That looks like a lot of work, man. I always just tried to shoehorn Rifts into another system. AD&D, d20 Modern, HERO, Warhammer 40k, etc.
Ironically, the best results I ever had I got with the old Marvel Comics Adventure Game, the one that used the deck of cards for character creation and gameplay.
Star Wars Saga Edition would probably do a pretty good Rifts game, come to think of it.
I'll get back to updating sometime this week. I've just been swamped with stuff lately, guys.
You know, a friend of mine has been trying to get me to run a Star Wars game so he can play a dark-side bastard. I wonder if Star Rifts would put an interesting run on things...
City Rats and Vagabonds: Why did we bring these guys along?
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of our long, slow trudge through the "normals" of Rifts. Today we'll be covering the classes that seem designed to make you wonder why they're taking up space in a book filled with all other manner of ridiculous awesomeness.
The future looks a lot like the 50s.
The classes in question are, in all their mediocre glory, the City Rat and the Vagabond. The City Rat is typically either a citizen of the Coalition living in the ghettos or one of the dregs who lives in the "Burbs" around one of their fortress cities. These are kids that were born at the bottom of the pile and are still in the process of digging themselves out. Their upbringing hasn't afforded them many opportunities for education or social mobility, and their lack of special O.C.C. powers isn't helping.
As you'd imagine, someone who grew up impoverished in a society that severely restricts access to education just doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of available skills. They can drive a car, fight a little bit and recognize drug dealers. Their free range skill selection is a little limited, but it's mostly hindered by this;
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
Porn made it through the apocalypse just fine.
City Rats also pop up in other populated areas. Japan and Germany both have their own brand, and practically every gang in Mexico is at least 50% City Rats by composition. This is basically the fallback class for anyone who couldn't hack it as a Headhunter. It is also one of the classes that ex-Juicers can jump to after detox, though why they'd pick this over Headhunter I have no idea. Maybe they really, really want those IS skills.
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Our last entry in the wall of shame is this guy;
I'm Terrible Man
Don't let the fact that he's dressed like a superhero fool you, this guy is hopeless.
His O.C.C. skill list is 3 lines long. He can speak American (yes, that's a language in this setting) and one other language, he can cook, and he can drive a car. He's got no combat training, no technical skills, nothing. He is literally less useful than a modern cell phone.
The fact that this and the Juicer were in the same book must be some kind of a joke on the part of Siembieda and crew. There's really no reason for this class to exist.
Going to back to the SAGA discussion, I think if you took out the more overt Star Wars references like the Jedi and such. The SAGA ruleset would make an excellent system for anything science fiction-y.
I remember a dude playing a cityrat in a game we had in Highschool. Was funny in a group full of Juicers, Borgs, and Tattooed men. I recall he lasted about 3 sessions.. the game lasted about 5, before we went back to DnD
Yeah, I recall pumping vagabonds up a bit just to make them capable of things that anyone ought to be able to at least attempt.
Cityrats filled the role of tech-junkies in my campaigns. Again, I made them slightly more useful (and I think later editions of the Rifts main book did the same) by expanding their tech skills.
I ran a semi-decent cyber-punk campaign using a group of City-Rats in the Burbs, once, taking inspiration from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Not the most thrilling game, but it had a certain nuance that most adventure campaigns lack. And it really punctuated the confrontations, since they were fewer and farther between. When all you're armed with is a Wilk's laser pistol, that lone CS soldier bearing down on you seems a lot more menacing.
Naturally, you need a fairly clever group of players to pull that off, but it's worth doing.
Yeah, I recall pumping vagabonds up a bit just to make them capable of things that anyone ought to be able to at least attempt.
Cityrats filled the role of tech-junkies in my campaigns. Again, I made them slightly more useful (and I think later editions of the Rifts main book did the same) by expanding their tech skills.
I ran a semi-decent cyber-punk campaign using a group of City-Rats in the Burbs, once, taking inspiration from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Not the most thrilling game, but it had a certain nuance that most adventure campaigns lack. And it really punctuated the confrontations, since they were fewer and further between. When all you're armed with is a Wilk's laser pistol, that lone CS soldier bearing down on you seems a lot more menacing.
Naturally, you need a fairly clever group of players to pull that off, but it's worth doing.
Yea--I think a lot of class balance can be added by the GM both in setting work and on-the-fly. Obviously that isn't ideal, but it is possible, and you could have a pretty exciting game if you limited the scope of it to a smaller-scale. I think that is a big part of the balance problem with RIFTS--the desire on the part of Siembeda to make anything and everything possible.
