My image of a post apocalyptic setting is probably characterized by three main features:

Small Population - abandoned rural and urban areas

Skill Desert - Finding people who know how to do anything technical is a challenge

Dangerous Traveling - For some reason, hitting the road is dangerous. Despite the road being dangerous, people can still live along it rurally.

If you don't know, the setting for Rifts is a post nuclear war setting where the deaths of billions of people all at once resulted in portals to other universes opening up along laylines, spilling demons and aliens out, and those same portals causing environmental disasters, which together depopulated the planet.

It occurred to me that if cities were to be built anywhere, that it would be more likely that they would be built on top of a layline or places where they cross. When the Rifts opened up to demons and aliens, they would have mostly opened over very populated areas just targeted by the nuclear weapons themselves.

Long Term: For the Rifts setting to get the feel right, that final fantasy mix of high tech and low population, there needs to be something going on keeping people from connecting the infrastructure or populating heavily.

The relatively low number of military assets capable of fighting aliens would keep people huddled around them. The rifts and creatures themselves destroying most of what was left of the old infrastructure, including power plants and cities.

The impossibility of growing GMOs or getting high quality fertilizer, and the demons making it more difficult to transport anything long distance without armed escort means people will need to eat local much more often.

A colossal amount of space junk proceeding a futuristic world war could prevent satellites from being used.

A part of what the world needs in its description is how that homeostasis is maintained. I don't think it would take 100 years to repopulate and rebuild society of universities, trains, cargo ships, mining and farming all got started again. There has to be powerful forces keeping people down.

A part of it could be that a HUGE portion of the resources are being used, maybe all of the power from power plants, to make and charge the batteries that are needed to power Mega Damage lasers and Rail Guns you need to kill demons.

If the materials for those weapons aren't normally available to humans, but come from getting alien technology and materials from things that come through the Rifts, it would put a hard limit on how much armor is around, and how big an area you can protect from demons.

If there are various territorial creatures who claim vast areas of the earth, preventing humans from fixing roads or repairing rail lines. "The principality of North Dakota does not permit humans from traveling through his lands," would be a big problem.

Excellent thread – the subject is near and dear to my heart – and great posts.

One of the things that seems to never gain a shred of attention in Rifts is the absolute wreck that Earth's ecosystem must be with the massive, widespread introduction of virtually indestructible (read: MDC) creatures.

Seriously. Every wild place on Rifts Earth should be covered in alien flora and fauna unless you severely downplay the frequency of rifts opening and of things coming through them.

I'll post more stuff as I remember it, later.

Isn't a major theme of Rifts that the apocalypse is being left behind with infrastructure and population centers being rebuilt?  North America has a population somewhere in the tens of millions.

RIFTS speaks directly to the issue of MDC being the rule of law.  How villains move into towns, kill those that can oppose them and dominate the rest.  Splugorth slave raids and all that.  Yes they huddle around the guns that can keep them safe.

Then there's the Coalition, Federation of Magic, Kingsdale, Worth, etc who actively patrol their territories.  They keep baddies in check and, in the case of ChiTown, keep the population in check as well.  No schools, no art, no culture, etc.

That is exactly how it works.  Civilized places like Atlantis and Tolkeen are also high-mana centers unless you're dealing with magic-phobes like the Coalition.  Outside of those centers, there isn't much civilization to speak of, certainly not a networked one like today.

JG

Quote from: Old One Eye;719760Isn't a major theme of Rifts that the apocalypse is being left behind with infrastructure and population centers being rebuilt?  North America has a population somewhere in the tens of millions.

"Tens of millions" is pretty freaking depopulated.  Europe post-Black Death had many tens of millions of people in a smaller area than North America.

As far as cities built on laylines, wouldn't a bunch of cities be built as far away from them as possible?  Look, if the San Andreas fault opened up apocalyptically, and California sank into the sea, the survivors sure wouldn't just shrug and move to the next fault line over.

Quote from: ForumScavenger;719686My image of a post apocalyptic setting is probably characterized by three main features:

Small Population - abandoned rural and urban areas

Skill Desert - Finding people who know how to do anything technical is a challenge

Dangerous Traveling - For some reason, hitting the road is dangerous. Despite the road being dangerous, people can still live along it rurally.

The core book, at least the original one (cover depicts a tentacle monster with hot chick honor guard) implies all of these conditions. However, the information is scattered about haphazardly. IIRC, the description of the Operator class makes the existence of the skill desert quite clear.

Consider though, that Rifts  isn't strictly post-apocalypse, but just barely post-post-apocalypse, so civilization has started to rebuild. However, the days when humanity was the uncontested dominant species are gone.

