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Wow, I had no idea that Precedence did a Rifts CCG. What a strange company it was.
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May 12, 2015 17:31
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Is Ninja Division a company or the username of somebody on the Palladium forums? Both? Because it would not surprise me if Siembieda started combining his two favourite strategies: blaming everything on his associates, and hiring fanboys who will give up favourable terms. Although I believe doing so really has the potential to end Palladium for good.
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Jun 7, 2015 18:02
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As someone who doesn't get into minis, the only exciting thing from Palladium for me is the Savage Worlds version. I'm not in love with SW or anything, but it's pretty much the polar opposite of the Megaversal system in terms of complexity and ease of play, and could actually get me playing a Nightbane campaign.
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Jun 7, 2015 20:52
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Huh. I'm no lawyer; maybe Nightbane has been around long enough for them to show that they've established a distinct identity for the product line. But I'd expect Clive Barker to get litigious at that point.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:22
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NTRabbit posted:The mod on the Palladium forums has Koolaid running through his veins, everything short of sunshine lollipops and rainbows usually gets locked and end in a ban for the poster, apparently. This shouldn't be surprising considering the only thing Palladium puts out with regularity is The Rifter, and the last time I read an issue, a sizable fraction of it was devoted to Kevin treating his business like a charity, exhorting the customers to buy more products and evangelize Palladium to their friends. Which is frankly a scumbag move. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 13:36
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It's to be expected in a company rag to an extent, honestly, but well, let's pull off a issue off my bookshelf more-or-less at random. Let's see: issue #17, dated 2002. It's 112 pages. 9 pages of that are just straight-up ad copy. Mind, bear in mind a lot of the ad copy that runs isn't even new ad copy, making it pure, uncut page filler. Another 3 pages are hype machine, including an exhortation to assist Palladium in the "slow economy" by special ordering books from local stores and basically asking fans to act as unpaid salesmen to store owners. It was also astonishingly low-quality. I really don't understand why so many people are willing to pay for supplement books that are just stat blocks. D&D Monster Manuals have a lot of monsters that are tactically interesting, whether you're talking about gas spores and rust monsters from the old books or the way 4e gave pretty much every monster tactical powers. And of course plenty have interesting backstory that keys into where you find them and why you fight them. But then there are a lot of companies out there that put out books that were just "Here's a skeleton, this is its combat stats, here's a wererat, this is its stats," etc. Palladium books seem to have a lot of this stuff. What's their policy on fanpages these days? There are years worth of stories about C&Ds they send out, but I wonder how they've actually responded to fansites in the past few years. The main reason I ask is that I've gotten the notion that while Palladium's popularity comes from publishing books that are chock full of stuff and not expensive, they have their diehard fans over a barrel, paying money for stuff that fans of other games get for free. The last time I looked at a Rifter, the quality of the content was on a level with homebrew stuff that you would put out there on a wiki or a blog, not expecting to make money from it.
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Jun 12, 2015 17:11
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Bieeardo posted:They produced a wodge of legalese for people to stuff into their pages back in the mid Nineties, but I think Geocities dying and a lot of ISPs canceling their free hosting packages has killed most of them off. It's sad. Their rules have always been terrible, but they used to have Carella as a staff writer.
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Aug 18, 2015 21:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I recently ran across evidence they planned to have Carella writing books for at least another year or so before he bailed, and had to find other writers to fill the gap. It's interesting to see what slips through their cracks. (Palladium is pretty cracked.) Reading between the lines, it seems that Kevin drives away his staff writers the same way he drives away freelancers, it just takes longer. That is, he gives them a project, doesn't give feedback during the development process, then chews them out when the book isn't exactly the way he would have done it. I am curious about how Kevin's reputation as a micromanager jives with this.
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Sep 7, 2015 04:07
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I remember you saying that the office was small and dark. Do they even still have an office? It is often repeated that no matter what anyone says about Palladium, they are still in business after decades. But I wonder how much business presence they actually have when the only thing they regularly publish is the Rifter. Do they actually do a lot of business in reprints and selling off old copies of old material? Do they have other streams of income?
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Sep 7, 2015 04:27
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Yeah, in the late 90s my buddy sent off some fanmail, and in it asked what Toronto was like Post-Rifts.