Yeah a City Rat cyberpunk campaign sounds really fun, but at a certain point you're missing out on all the kitchen sink crazyness of Rifts and you might as well be playing another game. Unfortunately the MDC/SDC gap requires some work to get across.
Oh yeah, totally. Keep in mind, I ran said campaign years after I'd been playing Rifts already. We'd done the whole over-powered, I-kicked-the-Old-One-in-his-giant-stupid-eye kind of stuff plenty of times over by that point.
I always thought Nightbane was their coolest and most original setting. Wish I could have played in a campaign of it. But that's a whole other can of worms.
Nightbane themselves, however, were ridiculously overpowered in many Palladium settings, including their own. For a game with a 'horror' theme, the protagonists (assumed to be Nightbane because how many people don't want to be a 7ft tall humanoid alligator with mini TV sets for eyes, zippers and seams across their body and the ability to belch fire while flying on angel wings?) were insanely powerful, and with a few power selections were almost impossible to keep held down or grievously wounded.
You think melee combat at 15 seconds is annoying to keep track of? Try having your characters go from the verge of death to full health in like 10-20 minutes without doing anything whatsoever? I always tried to include some gaps in time to justify people becoming super proficient in everything (going from level 1 to 5) in, like, a weekend, and to incorporate time to heal and unwind and whatnot, but in Nightbane you literally have minutes before the 'thing' you just shot with a tank comes back ready to kick ass and take names.
Though personally I always leaned towards the master psychics, even in that setting. Astral Lords were pretty badass, if even more frustrating to keep in one place.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
I just want to know how someone mistypes a number into a CAPITALIZED word.
Although I have an older version of the main book (8th printing October 1994) and it's 15, sorry to break it all up. They just wanted to be clever maybe? Like LOLZ the hacker character used letters for numbers in this version. If they did, may god have mercy on their souls.
Also you forgot to mention the vagabond's equipment list. Literally junk.
I understand wanting to make a "civilian" PC class but come on. At least you have a class for all the slaves you save from the splugorth.
Void Slayer on
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
I just want to know how someone mistypes a number into a CAPITALIZED word.
Although I have an older version of the main book (8th printing October 1994) and it's 15, sorry to break it all up. They just wanted to be clever maybe? Like LOLZ the hacker character used letters for numbers in this version. If they did, may god have mercy on their souls.
Also you forgot to mention the vagabond's equipment list. Literally junk.
I understand wanting to make a "civilian" PC class but come on. At least you have a class for all the slaves you save from the splugorth.
I'm working from the 6th printing.
So they must have finally caught it around the 7th or 8th.
The Vagabond finally got a specialized class skill in the Ultimate Edition. It's called "Eyeball A Fella".
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Oh shit, Rifts! Ridiculous power creep YES.
I found out about Rifts after playing Macross for ages. Always did want to crash land an REF vessel--maybe the SDF-3 or at least an Ikazuchi onto Rifts earth, just 'cuz REF mecha was so different (and so bursty) compared to the Rifts stuff. Or better yet, Macross 2. A couple Metal Sirens would TEAR SHIT UP yo.
Well, until they ran out of missiles. BUT STILL. Autododge plus 3d6x10 damage on that plasma spear means they'll be kicking ass all night long.
But Rifts man...oh the ridiculousness. The robot sourcebook was pretty entertaining. Only $20 million to build a robot that can kick 80 kinds of ass? Yes please. Or those Atlantis symbionts that would turn a norm into a god of war fit to take on a demon. Or those sentient swords...
And we're back. Rather than jumping straight into the magic using classes, as my linear trip through the book so far would dictate I do, I figured it was worth giving an overview of exactly what magic is in Rifts.
You know you want to. All the cool kids are doing it.
Let's start at the beginning.
Once upon a time (somewhere in our future), the world had entered a so-called Golden Age. Technology had advanced to give us spectacular medical and military breakthroughs, etc. It's unclear whether this "Golden Age" extended to the third world or managed to eradicate poverty in the first world, but it did give us the technology to make chemically powered disposable supermen and turn human beings into hunter-killer cyborgs, so it did have some degree of redeeming value.
Then, once upon a slightly less long ago time, everything ended. Exactly how was left, in a rare appearance for Palladium of the "less is more" approach to fluff, rather vague. At least until they gave us blow by blow with full color commentary in Chaos Earth, but for now we'll stick to what the original book is telling us. Something bad happened, war were declared and suddenly billions of people were dying.
