So... Palladium Rifts. I've played in two honest-to-God Rifts campaigns about 25-years ago. Both times were fun as hell. But that system!... In both cases, the campaigns felt like D&D and Gamma World PC's slammed together, in a Gamma World-with-Magic setting, and the politics never went much further than our local corner of the map, which was somewhere in Nevada/Colorado/AZ.

Of course we've all heard about the Coalition - Space Nazis! And even in the context of our old campaigns, while they weren't the exact bad guys, our GM who was really into Rifts, didn't portray them as the fascists everyone talks about. The facts were they were - they were just more pragmatic about it. I as a Cyberknight, was given more leeway than the Demons we both fought. And while we weren't allies, we apparently weren't interested in killing one another "just because". Magic or no magic. D-Bee or otherwise.

As a player, I never dived too deeply into the lore of the game mainly because I wanted to experience it as a player. Fresh eyes on the setting as presented by a GM that knew what they wanted and how to give us that experience. But this kept me ignorant of a *massive* amount of lore. When the campaigns folded, I was back on GMing duty and doing multi-year affairs, and never came back to Rifts...

Then Savage Worlds Rifts dropped. And as many round here know, it's become my system of choice, and while I was fond of Rifts, the baroqueness of the Palladium house system was long off the menu for me. Further, I was *skeptical* Savage Worlds could possibly scale to sheer ridiculous power-levels of Rifts. But I was intensely curious and realized IF it could be done, it had further implications about my future using this system for other things. So decided to run it. But I started reading, and bought a bunch of Rifts books to supplement the SW versions.

This brought me immediately to the Coalition. Naturally I've seen lots of reference to the Coalition as this eeeeeevil organization, and when the Savage Worlds Rifts edition dropped, they didn't candy-coat it. But they also put a lot of nuance in there I found intriguing. I wasn't sure if this was a Pinnacle thing, where they introduced a "neutral" organization, this Kumbaya Legion (The Tomorrow Legion) where everyone can hold hands and fight the good fight. /eyeroll, fine. And yes, it's put there intentionally to be an alternative to what I'd later read in the Palladium books.

The Coalition are fascists, but contextually, I'm a bit surprised at how much nuance Kevin Siembieda and his crew unapologetically write about them. The Palladium Rifts books are really good source material reads - and filled with intrigue and heart. The evils of the Coalition in the face of Armageddon is a powerful and visceral backdrop, and worth exploring. The same is true of the Federation of Magic - both of which do great good for Humanity writ large, but are also doing such evil shit in spite of one another.

I'm about to be a player in a Coalition campaign and I'm excited because while sure, we're going to do some heinous stuff, but we're going to be put in heinous circumstances. I don't feel the Palladium Rifts books get enough credit for the moral and ethical quandaries cooked into the setting. Most people just riff off the Rifts-is-Gonzo and blow it off. But under the hood, there is some really interesting stuff in there for playing a little more deeply.

I can't help but feel it's a more sane version of Warhammer 40k.

My question to anyone else that is a Rifts fan: What are some juicy tidbits and day-in-the-life stuff that people miss or don't know about in Rifts? I'm still relatively new to this, but catching up fast. Anything is game - not just Coalition.

(and if anyone cares, I'm trying to be a Coalition Mind-Melter Psi-Stalker from Psi-Battalion - if the GM vetoes me, then I'm going to be a Psi-Stalker Commando. One of the other PC's is going to be a Dog Boy, and we have 5 PC's total.)

Yeah the Coalition is "evil" in the sense that they hate dee-bees, the supernatural, etc. But honestly, they sort of have a point. I know I wouldn't want to be a normal dude just trying to scrape by under constant threat to be kidnapped and sent to Atlantis to do God knows what, or have my brain blown up because some psychic didn't like the chicken sandwich I made him. I wouldn't necessarily call them fascists; they're just heavy-handed for the most part because they have to be to create any semblance of a society. Chi-town is a police state because anything less means the normies get overrun by bandits, demons, dragons, whatever. Obviously the dudes at the top take advantage of their positions and throw their weight around irresponsibly, but show me any government where this isn't the case and I'll gladly accept the fascist label. Anyway...the original artwork/uniforms were great, I hate the revised ones. On to something else.