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Dec 16, 2015 22:56
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I like Nightbane so much that I at least wanted to go through the process of generating a character, but I found it almost impossible. Layout isn't usually something brought up in reviews as a factor that saves or sinks a game, but it had so many special case rules wedged in-between parts of the character creation process that I gave up in frustration. By the way, where can I read Carella throwing shade at Palladium?
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Jan 2, 2016 04:55
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My first recommendation is not to make it D20. You can have a d20-based resolution mechanic, sure, but the hobby has mostly moved on from D20 as a brand. To too many people it instantly signals that your product is shovelware, or that you're trying to ride a bubble that burst a decade ago. Consider that the last two attempts to be the Next Big Thing in gaming that I know of (Fyxt and Genesys) both used D20 or something very similar.quote:Coalition of the Living against the Fallen Lords in the Necromantic Wars quote:Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and your role at The Rock’s School of Science? Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jan 2, 2016 |
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Jan 2, 2016 23:34
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I'm not an expert on copyright law like Kevin Siembieda, but as far as I know, you can't copyright game mechanics, only text and specific terms. Before the OGL was a twinkle in WotC 's eye, there were lots of published, for-profit games out there that were more or less ripoffs of other games. Hell, the Palladium house system started as one of the first wave of systems that were "D&D but fixed" that went on to be universal, multi genre rules. So I don't know if you NEED a free premade system.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:17
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shades of eternity posted:with the 5e srd finally dropping, how feasible would it be to make a rifts-inspired game using that material? By the by, I haven't had time to go through the whole thing, but I've been trying to set aside some time here and there to go through Dark Revelations. The first thing I want to say is that you have a pretty solid, succinct first chapter that explains the premise of the setting and gives the players (as it's a player's guide) as much setting as they need to know to play. The first thing I want to criticize is in character creation. You sandwich rules for aging, carrying capacity, and tactical movement in between "generating ability scores" and picking a race. Why is that necessary? Oh, and alignment. Why do you need nine-point alignment at all? The second thing I have to criticize is that this is a D20 game, so character creation involves picking a race from a list that includes, elf, dwarf, human, and some other stuff. I'm sorry, but you really, really, really, really, really, really shouldn't do this. I can't emphasize enough how stultifying it is to crack open yet another D20 fantasy game and find yet another Races chapter with Dwarf, Elf, Human, plus a couple novel races. In fact, fantasy heartbreakers have been using the model of "Humans plus Tolkien races plus some new ones to show that we're different" since at least 1990. Rifts doesn't do that--it's class based and racial classes are a notable feature of the game--so why should you? The hardest thing when you're developing something under the D20 label is not making a bunch of assumptions that are built into the default D20 model. If you look at the D20 games that have been memorable and still have a fanbase after the collapse of the D20 bubble, like Mutants & Masterminds and Spycraft, the first thing you notice is that they hacked the system to death and made games that, ultimately, aren't even compatible with D&D 3rd edition.
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Jan 16, 2016 19:27
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I'm the gaily skipping elf shadowrunner.
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Apr 12, 2016 16:25
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Isn't the general consensus that their NDA probably screws them over in this regard? Or there's just no way for them to tell a different version of the story without creating a public spat between companies that are supposed to be cooperating and they're just being professional.
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Apr 13, 2016 02:21
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That's not accurate. Kevin only had to rewrite 75% of the monkey's manuscript, so per the contract, he'll get 25% of the bananas he was promised.
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Apr 14, 2016 14:52
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Demon_Corsair posted:- $90,000 D-Bee: Grackle Tooth Race information for playing one of the more beloved Rifts® D-Bees, the Mighty Grackle Tooth! (PDF) "Grackle Tooth." So it has cute little birds for teeth?
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Apr 28, 2016 17:28
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Kevin just learned about invisible dog fences and wanted to write it into the game.
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Jul 10, 2016 02:03
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 bark bark bark bark bark What's that, Dog Boy? Are you saying...we're the baddies?
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Feb 7, 2017 15:13
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Palladium's laziness really shines through in all the places where they make eleventy billion PC types based on animals.
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Dec 29, 2017 06:10
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