Billions of R&D dollars well spent.
Which brings us to our first installment on the "things that are kind of weird with Rifts magic" list; death and sudden P.P.E. explosion. Which will need clarified with the second installment; why is magic energy called 'psychic energy'? Let's just make a deal now: I'll try to do this in a way that can be understood if you promise not let your eyes roll back in your head. Can we do that? Also; maybe I should lay off the semi-colons.
So, second things first. Magical energy is measured in P.P.E., or 'Potential Psychic Energy'. I'm sure there are myriad reasons for this, but as near as I can tell it's basically because even people who don't actually have the ability to cast spells have some measure of P.P.E.. For most folks, it's a very small amount; 2d6 or something like that depending on possible O.C.C. bonuses. Children have more, roughly twice that of adults. For people who are actively psychic, it's less. Because the potential psychic energy has been converted into actual psychic energy called I.S.P.. We'll be covering that lovely acronym when we get to the chapter on psionics.
Some images are better out of context.
Actual spellcasters will have significantly larger pools of P.P.E. to draw on, which is good because otherwise they wouldn't be able to cast spells. Most will have somewhere between 30 and 150, based on their Physical Endurance attribute and a series of random rolls. Each spell cast drains a specific amount of energy from their pool and that energy is recovered over time. A spell might take anywhere from 1 or 3 P.P.E. to cast into thousands or even tens of thousands of points. Obviously, a normal spellcaster can't pull that kind of magic off under normal circumstances, but we'll be covering the means of doing so later on.
Side effects may occur. Contact your doctor if the tentacles persist for more than 4 hours.
That covers the second thing, now the first one; death spikes your P.P.E. reserves. Specifically, it doubles it. For reasons that should be obvious, the dead person can't really take advantage of this sudden surge in available energy, but any supernatural predator or less-than-scrupulous spellcaster in the vicinity is free to take full advantage of the sudden glut of free-range magical energy. Remember, kids have twice as much to start with. So one dead kid is like 4 live adults. Best not to ponder that too long. Psi-Stalkers in particular (which I will be covering in a later update) make great use of the death release to feed, though it's almost universally done with supernatural creatures.
So, let's review. Core concepts so far; everyone has some amount of P.P.E., it is doubled and released into the environment on the moment of death, billions of people died at once. You can probably see where this is going.
The apocalypse looks a lot like a hipster's bowling ball.
Suddenly, the earth was flooded with huge amounts of magical energy. This energy coalesced onto pre-existing ley lines, previously invisible conduits of mystical force that linked points on the surface of the planet. In an instant, that which was previously unseen and largely unknown to the population became tangible and began to glow a brilliant blue. Those that weren't wiped out in the atrocity that caused the ley lines to flare up were suddenly seeing these lines criss-crossing their backyards and reality warping ever so slightly around them.
Error - snarksubtitle.exe not found. Invalid extension.
And as if billions of deaths and a sudden flare up of long-dormant magic wasn't enough, rifts to other worlds and dimensions started to open up at nexus points where two or more ley lines crossed. These rifts varied in size from a few feet across to city-swallowing tears in space time. These rifts opened and closed seemingly at random, and on more occasions than was safe for the surviving members of the Golden Age nations things were coming through.
Tourists are the worst.
And that kind of brings us to the current state of the world. It's been several hundred years, and things have kind of stabilized. As much as they can in a post-apocalyptic, magic-blasted hellscape full of human augmentation and bizarre creatures straight out of Lovecraft's opium-induced fever dreams, anyway.
Over the intervening centuries, humanity has learned to use the runaway magical energy for constructive (in a very loose use of the term) purposes. Generalized spellcasting is now possible, though it takes tons of training for most people to be able to grasp and master, and there are several O.C.C.s that exist purely to exploit the copious amount of P.P.E. available in the environment to do various magical things. We'll be covering each of the classes in the main book separately in future entries. For the remainder of this one, I wanted to outline the basics of magic use in the game so that there would be some degree of context for the upcoming weirdness.
Context; not a manga slash comic.
In Rifts, mages cast spells. Not really earthshattering, but I figured we should get that out of the way. Like some other, more obscure systems, *coughAD&Dcough*, a spellcaster has to know the spell they want to cast before they can cast it. None of that hippy dippy making stuff up on the fly White Wolf silliness here. Where the system differs from other, less awesome systems is that there is no limit to the number of spells known (for most classes), nor is there any of that silly memorization stuff. Once a spell is known, it's known forever.