I think the #1 overlooked Rifts "fact" is that the most competent, power characters are actually just normal people who decide to be exceptional. Yeah, that dragon can shapeshift and breathe fire and takes MDC damage, the borg has laser beam eyes, and the leyline walker can cast magical spells, but at the end of the day it's going to be some jackass kid from the burbs who is leading the way and eventually ends up in charge. My best Rifts character was a rogue scholar; he had no inherent abilities or powers, but through sheer force of will and crafty planning was able to challenge Splynncryth and gain ownership over part of Atlantis. While the rest of the group was a bunch of heavies who saw every problem as a nail and their overpowered abilities as hammers, my character knew he had to find alternative means to accomplish his goals and pulled some Captain Kirk shit out of his ass. So it's possible that MAYBE this has nothing to do with OCC and more to do with how you play the game, but in Rifts it seems especially true. There are so many cool OCCs/RCCs to play with neat stuff they can do that many, many times the smart courses of action are overlooked simply because they're not as fun. Still, the normal rubes will be able to fit in anywhere and being able to blend into the shadows is a massive benefit. Don't stand out to psychics, mages, demons tend to ignore you, Coalition just thinks you're some rando, etc.

I'd also say the best OCCs are from the original book. Glitter boy, leyline walker, cyber knight...those are all the iconic Rifts characters. Psi- Stalkers are pretty badass if you play them correctly.

Quote from: tenbones on December 15, 2022, 08:53:11 AM
So... Palladium Rifts. I've played in two honest-to-God Rifts campaigns about 25-years ago. Both times were fun as hell. But that system!... In both cases, the campaigns felt like D&D and Gamma World PC's slammed together, in a Gamma World-with-Magic setting, and the politics never went much further than our local corner of the map, which was somewhere in Nevada/Colorado/AZ.

Of course we've all heard about the Coalition - Space Nazis! And even in the context of our old campaigns, while they weren't the exact bad guys, our GM who was really into Rifts, didn't portray them as the fascists everyone talks about. The facts were they were - they were just more pragmatic about it. I as a Cyberknight, was given more leeway than the Demons we both fought. And while we weren't allies, we apparently weren't interested in killing one another "just because". Magic or no magic. D-Bee or otherwise.

As a player, I never dived too deeply into the lore of the game mainly because I wanted to experience it as a player. Fresh eyes on the setting as presented by a GM that knew what they wanted and how to give us that experience. But this kept me ignorant of a *massive* amount of lore. When the campaigns folded, I was back on GMing duty and doing multi-year affairs, and never came back to Rifts...

Then Savage Worlds Rifts dropped. And as many round here know, it's become my system of choice, and while I was fond of Rifts, the baroqueness of the Palladium house system was long off the menu for me. Further, I was *skeptical* Savage Worlds could possibly scale to sheer ridiculous power-levels of Rifts. But I was intensely curious and realized IF it could be done, it had further implications about my future using this system for other things. So decided to run it. But I started reading, and bought a bunch of Rifts books to supplement the SW versions.

This brought me immediately to the Coalition. Naturally I've seen lots of reference to the Coalition as this eeeeeevil organization, and when the Savage Worlds Rifts edition dropped, they didn't candy-coat it. But they also put a lot of nuance in there I found intriguing. I wasn't sure if this was a Pinnacle thing, where they introduced a "neutral" organization, this Kumbaya Legion (The Tomorrow Legion) where everyone can hold hands and fight the good fight. /eyeroll, fine. And yes, it's put there intentionally to be an alternative to what I'd later read in the Palladium books.

