 soldiers. So means when you see there's like 5% of the troops are bloody-furred bichons, there's like, 6.4 bloody-furred bichons in every troop. Numbers are hard!

theironjef posted:

Did anyone else ever notice the "25 XP for completing a successful skill check" thing in the XP acquisition chart? My characters would always backflip everywhere.

Every time you read a sign, that's a Literacy check! Level up!

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO
May 8, 2006
Back in 1985 it was pretty forward-thinking to get the same amount of XP for talking someone down as for killing them.

Oh yeah, I just remembered that actually one of my legit favorite adventure modules of all time was a Palladium book, specifically, Robotech New World Order. That book was sick as hell! And there weren't even all kinds of crazy rear end mecha in it or anything, it was just a cool idea for an adventure and a really, really cool setting. It was Africa, after the planet had been mostly destroyed by aliens but humans had won the war, leaving the military in nominal control of most of the continent but completely lacking the ability or political willpower to invest the resources necessary to do more than extract as many natural resources as possible. I still have it around somewhere, I think...

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

Back in 1985 it was pretty forward-thinking to get the same amount of XP for talking someone down as for killing them.

Yeah, there's just no strong guidelines on how to use the system, but it's much, much better than AD&D. Mind, having run Rifts recently as a lark, keeping track of separate XP totals is for the dogs. And how they did the math on the XP tables (I suspect no math was done at all, really) is bizarre, where at certain points "strong" classes actually level faster than "weak" classes.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

I still run Heroes Unlimited when I can get a group together. No mega-heroes, you're allowed one free reroll during random character generation (mostly it's a Get Out of Mutant Animal Free Card). That game remains a blast as long as you more or less ignore about 40% of it.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

theironjef posted:

I still run Heroes Unlimited when I can get a group together. No mega-heroes, you're allowed one free reroll during random character generation (mostly it's a Get Out of Mutant Animal Free Card). That game remains a blast as long as you more or less ignore about 40% of it.

I would at least let mutant animals in Heroes Unlimited the option to use the superpowered mutant animal rules from TMNT Adventures, which give bonus BIO-E and the ability to buy certain superpowers.

TMNT Adventures posted:

Of course, this can make for some truly unique and outrageous mutant animals. Can you picture a blazing, normal sized guinea pig with full speech, human hands, flinging fire balls and flying around like a blazing meteor?

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I would at least let mutant animals in Heroes Unlimited the option to use the superpowered mutant animal rules from TMNT Adventures, which give bonus BIO-E and the ability to buy certain superpowers.

Heh, if someone is super desperate to use the jankity-rear end Bio-E rules I certainly won't stop them, but giving them 200 Bio-E still isn't going to make them not suck compared to everything else in the book. The rules are just too outdated. All those animal psionics are the worst. Normally the free reroll was just to let people get out of overcomplicated character builds, like if they rolled up tech experts and didn't feel like spending the next hour itemizing costs on a robot suit that would more than likely never come up. 1 major and 3 minors or 2 major, that's the way to be.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

theironjef posted:

Heh, if someone is super desperate to use the jankity-rear end Bio-E rules I certainly won't stop them, but giving them 200 Bio-E still isn't going to make them not suck compared to everything else in the book. The rules are just too outdated. All those animal psionics are the worst.

There are a lot of lovely, lovely options in Heroes Unlimited, honestly. (Heya, Physical Training!) It's not really any much fun unless you get to roll on those crazy power charts with all the fixin's, even if you end up with Clock Manipulation + Static Electricity Manipulation.

But, you know, if you roll up a t-rex with laser eyes, that's still a t-rex with laser eyes.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

There are a lot of lovely, lovely options in Heroes Unlimited, honestly. (Heya, Physical Training!) It's not really any much fun unless you get to roll on those crazy power charts with all the fixin's, even if you end up with Clock Manipulation + Static Electricity Manipulation.

But, you know, if you roll up a t-rex with laser eyes, that's still a t-rex with laser eyes.

I'm sure I have the slim volume with T-Rex in it. For the life of me I can't remember which one it is, since I have like After the Bomb (slim and fat version), TMNT Road Trip, Mutants in Orbit, Mutants of the Yucatan... I was so deep in Palladium Kool-Aid in the 90s.