Unless this guy catches you. Then there'll probably be some repression.
Learning new spells is kind of a crapshoot, unfortunately. There isn't any one language of magic in Rifts, so there is no guarantee that a captured spellbook will yield anything useful. Of course, there's no mechanical reason for enemy spellcasters to be carrying spellbooks anyway, since there's no step for a spell between not-known and known. You basically either have to find someone you can pay to teach you a new spell, get lucky with some kind of weirdo loot that your GM makes up or sell your soul to the devil for more spell knowledge.
Looking this badass cost me my soul. I wasn't really using it anyway.
The limiting factor for spellcasting is the amount of P.P.E. available to the caster. Each spell cast costs a specific amount of P.P.E., and once you're out you're out.
So, where'd I put that kitten?
There are ways around this limitation for the enterprising sorceror. The magical release on death that was covered earlier is one such out, but unless you want to keep a bag of stray cats around to power your Fire Bolt habit, this isn't really a sustainable solution. If you find yourself in proximity to a ley line, you can siphon power from that. It's not much, level x 10 P.P.E. per hour, but it's something. More can be found at nexus points, and even more on specific days of the year and at specific times of day. During a ley line storm, which is otherwise a rather unpleasant thing to experience, you can potentially pull down thousands of extra P.P.E., assuming the monstrosities streaming out of the holes in reality around you don't interrupt your spellcasting.
Get them, my doomed little S.D.C. pretties!
The other likely source of effectively free P.P.E. is magical items. Virtually anything bigger than a Techno-wizard weapon will have a pool of P.P.E. that its user can draw on. So golems, rune weapons, etc can be exploited for their raw magical power in addition to the whole inherently destructive magical item thing.
Jewelry made from the trapped souls of elder gods. Stylish AND functional.
That's not really all I wanted to cover, but it's getting pretty long. I guess I'll throw anything else that's relevant in the writeups for the individual classes, or the spell list itself which might be getting its own entry at some later point.
Magic was something I always made my NPC villains use, since level one characters just start off so weak. I could just go crazy with PPE amounts and spells that way. Plus, it makes a villain more unpredictable, and that always equates to more dangerous. I mean, you can always see what kind of gear someone has--robots, power armor, plasma rifles, etc.. But magic? You don't know what that cat is packing.
Magic in Rifts is fun, and potentially game-breaking with imagination.
"Oh, I can cast Carpet of Adhesion anywhere I can see? Can I see down the barrel of that guy's grenade launcher? Whoop, looks like he's got an explosive weapon jam the next time he fires that thing!"
*cue a guy exploding with the force of all the ammo he has in the weapon, along with everything he's carrying on him*
Bursar on
GNU Terry Pratchett
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Or the spell Decrease Weight. Cast that on someone then kick them up into the stratosphere. They'll either get chewed up by the asteroid guns or fall back down when the spell wears off. Either way, you win.
We're kicking off our segment on the magic using classes of Rifts with the most common; The Ley Line Walker. Common obviously being a relative term when you're talking about people who can reorder reality with a few chanted words.
Magic is blue.
These guys are presented as the traditional spellcasters of the setting. Highly attuned to magic and magical energy, they are the pure mage as it were, especially when compared to the hippies, mechanics and demon summoners that also made the first book.
They also have a long list of abilities regarding ley lines. Here's a truncated list;
1. Sense Ley Line and Magical Energy. These guys can tell if magic is in use nearby, or if they're within 10 miles per level of a Ley Line. A really useful ability to have, since it means finding basically unlimited magical batteries to power your spells.
2. Read Ley Lines. They can tell where a given ley line goes, whether there's a rift on it anywhere and whether it intersects with another one.
3. Ley Line Transmission. A Ley Line Walker can send a verbal message down a ley line, like a really bizarre pirate radio signal.
4. Ley Line Phasing. This guy can teleport to any point on a ley line he is currently on. Any point, no matter how far. At no personal energy expenditure. Since these things basically criss-cross the entire planet, they can get virtually anywhere almost instantly.
5. Line Drifting. If teleporting seems too easy, they can instead walk along the line suspended magically in the air. Every list needs a dud, I guess.
6. Ley Line Rejuvenation. They can heal themselves on a ley line. As if pulling free magic from it wasn't enough. Granted, most of these guys are S.D.C. creatures (like Humans), so this really doesn't matter. At all.
7. Observation Ball. Creating a glowing ball of energy that can only scout along the line itself is actually less lame than it sounds in most cases.
