Rifts Source Book Two Review

Ed note 2009: After watching BattleStar Galactica, wouldn’t you agree the Mechanoids are basicaly Cylon clones?
Rifts Source Book Two:

The Mechanoids
Do you like alien cyborgs who’s only point is to destroy all humanoid life? Well, I sure hope so, because that’s really all your going to get if you buy this book.
Based off of Palladium’s truly ancient RPG, The Mechanoids, this book is just basically a big conversion of the cyborgs into the world of Rifts. There is a fairly interesting background on the Mechanoids, followed by about 10 times as many pages devoted to their stats. The book also includes some OK adventuring ideas for incorporating them into your game.

On that last note, the Mechanoids are NOT a race that you can just casually bring into your campaign. They’re just too alien, war-like, and frankly annoying. I mean, you could theoretically have a game with the PC’s encountering them, exploring their lair, etc., but who want’s to? What reason would PC’s have for putsing around with these aliens? Maybe if your PC’s are all Cyber-Knights or something, but just the fact that the cyborgs usually move in platoons/groups, have MASTER psionics, and also have some pretty lethal ‘borg bodies makes them really powerful.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of them having been around for 1000’s of years (they fought the Kittani, cool!), but do they really NEED their own entire source book? I don’t think so, all they really need are stats, descriptions of their mind-less killing habits, and a history of their previous encounters. The adventures? Usually out of the scope of my campaign, it’s to big of a pain to bring them in, and all they’d ever do was shoot at my PC’s. I’m still not sure how your can have a whole RPG about them, just what is their to role-play out? “Let’s go kill some humanoids”. “OK, yes, they all must die”, and so on, this seems to be the mentality of ALL the insane borgs, the smart ones just think about it in more complicated ways.

Overall I would say that this book is definitely NOT detrimental to have in any campaign. If you like unity, buy it. If you just buy all of the books, then you probably don’t care anyway. Or, if you just need some baddies to shoot missiles at your innocent, and unfortunately humanoid PC’s for no other reason than to cause them to need to have expensive repairs done on their nice shiny vehicles and armor, then you might want to buy it. But if you’re like me, and want some detailed world data you can use to actually role-play off of, this is not the book for you.

Noticable Interesting Picture, Quote, or Stat:
The picture on pages 102-103 is pretty cool looking, it’s another tragic victim of the “let’s cut good art in half” problem though. A good representation of how ruined buildings would look like, and the two robots in it don’t look all that bad.

Noticable Lame Picture, Quote, or Stat:
Well, the piles of Mechanoid stats themselves are annoying, but overall this book doesn’t have anything that out of place. I if see something though, I’ll be sure to bring it to your attention!