Vampire Kingdoms, Rifts World Book One
Palladium’s first world book, Vampire Kingdoms covers the area of Mexico and central America. There is ample information on the Vampire Kingdoms that dot the Central American area, and are present in the dimensional-fluxing place called the Yucatan. The book has extremely detailed information on the few strongholds of humans left in the area (including Cuidad Juarez, El Paso, and others). This is one of the most detailed of all of the other world books. There really are scores of pages about the different peoples and nations of this area, and how they intermingle and compete with each other.
The book mainly focuses on the ultimate enemy, Vampires. There is a good amount of information on the undead, as well as tactics of killing them and items for such a purpose. Definitely not a stat filled book in that aspect though.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to a GM, to a PC it seems like it would just ruin a lot of secrets. The Vampires can be great enemies, and are really pretty good catalysts for some interesting adventures. And, they are given a back ground and reason for living, Palladium has really spent some time on writing up a great race, with many details and little things that help make everything seem very realistic.
Using this book in a “normal” North American campaign is pretty easy, the areas it covers are easily accessible for most, and the land is not unheard of to most adventurers (it’s even mentioned in the Main Book!)
The book’s art is OK. Long draws a lot of it, but I never was fond of his style with humans, he draws technology stuff much better. Seimbada also has a few drawings of his own here, I wouldn’t say his a the best artist, but he does pretty good drawing the vampires.
Noticable Interesting Picture, Quote, or Stat:
The Vernulians. A bad-ass d-bee race that isn’t just some lame-o human looking person with a ridged forehead. These guys are definitely NOT humanoid at all, they’ve got cool-looking tentacles, and are given some fairly interesting background inf. Plus, they’re not like all the wussy d-bee races that are just loser refugees on Rifts earth, the Vernulians have military OCCs, and are trying to colonize Rifts earth. Plus there is a faction of the race that is fleeing the military rule of their leaders. This race could be really cool, and it’s to bad they only get under 2 pages out of Vampires…
Noticable Lame Picture, Quote, or Stat:
Well, remember those “create your own super-hero group” rules from Heroes Unlimited? The book has many pages devoted to this, only now you’re making oh-so-exciting traveling shows. Some of the little details that they include are cool, but for the most part I always found the whole point system crap annoying. I mean, if I want a group, I’ll make it up my self, I don’t need some wacky rule system to help me.
No comments:
Post a Comment