After Mechanoid Invasion (1981), Palladium produced a number of “historically accurate” medieval arms and armor books for use with “ANY” game (read: D&D). The success of those led to The Palladium Role-Playing Game (1983, though this is the 1984 revised second printing).

It’s essentially a highly customized D&D. Sometimes you really need to squint at a thing and maybe scrape a couple layers of paint off, but D&D it almost always under there somewhere near the core. It has far more options, though — 13 playable races, 19 classes, 7ish systems of magic. Even at this date, you can see the game growing (mutating?) into something different, bigger, wilder. It isn’t enough that they are characters classes, they have to be Occupational Character Classes (OCCs) and that’s just the start of the abbreviations. Rifts and the larger Megaversal system will always be Too Much for me, but I was genuinely surprised looking through this book and seeing even back in 1984, Palladium was already Too Much.

In typical fashion, I don’t really care about the system and am won over in the end by all the delightful art. There is no clear credit and I don’t recognize any of the names and honestly, I think there are more styles here than artists, which makes me think that this was sort of a dumping ground for art that didn’t make it into other projects. That gives this book a strange sort of charm that later Palladium books lack—I still like the way those books look and they are certainly more cohesive, but they definitely feature a much more rigid art direction.

Bonus: I like the source material here for the world. It’s none of it revolutionary, but it makes for a sturdy standard. There are cool monsters and gods, too!