BlackIronHeart
Aug 2, 2004

The Oath Breaker's about to hit warphead nine Kaptain!
Is it Transdimensional TMNT? The time-travelling one?

I feel so loving dirty now.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

theironjef posted:

I'm sure I have the slim volume with T-Rex in it. For the life of me I can't remember which one it is, since I have like After the Bomb (slim and fat version), TMNT Road Trip, Mutants in Orbit, Mutants of the Yucatan... I was so deep in Palladium Kool-Aid in the 90s.

BlackIronHeart posted:

Is it Transdimensional TMNT? The time-travelling one?

I feel so loving dirty now.

That would be Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No shame there, I think it's probably the best book Erick Wujcik did for Palladium Books. It pretty well blew my mind as a young, unformed sprout, with its bizarro mutant futures, mutant dinosaur rules, freakish psychic humans (see the toppost), random alternate world tables, etc. And hell, look at this cover by Kevin Long again.



If anybody can find a clean version of this cover, I would love you forever.
Also it had the Rat King in the back for no particular reason.

CroatianAlzheimers
Jun 15, 2009

I can't remember why I'm mad at you...


I'll check down in the hold to see if I have a copy of that. If so, I'll get you a scan.

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.
...

Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 31, 2017

Parkreiner
Oct 29, 2011

Alien Rope Burn posted:

That would be Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No shame there, I think it's probably the best book Erick Wujcik did for Palladium Books.

TTMNT is pretty sweet, no doubt about it, but I'm also really fond of the flying leap into gonzo mysticism he took in Mystic China. Puke bombs of living energy into your enemies! Play a reformed demon punching his way towards reincarnation as a human! Or a demon hunter wearing spiked football pads and wielding a three-foot bronze statue as a club! Avoid the Six False Methods of Immortality!

Then again, TTMNT has the amazingly petty "I will burn all my time-travel spell-slots to prove you ate the last cookie" example of play. Oh, I can't choose.

Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 19:42 on May 15, 2013

clockworkjoe
May 31, 2000

Rolled a 1 on the random encounter table, didn't you?

50 Foot Ant posted:


That's not even getting into the fact that KS sometimes seems to think he's a tactical and strategic genius when he writes Rifts, but when it comes down to it he's barely qualified to figure out Starcraft strategies. The big hoopla surrounding the Coalition War, and through the whole thing he falls into the basic traps that anyone who doesn't know jack poo poo about military strategy and tactics falls into. It rendered the entire Tolkeen War a loving joke.



I'd like to hear more about how the Coalition War was hosed up. I never read into it. The last book I read about the CS war was the military campaign book that stated the CS had 1 million SAMAS units in storage. One. loving. Million. SAMAS power armor units.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

clockworkjoe posted:

I'd like to hear more about how the Coalition War was hosed up. I never read into it. The last book I read about the CS war was the military campaign book that stated the CS had 1 million SAMAS units in storage. One. loving. Million. SAMAS power armor units.

Right? The US now (with an exponentially larger population, safer access to factories, a literate workforce, and no Xiticix attacking) has 637 operational F-18s. But no, let's say a million, of which 3% don't know anything about Anthropology and 7% have been to Rubio's on a Tuesday.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


clockworkjoe posted:

I'd like to hear more about how the Coalition War was hosed up. I never read into it. The last book I read about the CS war was the military campaign book that stated the CS had 1 million SAMAS units in storage. One. loving. Million. SAMAS power armor units.

This is from vague memories based on skims and second-hand information, but…

Tolkeen's characterization changes. They were just these guys in a magic city, except now they've got demon pacts and poo poo that never came up before. Because Kevin didn't want the war to be as morally one-sided as "Gandalf vs. the TechnoNazis" sounds.

Part of the scenario is that the Coalition forces trudge through Xitizik-or-however-you-spell-it territory. This is basically a giant hive of xenomorphs from Alien and/or the Brood from Marvel. Lucky for them, all the Guaranteed Death Aliens just happened to be asleep because it was hibernation season or whatever.

The biggest problem is that the Coalition lacks the infrastructure to really fight sentient teleporting nukes, which is what a powerful wizard could be. Hell, low-level teleport spells just to send powerful explosives to a chosen destination opens up tons of possibilities and really fucks the Coalition's chances.

