Rifts Mainbook Review

Again an old repost of the Main Book review I did a long time ago for my old site.

Rifts books,

An objective view of them and the world(s) they describe.

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Rifts Main Book: What started it all.

This is the book that started Palladium’s most widely known (and played) RPG game. Using a slightly modified version of the rules of their previous games, Rifts allows players infinitely more possibilities in gaming, instead of the previous game’s basically real-life settings.

This freedom in my opinion is a mixed blessing. As a fan of actual role-playing, and not just hack n’ slashing, Rifts creates a dilemma. While most of Palladium’s other games take place in a world basically like today’s, Rifts takes place in the drastically transformed earth of around 300+ years in the future.

Unfortunatly, for GM’s who wishes to employ a lot of setting into their adventures, now just taking things out of today’s world doesn’t work. Rifts earth is more alien than ever. The remaining humans of this world are even hard to imagine, they’re way of life, thinking and society all permanently changed by the forces that ravaged the earth during and after the coming of the Rifts. And that’s just the humans! There are now countless other races now co-inhabiting Rifts earth with them. How can a GM know how to play out the actions of this Alien or than mutant? We may tend to just give them human tendencies, but never really think about the differences in psychology that there obviously should be between to races that grew up totally separate.

Plus, the world of Rifts itself is also totally different. Cities are nuked to radioactive dust, crushed to ruble, or covered by the invading seas. And, the remaining cities may look nothing like their previous selves, and probably no longer hold humans only, adding to their alien look. The water has expanded, and natural and unnatural disasters have literally reshaped the world in many places.

So, what is an unfortunate GM to do in these drastically different circumstances? Well, now you really have to rely on either Palladium, yourself, or the work of others to aide you in the stocking of this incredible new world. Is this a bad thing? No, personally I think that the world of Rifts kicks ass! But without actual world data, it turns into just and empty wasteland of stats (numbers). Making up the intricacies of the world is where I feel the prime difficulty lies, and the Main Book does make a valiant start at it, but it is only that, a start, a taste of things to come.

The book does an excellent job of giving the general setting of Rifts that chaotic, anything goes feel. The art truly goes miles in capturing a glimpse of what the earth transformed looks like. Nearly all of the character classes are detrimental to the playing and fleshing out of the world. There is the perfect (almost to little) level of technology, and of course Palladium’s slightly moded rules system, set to work with the new aspect of M.D.C.. Plus it gives quite a large amount of world data, that while general, does give you a pretty good feel for the world, and gives a GM a foundation to work off of (as was planed I assume).

Negatives of this book? Well, one minor one that always annoyed me was that there wasn’t quite enough of a conversion of the old rules to the new SDC ones in relation to bursts, but I know that that has been an ongoing argument, so I’ll leave it be for now… At the time the book was written it was assumed that more world data would follow shortly, but I’ll also have more on that later. But aside from all of it’s relatively minor problems, no one could argue with the fact that this is undoubtedly one of Palladium’s greatest works, and it deserves to be revered.