I'm pretty sure this look is mandatory.
For skills, these guys are kind of limited. They start out with no hand to hand combat training, meaning they have half the attacks of a combat-trained character and this won't improve as they level. They can speak several languages and have some lore skills, making them the conventional know it all mages, but they don't have a lot of options for more technical skills. It's basically magic or nothing for these guys.
And then they get a taste for being near/on a ley line, and it's good, but eventually they want more. So they find a nexus. And get eaten by a nameless horror from beyond.
But up until that point it's all awesome.
Forar on
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
So, does being on a ley line give you enough PPE for those crazyass high level spells? I never figured out how that was supposed to work. Some of the level 15 spells cost like 3000 PPE, which is about 10 times what a high level magic user PC would have. The rules talk about drawing on additional PPE per minute or hour, so can you just wait however many hours it would take to draw enough cast it, or is there a max or what?
I don't know that that's ever actually cleared up. There are a lot of vagaries in terms of how drawing power interacts with actually having power.
In the middle of a ley line storm at a nexus you're drawing several hundred P.P.E. per hour per level I believe. So theoretically you could be casting thousands of points worth of spells an hour.
Maybe they're rituals? Those are basically the same as invocations except that they take longer to cast. According to the main book, every spell that can be cast can be cast either way. So if you spend 3 hours on a ritual, maybe you get to spend three hours worth of absorbed P.P.E. on it?
Posts
Ironically, the best results I ever had I got with the old Marvel Comics Adventure Game, the one that used the deck of cards for character creation and gameplay.
Star Wars Saga Edition would probably do a pretty good Rifts game, come to think of it.
I'll get back to updating sometime this week. I've just been swamped with stuff lately, guys.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
and like last longer than say
character creation
so
i would recommend a system that y'know
actually has star wars in mind
like
saga edition
it's a pretty good edition of the star wars rpg
in fact it's pretty freaking great
Welcome to the fourth and final installment of our long, slow trudge through the "normals" of Rifts. Today we'll be covering the classes that seem designed to make you wonder why they're taking up space in a book filled with all other manner of ridiculous awesomeness.
The future looks a lot like the 50s.
The classes in question are, in all their mediocre glory, the City Rat and the Vagabond. The City Rat is typically either a citizen of the Coalition living in the ghettos or one of the dregs who lives in the "Burbs" around one of their fortress cities. These are kids that were born at the bottom of the pile and are still in the process of digging themselves out. Their upbringing hasn't afforded them many opportunities for education or social mobility, and their lack of special O.C.C. powers isn't helping.
As you'd imagine, someone who grew up impoverished in a society that severely restricts access to education just doesn't have a lot to offer in terms of available skills. They can drive a car, fight a little bit and recognize drug dealers. Their free range skill selection is a little limited, but it's mostly hindered by this;
It's like some kind of zen riddle. They know "IS" other skills. But what is IS? Is IS everything? Nothing? That which exists? Maybe it just IS. We may never know.
Porn made it through the apocalypse just fine.
City Rats also pop up in other populated areas. Japan and Germany both have their own brand, and practically every gang in Mexico is at least 50% City Rats by composition. This is basically the fallback class for anyone who couldn't hack it as a Headhunter. It is also one of the classes that ex-Juicers can jump to after detox, though why they'd pick this over Headhunter I have no idea. Maybe they really, really want those IS skills.
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Our last entry in the wall of shame is this guy;
I'm Terrible Man
Don't let the fact that he's dressed like a superhero fool you, this guy is hopeless.
His O.C.C. skill list is 3 lines long. He can speak American (yes, that's a language in this setting) and one other language, he can cook, and he can drive a car. He's got no combat training, no technical skills, nothing. He is literally less useful than a modern cell phone.
The fact that this and the Juicer were in the same book must be some kind of a joke on the part of Siembieda and crew. There's really no reason for this class to exist.
2 seconds before becoming dinner.
Next time;
Magic. Finally
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think he's an actor now...
Cityrats filled the role of tech-junkies in my campaigns. Again, I made them slightly more useful (and I think later editions of the Rifts main book did the same) by expanding their tech skills.
I ran a semi-decent cyber-punk campaign using a group of City-Rats in the Burbs, once, taking inspiration from the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Not the most thrilling game, but it had a certain nuance that most adventure campaigns lack. And it really punctuated the confrontations, since they were fewer and farther between. When all you're armed with is a Wilk's laser pistol, that lone CS soldier bearing down on you seems a lot more menacing.
