Since I am all out of After the Bomb books, how about we build on yesterday’s post with the Rifts World Book for England (1993), yea?

So, what we have here is the follow up to two pretty excellent Rifts sourcebooks – Vampire Kingdoms and Atlantis. If you compare England and the next World Book, Africa, to those two tomes, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Rifts had run out of ideas. They are flat as hell. England is the worse of the two, in no small part because a good portion of the book is dedicated to, you guessed it, another retelling of the King Arthur legend. Er, I mean, King Arr’thuu (gesundheit). This time, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake and Guinevere are actually imperialistic alien intelligences playing Arthur as a dupe. Its a Doctor Who plot gone terribly wrong.

I find Rifts books generally dense and confusing, but rarely boring, but that is exactly the word I would use for this book. Mutants in Avalon, this is not. There are druids but they don’t have magic. There are Time Wizards (is that a Doctor Who reference?). There is herbalism. There is, ah, the hell with it.

The art is nice though, as is true of most Rifts books. Kevin Long was a company-defining talent for Palladium.