Palladium books?

[Summer-Knight925]

From what I understand the financial troubles have crippled this company, but other than the lack of new material, is the current/old material good?

I've been looking at the 'new' RIFTS on shelf at my local game store, I also did a little bit of research and found Beyond Supernatural and Dead Reign to peak an interest.

Anyone wanna help a fellow gamer out?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What do you mean by "good?"

Palladium's stuff- especially the RIFTS material- has some of the best fluff in the biz. Extremely rich settings. The mechanics, however, are the company's shortfall. Not only are they outdated, they were never particularly good to start off with.

And I say all of this as someone who has a BUNCH of RIFTS (and other Palladium games).

 

[Summer-Knight925]

So worth it or not?

thats the question, I can work with broken mechanics, tweak them a bit where needed, perhaps take some parts from then and work out a homebrew, who knows, I got a copy of Dead Reign via download a few ago and from what I see, it is very basic but the mechanics are a bit whack

so the plan?
work parts of it into my own zombie rpg


this sound good or is RIFTs worth the buy?

 

[Saeviomagy]

The system isn't fairly painful, balance is pretty much non-existent, and a fair few of the rifts books don't have very much in the way of coherency...

BUT

There's some really awesome ideas there. Dream mages, magically awakened slaughterhouses, worlds on the other side of the mirror.

I think that pretty much sums up palladiums entire line.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Honestly, the mechanics are quite ditchable. While I've run RIFTS straight-up a few times, I find it does better as a set of resource books.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if you want to buy books that you may only be using one half of.

For a zombie game, unless you're planning on going mind-blowingly far out, I don't know that you'd find much value in RIFTS. Its just too "WAHOOOO!" for that. However, some of the other Palladium books- like the aforementioned Beyond the Supernatural may be of use.

One thing: if you do get more than one Palladium game to work with, I'd make sure that I picked up the Conversion Guide, which at least gets all of the stuff into common ground.

 

[Summer-Knight925]

I was referring to the zombie element coming from Dead Reign, which came from Beyond Supernatural

which would be more promising IF the other 2 core rule books were released OR had a release date...as of now theyre still in production

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I was referring to the zombie element coming from Dead Reign, which came from Beyond Supernatural

which would be more promising IF the other 2 core rule books were released OR had a release date...as of now theyre still in production

That I cannot answer.

 

[LostSoul]

I recently (last year!) bought a copy of Palladium Fantasy 2nd edition. I think the mechanics are pretty solid. They do a good job with what they were meant to do - allow players to adventure in the default setting.

The advice on how to run a game is pretty hard to understand, but that's typical of books produced in that era. It's spread out throughout the whole of the book, instead of being condensed into one area. I think that if you take a look at all the text as a whole, you'll get a good idea of how the game is supposed to be played.

And I think that, if you work with that idea, you will have a good game.

 

[Lord Crimson]

I was referring to the zombie element coming from Dead Reign, which came from Beyond Supernatural

which would be more promising IF the other 2 core rule books were released OR had a release date...as of now theyre still in production

This is actually the biggest issue you'll see with Palladium books - those other books you're talking about? They may not actually get around to being published for years. Even if KS and crew post a release date, they will almost certainly miss it, and not just by a month or two.

Ultimately, Dannyalcatraz has the right of it. The system is a hot mess (and yes, you can try to fix bits and pieces, but there's a lot more than "bits and pieces" wrong with it) but the setting has a lot of post-apocalyptic, magical, kitchen-sink awesome built into it.

The questions are:

1. Do you really think you can fix something that the whole of Palladium fandom still hasn't been able to fix after 20 years?
2. Or do you really want to put the work into shoehorning an inherently unbalanced setting/system into something more coherent but also completely unable to really do the "gonzo" that makes RIFTS so interesting?

As for me, I love me some RIFTS. But I've played it for years, know its shortcomings, have a handful of houserules, and just accept that the rest can't be "fixed" (at least not without a from-the-ground rewrite that might very well end up destroying the very things I love about it).

Palladium in general and RIFTS in specific do get more flack in the message boards than they probably actually deserve. On the other hand, they also get a lot of flack that they fully deserve.

 

[Twowolves]

If you really want to give the world of RIFTS a try, do one of the following:

1) ditch the rules and use Mutants and Masterminds

2) ditch the rules and use Savage Worlds

3) ditch the rules and use Marvel Superheroes/RASERIP

4) ditch the rules and just make it up as you go along.

Any of these suggestions will work better than the "rules" they put in the books.