Naturally, you need a fairly clever group of players to pull that off, but it's worth doing.
Yea--I think a lot of class balance can be added by the GM both in setting work and on-the-fly. Obviously that isn't ideal, but it is possible, and you could have a pretty exciting game if you limited the scope of it to a smaller-scale. I think that is a big part of the balance problem with RIFTS--the desire on the part of Siembeda to make anything and everything possible.
I always thought Nightbane was their coolest and most original setting. Wish I could have played in a campaign of it. But that's a whole other can of worms.
You think melee combat at 15 seconds is annoying to keep track of? Try having your characters go from the verge of death to full health in like 10-20 minutes without doing anything whatsoever? I always tried to include some gaps in time to justify people becoming super proficient in everything (going from level 1 to 5) in, like, a weekend, and to incorporate time to heal and unwind and whatnot, but in Nightbane you literally have minutes before the 'thing' you just shot with a tank comes back ready to kick ass and take names.
Though personally I always leaned towards the master psychics, even in that setting. Astral Lords were pretty badass, if even more frustrating to keep in one place.
Like basically the entirety of the Palladium lineup.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
It depends...
Also from the choices offered so far,
Glitter Boy,
everytime.
How many people have wandered into this thread saying something like "Dang, I remember playing Rifts, and then we just stopped"? Add one more!
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I mean, that guy is smooth.
Why I fear the ocean.
is is delicious
I just want to know how someone mistypes a number into a CAPITALIZED word.
Although I have an older version of the main book (8th printing October 1994) and it's 15, sorry to break it all up. They just wanted to be clever maybe? Like LOLZ the hacker character used letters for numbers in this version. If they did, may god have mercy on their souls.
Also you forgot to mention the vagabond's equipment list. Literally junk.
I understand wanting to make a "civilian" PC class but come on. At least you have a class for all the slaves you save from the splugorth.
So they must have finally caught it around the 7th or 8th.
The Vagabond finally got a specialized class skill in the Ultimate Edition. It's called "Eyeball A Fella".
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I found out about Rifts after playing Macross for ages. Always did want to crash land an REF vessel--maybe the SDF-3 or at least an Ikazuchi onto Rifts earth, just 'cuz REF mecha was so different (and so bursty) compared to the Rifts stuff. Or better yet, Macross 2. A couple Metal Sirens would TEAR SHIT UP yo.
Well, until they ran out of missiles. BUT STILL. Autododge plus 3d6x10 damage on that plasma spear means they'll be kicking ass all night long.
But Rifts man...oh the ridiculousness. The robot sourcebook was pretty entertaining. Only $20 million to build a robot that can kick 80 kinds of ass? Yes please. Or those Atlantis symbionts that would turn a norm into a god of war fit to take on a demon. Or those sentient swords...
And we're back. Rather than jumping straight into the magic using classes, as my linear trip through the book so far would dictate I do, I figured it was worth giving an overview of exactly what magic is in Rifts.
You know you want to. All the cool kids are doing it.
Let's start at the beginning.
Once upon a time (somewhere in our future), the world had entered a so-called Golden Age. Technology had advanced to give us spectacular medical and military breakthroughs, etc. It's unclear whether this "Golden Age" extended to the third world or managed to eradicate poverty in the first world, but it did give us the technology to make chemically powered disposable supermen and turn human beings into hunter-killer cyborgs, so it did have some degree of redeeming value.
Then, once upon a slightly less long ago time, everything ended. Exactly how was left, in a rare appearance for Palladium of the "less is more" approach to fluff, rather vague. At least until they gave us blow by blow with full color commentary in Chaos Earth, but for now we'll stick to what the original book is telling us. Something bad happened, war were declared and suddenly billions of people were dying.
Billions of R&D dollars well spent.
Which brings us to our first installment on the "things that are kind of weird with Rifts magic" list; death and sudden P.P.E. explosion. Which will need clarified with the second installment; why is magic energy called 'psychic energy'? Let's just make a deal now: I'll try to do this in a way that can be understood if you promise not let your eyes roll back in your head. Can we do that? Also; maybe I should lay off the semi-colons.
So, second things first. Magical energy is measured in P.P.E., or 'Potential Psychic Energy'. I'm sure there are myriad reasons for this, but as near as I can tell it's basically because even people who don't actually have the ability to cast spells have some measure of P.P.E.. For most folks, it's a very small amount; 2d6 or something like that depending on possible O.C.C. bonuses. Children have more, roughly twice that of adults. For people who are actively psychic, it's less. Because the potential psychic energy has been converted into actual psychic energy called I.S.P.. We'll be covering that lovely acronym when we get to the chapter on psionics.