Sure, there're probably safeguards around high-level personnel—probably even magical ones despite the hypocrisy of that. A relatively small team of dedicated wizards could still completely decimate them. But they don't, because then instead of a bunch of books, you'd only have to buy a five-page pamphlet about how the Coalition doesn't exist anymore.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

My buddies recently ran a whole campaign set in the Coalition War, but they smarted up the Coalition a bunch (Samas were basically personal guard, the rest of the Coalition build effort went into stuff like high-altitude bombers and surface to surface missile research). It went fairly well, we basically played a team dedicated to assassinating the Prosek family with a side order of doublecrossing the "allied" Fed of Magic before they doublecrossed us.

This was actually super recently, like campaign ended last month. But we long ago abandoned Palladium's wonky engine outside of occasional games of HU, and my buds spent years developing a homebrew D10 engine to run Rifts in (mostly Exalted DNA), which is actually pretty drat fun.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

50 Foot Ant posted:

I've tried over and over during the years to make sense of four things that KS insists upon in Rifts, that drives me absolutely crazy.

Trying to hammer on the science and facts in Rifts, especially on the official forums, is never gonna work out, sadly. Just look at how the Glitter Boy or SAMAS are designed. Not to say that stuff isn't as dumb as a plum, but you'd be harder-pressed to find things that make sense than don't, especially when it comes to Rifts technology.

Rifts makes a lot more sense when you think of it as plastic toy battles with clip-on missiles, I think.

theironjef posted:

Right? The US now (with an exponentially larger population, safer access to factories, a literate workforce, and no Xiticix attacking) has 637 operational F-18s. But no, let's say a million, of which 3% don't know anything about Anthropology and 7% have been to Rubio's on a Tuesday.
Also you have to note that the Coalition seemingly has no infrastructure, yet builds a farcically huge military. It's akin to Cobra or HYDRA and other forms of cartoon military villainy - how do they build massive bases and armies? They just do, shut up.

That being said, it's the kind of thing that's easily fixed with ten minutes of reflection on the setting. "Oh, yeah, they must have mines and salvage operations and farms and all the things that would actually make their country run."

clockworkjoe posted:

I'd like to hear more about how the Coalition War was hosed up. I never read into it. The last book I read about the CS war was the military campaign book that stated the CS had 1 million SAMAS units in storage. One. loving. Million. SAMAS power armor units.

Here's Bill Coffin's comments on writing for the Coalition War series.

Bill Coffin posted:

Our collaboration on the Siege on Tolkeen went very poorly despite Kevin's high hopes. it didn't sell as well as could be expected and it got a lot more flak from the fans than I think Kevin was prepared for. as for my collaboration with Kevin on this, I think there were a bunch of reasons for why it didn't work out very well, not the least of which were a) I didn't really want to get involved in this project but I agreed to it because of the moeny, which was a mistake; b) I didn't even play Rifts, much less have the kind of appreciation for the Tolkeen/Coalition conflict that the fans did; c) I didn't feel comfortable writing up the Coalition as heroes because I find the whole Nazi angle distasteful, d) it was hard writing a series that flew in the face of logic -- how come the Coalition just didn't bombard Tolkeen with LRMs all year, or why didn't Tolkeenite sorcers whack Prosek -- and e) Kevin never really wanted to collaborate on this; he would just tell me to do my thing, but then get bent out of shape when it didn't jive with what he wanted the series to showcase.

Really the core issue is that Siembieda wanted to have a ground slog like World War I, but with the technological and magical advancement in the setting, both sides are reduced to holding the idiot ball. What's more, it's all really railroaded, and there's no acknowledgement that the PCs could change the outcome of the war, and all of the adventures just being sideline battles and whatnot. I remember one particular part where there's an adventure where there's race between the two sides to control a killer satellite! Man, that'd be an exciting, thrilling turn in the course of the war that the PCs could influence, right? Well, no. It's a red herring. The adventure goes so far as to say:

Rifts Coalition Wars 3: Sorcerers' Revenge posted:

And remember, the potential for these things to critically unbalance a campaign is very high, so forget killer satellites even exist and do not include them in your game.

:v:

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turn it up TURN ME ON
Mar 19, 2012

In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is only war.

...and delicious ice cream.
I've never really known why, but I have always had a soft spot for Rifts. Now I'm going to have to start collecting the books.

I think it's because I have always loved really odd and crazy things, like a magician flying on a jet cycle teleporting atom bombs at dragons.

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