QuoteIf you don't know, the setting for Rifts is a post nuclear war setting where the deaths of billions of people all at once resulted in portals to other universes opening up along laylines, spilling demons and aliens out, and those same portals causing environmental disasters, which together depopulated the planet.

It occurred to me that if cities were to be built anywhere, that it would be more likely that they would be built on top of a layline or places where they cross. When the Rifts opened up to demons and aliens, they would have mostly opened over very populated areas just targeted by the nuclear weapons themselves.

According to the book, magic-using civilizations (e.g. Tolkeen or Atlantis) generally do build on a nexus, use the available energy, and take steps to minimize or mitigate the attendant dangers. Those civilizations which can't or won't make productive use of ley line energy (e.g. the Coalition) generally build as far away from it as they can.

QuoteLong Term: For the Rifts setting to get the feel right, that final fantasy mix of high tech and low population, there needs to be something going on keeping people from connecting the infrastructure or populating heavily.

The relatively low number of military assets capable of fighting aliens would keep people huddled around them. The rifts and creatures themselves destroying most of what was left of the old infrastructure, including power plants and cities.

The impossibility of growing GMOs or getting high quality fertilizer, and the demons making it more difficult to transport anything long distance without armed escort means people will need to eat local much more often.

This is implied here and there in the book. In my campaign, parts of what used to be rural Pennsylvania cultivated a pre-rifts genetically modified grass whence to synthesize fuel. This was a small operation by pre-rifts standards, but enough for a town full of NPCs to go Red Harvest on each other.

Keep in mind also that Rifts player characters are deliberately not reflective of the world as a whole. They're ahead of the general curve in terms of access to high tech weaponry, while at the same time not necessarily being beholden to any of the major powers of the setting. In the quasi-feudal society the book posits, this is unusual.

QuoteA colossal amount of space junk proceeding a futuristic world war could prevent satellites from being used.

IIRC the core book explicitly provides this as one explanation for why space travel and satellite communications are a no-go.

QuoteA part of what the world needs in its description is how that homeostasis is maintained. I don't think it would take 100 years to repopulate and rebuild society of universities, trains, cargo ships, mining and farming all got started again. There has to be powerful forces keeping people down.

A part of it could be that a HUGE portion of the resources are being used, maybe all of the power from power plants, to make and charge the batteries that are needed to power Mega Damage lasers and Rail Guns you need to kill demons.

If the materials for those weapons aren't normally available to humans, but come from getting alien technology and materials from things that come through the Rifts, it would put a hard limit on how much armor is around, and how big an area you can protect from demons.

Agreed, it would be nice if Palladium did a bit more of this legwork for the GM, or at least provided some good tools to make it easier.

In my own campaign, I had freelance salvage crews cannibalizing a pre-rifts maglev subway to sell the materials (superconductors, MDC alloys, etc) to armed caravans, who later sell them to the various small and middling powers of North America. This is dangerous work, so not everybody is up to it. Naturally there's a limited supply of materials in circulation.
The players only stopped to ask for directions, but they could have stuck their noses in had they wanted.

QuoteIf there are various territorial creatures who claim vast areas of the earth, preventing humans from fixing roads or repairing rail lines. "The principality of North Dakota does not permit humans from traveling through his lands," would be a big problem.

Yes. Atlantis is one example of this in the setting. Xiticix territory is probably a better example, as human travelers could conceivably try to cross it on their way from one city to another.

Quote from: Ravenswing;719802"Tens of millions" is pretty freaking depopulated.  Europe post-Black Death had many tens of millions of people in a smaller area than North America.

As far as cities built on laylines, wouldn't a bunch of cities be built as far away from them as possible?  Look, if the San Andreas fault opened up apocalyptically, and California sank into the sea, the survivors sure wouldn't just shrug and move to the next fault line over.

It depends. If you have the means to make productive use of all that magic energy and minimize the risks, building on a ley line nexus starts looking pretty good.

Realistically (yes I know that is an ironic statement for a fantasy PA setting) it would take about 50 years to be back to the early 20th century. A solid 19th century tech base with early electrical system up and running. Radios, train systems, small hydro-plants, wind power, etc. And with some high tech centers still functioning it might take less time than that. But we love the 'primitive' PA setting. We play with entropy. Things work after decades or centuries of disuse when realistically they would completely fail after only a year or even a few months of downtime. Heck, in my factory you leave a machine down for a month and it might take two maintenance guys hours to get it running. We love out techy toys.

Slightly off-topic: Is Rifts worth picking up and playing? If so, which version (Are there more than one?) and if not using the original mechanics, which substitute?