Some images are better out of context.
Actual spellcasters will have significantly larger pools of P.P.E. to draw on, which is good because otherwise they wouldn't be able to cast spells. Most will have somewhere between 30 and 150, based on their Physical Endurance attribute and a series of random rolls. Each spell cast drains a specific amount of energy from their pool and that energy is recovered over time. A spell might take anywhere from 1 or 3 P.P.E. to cast into thousands or even tens of thousands of points. Obviously, a normal spellcaster can't pull that kind of magic off under normal circumstances, but we'll be covering the means of doing so later on.
Side effects may occur. Contact your doctor if the tentacles persist for more than 4 hours.
That covers the second thing, now the first one; death spikes your P.P.E. reserves. Specifically, it doubles it. For reasons that should be obvious, the dead person can't really take advantage of this sudden surge in available energy, but any supernatural predator or less-than-scrupulous spellcaster in the vicinity is free to take full advantage of the sudden glut of free-range magical energy. Remember, kids have twice as much to start with. So one dead kid is like 4 live adults. Best not to ponder that too long. Psi-Stalkers in particular (which I will be covering in a later update) make great use of the death release to feed, though it's almost universally done with supernatural creatures.
So, let's review. Core concepts so far; everyone has some amount of P.P.E., it is doubled and released into the environment on the moment of death, billions of people died at once. You can probably see where this is going.
The apocalypse looks a lot like a hipster's bowling ball.
Suddenly, the earth was flooded with huge amounts of magical energy. This energy coalesced onto pre-existing ley lines, previously invisible conduits of mystical force that linked points on the surface of the planet. In an instant, that which was previously unseen and largely unknown to the population became tangible and began to glow a brilliant blue. Those that weren't wiped out in the atrocity that caused the ley lines to flare up were suddenly seeing these lines criss-crossing their backyards and reality warping ever so slightly around them.
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And as if billions of deaths and a sudden flare up of long-dormant magic wasn't enough, rifts to other worlds and dimensions started to open up at nexus points where two or more ley lines crossed. These rifts varied in size from a few feet across to city-swallowing tears in space time. These rifts opened and closed seemingly at random, and on more occasions than was safe for the surviving members of the Golden Age nations things were coming through.
Tourists are the worst.
And that kind of brings us to the current state of the world. It's been several hundred years, and things have kind of stabilized. As much as they can in a post-apocalyptic, magic-blasted hellscape full of human augmentation and bizarre creatures straight out of Lovecraft's opium-induced fever dreams, anyway.
Over the intervening centuries, humanity has learned to use the runaway magical energy for constructive (in a very loose use of the term) purposes. Generalized spellcasting is now possible, though it takes tons of training for most people to be able to grasp and master, and there are several O.C.C.s that exist purely to exploit the copious amount of P.P.E. available in the environment to do various magical things. We'll be covering each of the classes in the main book separately in future entries. For the remainder of this one, I wanted to outline the basics of magic use in the game so that there would be some degree of context for the upcoming weirdness.
Context; not a manga slash comic.
In Rifts, mages cast spells. Not really earthshattering, but I figured we should get that out of the way. Like some other, more obscure systems, *coughAD&Dcough*, a spellcaster has to know the spell they want to cast before they can cast it. None of that hippy dippy making stuff up on the fly White Wolf silliness here. Where the system differs from other, less awesome systems is that there is no limit to the number of spells known (for most classes), nor is there any of that silly memorization stuff. Once a spell is known, it's known forever.
Unless this guy catches you. Then there'll probably be some repression.
Learning new spells is kind of a crapshoot, unfortunately. There isn't any one language of magic in Rifts, so there is no guarantee that a captured spellbook will yield anything useful. Of course, there's no mechanical reason for enemy spellcasters to be carrying spellbooks anyway, since there's no step for a spell between not-known and known. You basically either have to find someone you can pay to teach you a new spell, get lucky with some kind of weirdo loot that your GM makes up or sell your soul to the devil for more spell knowledge.
Looking this badass cost me my soul. I wasn't really using it anyway.
The limiting factor for spellcasting is the amount of P.P.E. available to the caster. Each spell cast costs a specific amount of P.P.E., and once you're out you're out.
So, where'd I put that kitten?