The Coalition are fascists, but contextually, I'm a bit surprised at how much nuance Kevin Siembieda and his crew unapologetically write about them. The Palladium Rifts books are really good source material reads - and filled with intrigue and heart. The evils of the Coalition in the face of Armageddon is a powerful and visceral backdrop, and worth exploring. The same is true of the Federation of Magic - both of which do great good for Humanity writ large, but are also doing such evil shit in spite of one another.

I'm about to be a player in a Coalition campaign and I'm excited because while sure, we're going to do some heinous stuff, but we're going to be put in heinous circumstances. I don't feel the Palladium Rifts books get enough credit for the moral and ethical quandaries cooked into the setting. Most people just riff off the Rifts-is-Gonzo and blow it off. But under the hood, there is some really interesting stuff in there for playing a little more deeply.

I can't help but feel it's a more sane version of Warhammer 40k.

My question to anyone else that is a Rifts fan: What are some juicy tidbits and day-in-the-life stuff that people miss or don't know about in Rifts? I'm still relatively new to this, but catching up fast. Anything is game - not just Coalition.

(and if anyone cares, I'm trying to be a Coalition Mind-Melter Psi-Stalker from Psi-Battalion - if the GM vetoes me, then I'm going to be a Psi-Stalker Commando. One of the other PC's is going to be a Dog Boy, and we have 5 PC's total.)

Rifts is a great setting, sometimes. Kevin's writing ranges all over the place. From really thought provoking background on the process of creating the Dog Boys, to the utter silliness of Myrr-lynn and the Knight of the Round table.

The Coalition is a great example. A bunch of bad guys who have a point and a method to their madness, and their over the top asthetic of putting skulls on everything.

My personal favorite approach is to portray the world as having gone insane due to living in an insane world. A world where a guy, a simple farmer living on the outskirts of civilization. One day, the most horrific thing just floats into town. A monster with tentacles and magical cybernetics riding a platform covered with living eyeballs, takes his family and friends to do who-knows-what to them, and he's powerless to stop it. In his desperation, he travels to the nearest cyber doc and gets a  Juicer conversion so he has a chance against the bizarre creatures who took his family, and spends a few years of indentured servitude paying back the cost of his juicing. He then goes on a probably failed journey to find out what happened to his family.

People in the world of Rifts see some f**ked up shit, and are likely traumatized. Thus we get people who dress up as cowboys in the New West, people who put monstrous skulls on their robot vehicles. If you were fighting demons and vampires and worse, you might feel like putting a skull on your head and screaming at the world too.

Quote from: Brad on December 15, 2022, 09:50:19 AM
Yeah the Coalition is "evil" in the sense that they hate dee-bees, the supernatural, etc. But honestly, they sort of have a point. I know I wouldn't want to be a normal dude just trying to scrape by under constant threat to be kidnapped and sent to Atlantis to do God knows what, or have my brain blown up because some psychic didn't like the chicken sandwich I made him. I wouldn't necessarily call them fascists; they're just heavy-handed for the most part because they have to be to create any semblance of a society. Chi-town is a police state because anything less means the normies get overrun by bandits, demons, dragons, whatever. Obviously the dudes at the top take advantage of their positions and throw their weight around irresponsibly, but show me any government where this isn't the case and I'll gladly accept the fascist label. Anyway...the original artwork/uniforms were great, I hate the revised ones.

I hate the first versions of the new Coalition style, but Perez kind of redeems it.

*Salutes* Hail the Coalition.   

The Coalition of PA 109 evolved from NEMA, which was the most powerful military organization that existed at the time when the ley lines and magic erupted over the earth. From this came the Rifts, and everything that came through these Rifts we're all the horrors that still plague the Rifts Earth of PA 109.

After dealing with all the human death caused over a couple centuries by magic, vile creatures, and so on... NEMA became very Human centric and rightfully so. When this organization witnessed the continual wrecking of earth for centuries and tried to fight for humanity, eventually they changed from a peace keeping force into a more human only fascist force, but it's really more just Anti-Magic and Anti-Nonhuman after centuries of hell.

