Behold, the Rifts 1993 Calendar, the one and (to my knowledge) only Rifts calendar. What a glorious beast, it features seven paintings (and one impressive centerfold) by Palladium mainstay Kevin Long and five by Keith Parkinson. The pair, for my money, pretty much entirely defined the look and feel of Rifts.

Let’s see what we’ve got. Parkinson’s cover for the Rifts rules is easy, as is Long’s covers for Sourcebook One (seen earlier this week) and Vampire Kingdoms. We also have Parkinson’s covers for Atlantis and Mutants in Orbit. It gets a little harder from there. The red skelebot looking thing is from the cover of the Rifts GM Screen and the group painting with the dragon is from Rifts Conversion Book One. Two of the Long’s — the shaman-looking dude and those rocket pack troopers — were covers of Rifter Magazine. That leaves three. I think the two remaining Parkinsons — the tiger woman and the barbarians on horseback — were just sitting around his studio. They don’t feel particularly Palladium-y to me, though I suppose they could have been on a Palladium Fantasy publication I’ve never seen. Long’s bug invasion does feel Riftsish, though, but again, not sure if it was ever used elsewhere. Ah well.

I gotta say, this is maybe the purest distillation of Rifts for me, because its foregrounds all the cool skull masks and monsters and stuff and I don’t have to worry about the sheer poundage of pages and rules. Shame this is the only one.

I could have reused this in 2021, but I didn’t know you could reuse calendars at that point. Thankfully, 1993 is a pretty common year and will be usable again in 2027. Can’t come fast enough!