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[Let's Read] Rifts: Let's Read Something Else
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NG2 is catalogue but a really good one with some pretty fun art in it and a lot of useful options. NG1 if you want the lore and setting info.
Add on to that its main weapon has nearly triple the range of most common heavy weapons and five times or more the range of most hand held weapons. A GB is one of the few stand alone group threats that can be seriously deadly even by accident. I have seen a lot of players legit vaporized by glitterboys because they did not grasp how deadly this thing is.
Things like dragon hatchlings are good as well. Highly durable due to initial large amounts of MDC and insanely quick regeneration rates. Less accidentally lethal to a party as well although they do more than enough damage to be very dangerous they are not generally going to one shot kill most players.
Glitter Boys are (sparkly) metal, yo.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
So yeah, I may just need to keep piling on MDC.
Fixed
My Rifts games were rarely vanilla. They were horrible things of Mutant Armadillo's with Juicer OCCs piloting Veritechs while fighting Thor. Shit was bonkers and I loved every LSD meets PCP induced moment of it in my teen years.
I am slightly curious if more of the classic books will be covered. I got tons of millages out of Mystic China (N&SS's follow up book.) and Beyond the Supernatural (think X-files meets Trails of Cthulu before that was even a thing.)
And well, the Clive Barker inspired NIGHTBANE. Why yes, I want to be a horrific nightmare inducing hell beast....who is the hero. You know just as WOD was turning that into a think, Pallidum in 95 gave us Beast the Whatever about 2 decades early.
I'll try and dig into them a bit this weekend if anyone wants to talk about them, at least.
I will say that it looks more playable than the original.
I won't follow that up by talking about how low a bar that is.
D'oh.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I worry that it's going to make the Juicer player crazy during any session that starts with them losing some Burn and then ends up being spent in town talking to NPCs.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Ah, love the smell of that old style game "balance". Like when D&D Haste aged the target of the spell a year as well. Completely irrelevant for Elves, a minor downside to Dwarves and a big concern to Humans.
Most spellcasters also can just buy any spell they need (assuming you let them) and then cast them with nexus points/cult groups/blood sacrifice. A level 1 leyline walker can cast almost any spell you want.
Yes spell casters and some psychics are about the only OCC that really gain much power with level under the original palladium Rifts rules.
Classes like glitter boy pilots are nearly as good as they will ever be at level 1. Most of their play session achievements come in using and maintaining what they already have and keeping high end power armor repaired and in fighting condition winds up being a lot of their story and stress.
Characters that actually gain any significant power over time are rarities in rifts.
it's space dinosaurs all the way down
Or, you started at space dinosaurs and then it all went to hell.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Then the minion war breaks out and its hell everywhere so YOLO!
"And God said
no I don't know which god probably Osiris or something shutup and let me talk
And lo God said 'let there be space dinosaurs'."
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Oh, I once played a mutant dino from TMNT who happened to be a space pilot. So....Space Dino, if you counted I had one of the space mechs. Then there you go.
Optimus, Think you can do a rider to the classic where you read but this time for the Savage Rifts version?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Fair enough. Well, if/when you play it I'd love to see your opinion. Oh, are you ever going to do Phase World? I use to love playing as a Cosmo Knight in that setting.
- gundam pilot
- dragon
- thief (but with no skills whatsoever)
- historian with a pocket knife
- two-ninjas taped together
- alien godking
- like 20 kinds of space dinosaur
Don't forget to bring a healer!
How adorable.
That's like, the SDC of cover types.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
My hardcover is my tablet. That's just my use copy. And hush you, I got my start in SDC with AR.
It's funny you say this because I seem to recall there being almost negligible healing in Rifts, and it's pretty much useless anyway (what with most attacks either hitting armour/mdc skin and bone, or pulping the target).
I think Warlocks in Conversion Book 1 get a Resurrection spell, and yeah there's some minor healing psionics, WB3: England has some healing stuff too (tea?), but see point 1 above; healing 3d6 hp/sdc doesn't mean much when you have less than 1 MD between them combined.
