Rifts Sourcebook (1991) was the very first supplement for Rifts and it is sort of a potpourri of material that probably should have been in the core rules. To give you some idea of how true this is, it opens with six pages of “Answers to Questions about Rifts,” a set of rules clarifications that illustrates A. How complex Rifts really is and B. How seat-of-the-pants the initial iteration of the game was.

The best chunk of the book details the Coalition, the fascist empire that has taken over most of the US. The initial foray into the Coalition section is titled “The Coalition: Good of Evil?” and it tries to paint the clearly evil government in shades of gray (these are the guys with the skelebots and the spider skeleton robots and the guys in skull mask armor, just to be clear). Two pages later, the book gives up and the title “The CS Government: The Source of Evil” appears. This is a good example, I think, of what it feels like to read any given Rifts book. So much whiplash.

Lots of material on Triax, the German arms manufacturer, which boils down to a guns chapter. There is a selection of monsters, rules for Bot characters. The “botweiller” is introduced. Also ARCHIE, a giant brain in a jar (er, pool?) that can build all sorts of machine horrors/wonders, but lacks the imagination to come up with designs. So it needs a partner. In this case, Hagan, the fellow on the cover, who is ARCHIE’s literal idea man. I kind of love this? Even if the botweiller is one of Hagan’s ideas.

Kevin Long artwork through and through. That cover is top shelf Rifts, and his interiors are just endlessly entertaining. Rifts really wouldn’t work at all, I think, without Long providing at least some of the visual cement.