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;719855Slightly off-topic: Is Rifts worth picking up and playing? If so, which version (Are there more than one?) and if not using the original mechanics, which substitute?

I like the original honestly.

It is a pretty solid game too once you come to grips with the system. It really gives the player alot of freedom of choice in character progress.

The game though is not novice-GM friendly. You have to guess what monsters would be good opponents for a group with XYZ loadouts. In general expect to underestimate just what the PCs can dole out in damage.

Once you get the hang of it though the game rolls along fairly well. A few expansion books and things can really get crazy. Personal favorite is Rifts Underseas for opening up some interesting aquatic adventures and cetacian PCs.

If you just want one complete game though then possibly look at the After the Bomb RPG as it in its original TMNT PA setting and especially Beyond the Supernatural RPG were the foundations for Rifts. The ATB RPG though is now a standalone RPG sans most of the TMNT stuff.

Quote from: Dan Vincze;719812It depends. If you have the means to make productive use of all that magic energy and minimize the risks, building on a ley line nexus starts looking pretty good.

I didn't mean really that people were building on laylines for a benefit intentionally, but that cities would just happen to be on the nexus of the lines, because that's where river crossings, river forks, valleys, and things like that would also / could also be. On top of that, people might in general be drawn there, out of conscious / unconscious feelings of religious significance.

The layline at Jerusalem. The layline at Rome. The layline the runs along the Ohio River. The laylines that cross in Las Vegas' valley.

In that way, when the Rifts opened, they opened right on top of where most people were living.

Dan, a part of why I feel the world needs to be chopped up in the way it is, is that I think having a lot of anarchy is important in the setting. There has to be limits on how information travels and how resources and people get around.

If Frank is playing a Mind Melter, and he fries a Coalition soldier, the other Coalition troops are going to radio your position to base. A Robot flies over and spots you. A hover craft is then deployed full of robots to come and waste you. If you escape them, they just radio ahead to the next base and they send people after you. It would be worse than real life because everything flies.

The fact that you solve problems in this game with mini missiles makes me think there is some reason the CS can't just come after you. The whole idea of the CS having these boarders of claimed territory doesn't sit right with me. Are they collecting taxes or providing services to be inside those boarders? Do they have some capacity to maintain them from anything walking through? If someone gets into trouble 200 miles from Chi Town, can they just deploy a bunch of spider walkers or are they too few to spend that way?

Quote from: Omega;719863

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;719855Slightly off-topic: Is Rifts worth picking up and playing? If so, which version (Are there more than one?) and if not using the original mechanics, which substitute?

I like the original honestly.

It is a pretty solid game too once you come to grips with the system. It really gives the player alot of freedom of choice in character progress.

The game though is not novice-GM friendly. You have to guess what monsters would be good opponents for a group with XYZ loadouts. In general expect to underestimate just what the PCs can dole out in damage.

Once you get the hang of it though the game rolls along fairly well. A few expansion books and things can really get crazy. Personal favorite is Rifts Underseas for opening up some interesting aquatic adventures and cetacian PCs.

I have little to add to Omega's fine run-down:

The system is not really bad in and of itself, just abysmally presented in both writing and layout. PFRPG 1e made great use of charts for both hand-to-hand and percentile-based non-combat skills, and God only know why KS decided to do away with those somewhere along the evolution of the Palladium house system.

The game as a whole, both setting and system, requires a GM who's not afraid to step up and let the players know what's kosher and what's not. This is particularly true once you start piling on the supplements, where the power creep gets out of hand real fast.

Speaking of supplements, Rifts World Book 2: Atlantis is where the power creep really got started, but it's such an iconic piece of Rifts lore that I cannot in good conscience recommend against picking it up.

Conversion Book 1, in addition to conversion notes for other Palladium games, is a useful bestiary. Conversion Book 2 has a couple good ideas but it's mostly just stats for gods plus a Priest class. Conversion Book 3 is another bestiary, plus conversion notes.

I'd avoid the South America books, which feature both nasty power creep and horrible, poorly thought-out fluff.

Vampire Kingdoms is mandatory for games with, well, vampires, Mexico or the American Southwest. It's also got a great write-up of Ciudad Juarez as a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

England and Africa are forgettable but not guilty of power creep.

I am very, very fond of Triax & the NGR, Mindwerks and both Russia books. I also enjoyed the Underseas book. Juicer Uprising was cool for the world info and new toys, but I wasn't crazy about the adventure.

Coalition War Campaign seriously cranks up the Coalition power creep.

I can't comment on anything post-Russia becuase that's when I jumped off of the Rifts supplement treadmill.