Why confused? Because it’s Rifts. Gods can’t just be gods, they have to cross dimensions/genres at every possible opportunity. Hecate has Witchblade armor (which, OK, impressive since Witchblade came out the following year), Krishna’s goth, Asgardian dwarves are gunsmiths, Shiva looks like an Ultimate Weapon from Final Fantasy (again, ahead of the curve, but still). Then there is “Huitzilopochtli, the Warrior of the Sun, full conversion cyborg.” And he just looks like a ‘roided out Coaltion bot.

Worse, there are all these impostor gods running around. There are three versions of the Oympian gods. I can barely parse the core pantheons, let alone the knock-offs. When I say I often find Rifts exhausting, this book is the best embodiment of my fatigue that I have encountered so far. And even then…John Zeleznik’s cover is cool enough that I probably won’t get rid of the book. Frickin’ Rifts.

The post Pantheons of the Megaverse (1994) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

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!

The post Rifts 1993 Calendar (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

There’s the basic stuff you’d expect from a book like this, of course. Regional information, (so many) new character classes, monsters. Various types of African mysticism and magic get a lot of attention, as do the gods of Egypt. The latter are important for the Phoenix Empire, which is a techno/theocratic resurgence of the ancient Egyptian culture. All this stuff, off course, mashes together the usual melange of extradimensional hijinx. The Phoenix Empire is extremely similar to Torg’s Nile Empire, but the twist is either silly or bizarre, depending on your temperament: Pharaoh Rama-Set looks like a man, but is actually a Celestial Dragon in disguise? I, for one, approve.

The real star of the show, though, is the introduction of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are all presented in typically over-the-top fashion (though given plausible weight thanks to Kevin Long’s illustrations). They’re spread out on the African continent, doing their individual things while also seeking each other. Should all four meet, they will fuse into a giant apocalypse beast that will destroy the world, so the book suggests that the players find and destroy the horsemen before that happens. Truly, a wild scaling of power going on here.

The post World Book Four: Africa (1993) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

The Mechanoid Invasion (1981) spun out of a never-realized idea for a comic series and was Palladium’s first RPG. It tells the story of an Earth invaded by hostile aliens and humanity’s desperate hunt for ancient weapons with which they can turn the tide of war. The Mechanoids themselves are little squishy alien weirdos with a talent for creating mechanical war suits of various shapes and sizes. They remind me a lot of the Krang, in fact, and I wonder if that similarity was what inspired Siembieda to secure the TMNT license for a game (honestly not sure when the TCRI aliens first show up in the comics, or if they had robot suits when they do; it might be too late to have influenced the RPG deal, but maybe the Mechanoids influenced Eastman and Laird?).

Anyway, this book reintroduces the Mechanoids in the context of Rifts. They’re basically the same murderous conquerors as they were a decade previous, and you might think another faction of robo-skeleton guys would be hard to distinguish (especially since, curiously, ARCHIE and Hagan get further detailing in this book and come with more skelly-robots that are even more clearly patterned on the Terminator). But the opposite is true, I think, the Mechanoids seem cooler to me in the context of all the other bonkers crap that’s going on in Rifts. In their first iteration, they’re basically just rehashed War of the Worlds Martians stomping on pretty ill-prepared humans. And, I mean, the Mechanoids clearly have an advantage over the Coalition, judging from Kevin Long’s cover painting. But how do they measure up against (or how do they make friends with) Atlantis, or the Splugorth, or Triax, or the Federation of Magic? Or even ARCHIE and Hagan? Who can tell, honestly?

Newton Ewell and Kevin Siembieda join Kevin Long in the interior illustrations, but really, it’s Long’s show all the way.

The post Sourcebook Two: The Mechanoids (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

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.

The post Rifts Sourcebook (1991) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, it’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There’s Stu’s new radio show, Games People Play (co-hosting with Unwinnable’s own Sara Clemens)! There’s Hambone’s reaction to Sinners! There’s the Rifts calendar! There’s the Warriors of the Galaxy play set with sound effects box!

* * *

Check out the debut broadcast of Games People Play in the WFMU archives! As of now, we’re filling in for other shows, so we don’t have a regular time slot. Hopefully in the summer! Next show is Friday, May 16, 6pm – 7pm.