There are ways around this limitation for the enterprising sorceror. The magical release on death that was covered earlier is one such out, but unless you want to keep a bag of stray cats around to power your Fire Bolt habit, this isn't really a sustainable solution. If you find yourself in proximity to a ley line, you can siphon power from that. It's not much, level x 10 P.P.E. per hour, but it's something. More can be found at nexus points, and even more on specific days of the year and at specific times of day. During a ley line storm, which is otherwise a rather unpleasant thing to experience, you can potentially pull down thousands of extra P.P.E., assuming the monstrosities streaming out of the holes in reality around you don't interrupt your spellcasting.
Get them, my doomed little S.D.C. pretties!
The other likely source of effectively free P.P.E. is magical items. Virtually anything bigger than a Techno-wizard weapon will have a pool of P.P.E. that its user can draw on. So golems, rune weapons, etc can be exploited for their raw magical power in addition to the whole inherently destructive magical item thing.
Jewelry made from the trapped souls of elder gods. Stylish AND functional.
That's not really all I wanted to cover, but it's getting pretty long. I guess I'll throw anything else that's relevant in the writeups for the individual classes, or the spell list itself which might be getting its own entry at some later point.
Next Time;
Not quite walking on sunshine
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I like Rifts :^:
"Oh, I can cast Carpet of Adhesion anywhere I can see? Can I see down the barrel of that guy's grenade launcher? Whoop, looks like he's got an explosive weapon jam the next time he fires that thing!"
*cue a guy exploding with the force of all the ammo he has in the weapon, along with everything he's carrying on him*
PSN: Wstfgl | GamerTag: An Evil Plan | Battle.net: FallenIdle#1970
Hit me up on BoardGameArena! User: Loaded D1
Drop a zone that immobilizes even on a successful save and then scare everyone onto it.
Reduce Self, Invisibility and Super Strength made for some fun antics as well.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Little Boy: "If you're a witch, where's your broom?"
Warlock: "I need something else to fly."
We're kicking off our segment on the magic using classes of Rifts with the most common; The Ley Line Walker. Common obviously being a relative term when you're talking about people who can reorder reality with a few chanted words.
Magic is blue.
These guys are presented as the traditional spellcasters of the setting. Highly attuned to magic and magical energy, they are the pure mage as it were, especially when compared to the hippies, mechanics and demon summoners that also made the first book.
They also have a long list of abilities regarding ley lines. Here's a truncated list;
1. Sense Ley Line and Magical Energy. These guys can tell if magic is in use nearby, or if they're within 10 miles per level of a Ley Line. A really useful ability to have, since it means finding basically unlimited magical batteries to power your spells.
2. Read Ley Lines. They can tell where a given ley line goes, whether there's a rift on it anywhere and whether it intersects with another one.
3. Ley Line Transmission. A Ley Line Walker can send a verbal message down a ley line, like a really bizarre pirate radio signal.
4. Ley Line Phasing. This guy can teleport to any point on a ley line he is currently on. Any point, no matter how far. At no personal energy expenditure. Since these things basically criss-cross the entire planet, they can get virtually anywhere almost instantly.
5. Line Drifting. If teleporting seems too easy, they can instead walk along the line suspended magically in the air. Every list needs a dud, I guess.
6. Ley Line Rejuvenation. They can heal themselves on a ley line. As if pulling free magic from it wasn't enough. Granted, most of these guys are S.D.C. creatures (like Humans), so this really doesn't matter. At all.
7. Observation Ball. Creating a glowing ball of energy that can only scout along the line itself is actually less lame than it sounds in most cases.
I'm pretty sure this look is mandatory.
For skills, these guys are kind of limited. They start out with no hand to hand combat training, meaning they have half the attacks of a combat-trained character and this won't improve as they level. They can speak several languages and have some lore skills, making them the conventional know it all mages, but they don't have a lot of options for more technical skills. It's basically magic or nothing for these guys.
Next Time:
Meditating gives you superpowers
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And then there are ley lines just fucking everywhere, all over earth.
And Walkers can sense them and find them.
But up until that point it's all awesome.
In the middle of a ley line storm at a nexus you're drawing several hundred P.P.E. per hour per level I believe. So theoretically you could be casting thousands of points worth of spells an hour.
Maybe they're rituals? Those are basically the same as invocations except that they take longer to cast. According to the main book, every spell that can be cast can be cast either way. So if you spend 3 hours on a ritual, maybe you get to spend three hours worth of absorbed P.P.E. on it?
Clarity isn't a strong suit of the system.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.