Rifts is one of those games where you're generally either alive and fighting at full capacity, or a rapidly diminishing cloud of vapor.
If there's enough left of someone whose armor failed to fit into a doggy bag, it's practically an open casket funeral.
In hindsight, if I was ever insane enough to run this game from the core (non-Savage) books again, I'd probably lean towards a 10 to 1 conversion instead of 100 to 1, and trim down any insane SDC numbers similarly (so juicers that could have thousands would get hundreds instead; similar exchange rate overall, but people don't just turn to ash because a Wilks Laser Pistol grazed them).
Though my ire with Palladium is such that I can't see that happening even if I were so inclined, based on the bullshit my friends and I have watched them try to peddle regarding the Robotech Tactics Kickstarter.
Fuck those guys.
Naming your centuries old secret society of mega good guys with no other lore to them at all the "Republicans" and then sticking them randomly into Savage RIFTS is really a dick move kids.
... go on.
Friends don't let friends try to "fix" RIFTS. Just steal the setting and play it in a system that already works.
I speak from experience on this one.
The revised Rifts Sourcebook One has a huge info dump on the Republicans. Just an FYI.
TL,DR: They are descendants of America and are seeking to remake the Coalition in America's image. They are in a secret war with ARCHIE (who they created). Archie refused to awaken an army during the Coming of the Rifts to help stabilize the country because he thought they would all die. Said army is still in stasis. They badly want to awaken this army. They want to infiltrate and replace the top leadership of the Coalition States because they hate the the Tyrants leading them, but they are still human supremacists.
But that might be modern reality biasing my worldview.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
this is a much better treatment than they got in savage rifts for sure!
So ya. Mileage may vary.
To stay topical for a moment, the Republicans are just as mysterious and retcon-heavy as Archie 3. They were a myth, then they were chill bros who had a large community of elves helping them handle the magic side of things and lots of tech, now they're just the CS but a bit crazier. Seems like a pattern. Tolkeen was a shining beacon of egalitarianism, then just spontaneously turned into demon-worshipping jackholes dumping murder-fiends on civilians for no good reason. Archie was just trying to carefully protect humans without getting stomped, now he's Friend Computer from the Paranoia setting.
A friend of mine says it's all because Kevin wants the CS to be on the Moral Event Horizon instead of well past it, so he has to keep making everyone else more evil to keep the threshold lower.
Anyways, time for tangents.
One thing I noticed is that there are a lot of ways to "pun-pun" the game system. From a library of magic scrolls that an army of peasants can read to a giant army of MD zombies to Free Vampire Enclaves there are a lot of ways to take 1-3 OCCs and combo their powers into a terrifying force of doom. All you need is some time to get things in order.
Zombies with guns, you're probably in trouble.
Another is the weird Vagabond trick. Vagabond receives well-deserved lumps for being hopelessly outclassed, but if you can keep her alive from the ridiculous combat she is impossibly powerful at social situations. Near-perfect lie detection and the ability to basically grab the character sheet of anyone she meets is extremely powerful in any campaign that actually has character interaction beyond "game start, roll initiative."
To make matters worse there are ways to cheat in more skills. A rogue scholar can teach anyone anything (due to poor editing, even if said scholar doesn't have that skill #welcometorifts) in 1d6+8 weeks meaning you can teach Lassie to read, then watch her get shot for the treason of being literate.
Wait, woof?
To say nothing of the fact that a level 1 shifter can just keep summoning bigger and scarier things all day until the great demon army conquers the earth.
The game I'm in does everything wrong. We don't have any of the main tier-1 classes (except a dog boy), we run around with a functioning moral compass, the most fragile party member has 400 MDC, and because the DM has no patience for 3-hour combats we use the optional "all-out attack" rules that mean dodging and parrying can't happen and therefore juicers and crazies are completely useless and do not make appearances.
But when I get to broker a trade agreement selling MD steeltree wood gear to people in vampire territory while speaking with an atrocious and mildly-offensive slavic accent (I am playing a Mystic Kuznya from Mystic Russia) it ends up still being loads of fun.