* * *

Want to reuse a calendar? This site’s got you covered!

* * *

Instagram? Old news. Join the Vintage RPG Newsletter! That’s where all the cool kids are now!

Stu’s book, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground is for sale now! Buy it!

Patreon? Discord? Cool RPG things to buy? All the Vintage RPG links you need are right here in one place!

Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!

Edited by the one and only R. Alex Murray.

Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.

Available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.

The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.

Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Just Riffin’ appeared first on Vintage RPG.

* * *

Through September 7, use the code ROLLDICE to get $6 off any purchase $25 or more at Noble Knight!Hang out with us on the Vintage RPG Discord!If  you dig what we do, join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises! Patrons keep us going!Like, Rate, Subscribe and Review the Vintage RPG Podcast!Available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube and your favorite podcast clients.Send questions, comments or corrections to info@vintagerpg.com.Follow Vintage RPG on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook. Learn more at the Vintage RPG FAQ.Follow Stu Horvath, John McGuire, VintageRPG and Unwinnable on Twitter.Intro music by George Collazo.The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.Tune in next week for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

The post Rifts appeared first on Vintage RPG.

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.

The post England (1993) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

I chose this one for two reasons. Primarily, as is the way with 90% of Rifts books, it has awesome cover art. The interiors are pretty great too. Kevin Long isn’t present, but the artist who are have significantly upped the skulls and masks game and, in the case of the Mystic Knights (I think that is what they are) combined the two to excellent effect.

Second, FoM appeared seven years into Rifts’ run. Rifts itself was the culmination of about ten years of design work on Palladium’s in-house system and combined pretty much all their previous game lines. By 1997, that means we’re talking 16 years of development without a real line editor (RPG line editors make sure every entry into a setting makes sense continuity-wise and that readers new to the material aren’t overwhelmed by that continuity). Instead, you have Kevin Siembieda essentially doing the heavy lifting of creating the line by himself, with no one to rein in his unfettered creativity.

This makes the book impenetrable. Where Atlantis was dense, I can at least flip through it and get a sense of what is going on. Federation of Magic is absolutely beyond me. No matter where I decide to dip into the text, it is packed with jargon and dripping with lore.

I suspect this is actually important to Rifts’ success. As I mentioned on Monday, creator Kevin Siembieda had a history in comics and Rifts books had a tendency to turn up on comic shop shelves. What better place was there to pick up a huge untapped market of teens who had never played RPGs before? Rifts books are the equivalent of cocaine for continuity brains, the exact same brains that are drawn to superhero comics. If I had gotten into Rifts in high school, I would have stopped at nothing to learn everything I could about the setting, because that’s how the books are structured. There’s always an intriguing reference to something else.

Sadly, I am not a high schooler anymore, so my window of opportunity to be able to rattle off facts about Rifts the way I can Star Wars and super hero comics is pretty firmly closed.

The post Federation of Magic (1997) appeared first on Vintage RPG.

This one is Atlantis. Because of course Atlantis is back. Why wouldn’t it be? It seems like a horrible place to visit.

As you’ll find whenever I try to talk about a Rifts book, summaries escape me because there is just so much crammed in here. We’ve got the Splugorth (that name, my god), a villain faction of awful techno-mages. We’ve got 20 more races suitable for players, rune magic, bio-wizardy, tattoo magic (from the back copy of the book: “including T-Men, Maxi-Men, T-Monster Men and Undead Slayers) and dragons. And pages and pages of new weapons and power armor. And the book is only 160 pages.

The art is still high quality, even if a lot of it – particularly what I assume are the Splugorth’s weird mecha are super WTF. You’ll note some dudes in masks. Masks are about as prevalent in Rifts as skulls and almost always pretty badass. I get the impression that you can tell a character’s faction by their mask, which really tickles my childhood love of Star Wars and Cobra action figures.

Fun fact: the tentacle dude with the laser gun babes from the Rifts rulebook is a Splugorth. It took a lot of work to figure that out.

The post Atlantis (1992) appeared first on Vintage RPG.