From our own modern perspective we could see the Coalition as evil, but then there is the Federation of Magic, which kinda proves the Coalition right. Right? 😉

Probably the reason most people find the Coalition cooler than one might expect is that most of the OCCs linked to it -- the characters players actually play, in other words -- tend to be the kinds of characters who go out and physically fight monsters face to face to protect their people. That's badass and respectable as a basic fact. The people who really bring the evil to most totalitarian movements in real life aren't the front-line soldiers, but the internal secret police, witch-hunt style inquisitors, prison camp guards, and vicious Party bureaucrats whose greatest joy is abusing and destroying those who are helpless to fight back. (Psi-Stalkers, by contrast, are almost always hunting targets who can fight back, and often with catastrophic destructiveness.)

One thing I remember from my copy of the original RIFTS book is Siembieda's subtle but clear implication that in practice, Coalition field commanders were quite often allowed to ally themselves with "lesser enemies" in order to effectively put down greater mutual threats; what probably never gets used in most campaigns is that the Party bureaucrats back in Chi-Town see this as a way to control those commanders, by having "kompromat" on them from such actions that can be used to neutralize any officer whose ambitions, popularity and competence make him a threat. The evil of the Coalition isn't in how they fight monsters, but in what they do in the meantime with those they're (ostensibly) protecting.

Quote from: RebelSky on December 15, 2022, 04:40:06 PM
From our own modern perspective we could see the Coalition as evil, but then there is the Federation of Magic, which kinda proves the Coalition right. Right? 😉

The Federation of Magic isn't a unified state. There's the Dunscon faction (The "true" federation), which is just as bad as the Coalition, Stormspire which is more profit oriented, there's Dewomer, which seems benign or at least neutral. And a whole bunch of sub-factions, cults and groups in the Magic Zone that are clumped into the Federation.

What really bugs me is that after the first worldbook, Siembieda went on a gobal jaunt, making world books for every major area of the world except north america. I feel like if he had focused on just one country, we could have gotten a more cohesive and rich setting. We still don't have a worldbook for one of the major powers in the NA area, Lazlo and New Lazlo.

I love this art from the new Savage Worlds Empires of Humanity



So... I love the whole NEMA>Republicans and Coalition storyline. Especially the idea that each Glitterboy suit from that era has a pedigree of pilots with each suit having its own unique history. Are there any sourcebooks that talk about this? Like Glitterboy pilots having their own sub-culture? Reminds me of WW1 pilots on both sides of the war.

  I have never accepted the Coalition as Nazis.   Nazis created fictions and scapegoats and needed propaganda.   The Coalition can just show a news feed of a rampaging monster/group of humanoids/psychic/mage.   The CS high ups do abuse their position but they are operating with humanity's best interests to repel what is a never ending invasion.  I look at the CS as a perspective group and NOT as evil.  The most unrealistic/stupid thing about the Coalition is that they shun any and all use of magic.  This would leave them open to attacks they could never, ever counter.   A dragon/demon would teleport to where ever a leader is (even the emperor) and slaughter them.   The idea huge armies of magically powered foes would meet the coalition on some battlefield is also stupid.  The mages would just teleport/use rifts to go to the city/leaders/infrastructure and just win any sort of major conflict because the CS has ZERO real countermeasures to stop magic operating against them (detection is NOT prevention).

I don't accept them as Nazis either.

But... in canon they use the same propaganda that the Nazis use. It's explicit: All magic is "The Evil". The difference is humankind *is* under existential threat of extinction. I like that Rifts doesn't even come remotely close to trying to finger-wagging at people on "what is right." There is a strong case that humanity would have been washed aside were it not for their humanocentric views. It should be noted that from what I've read *every* major bastion of humanity - the NGR, Free Quebec, the CS, that can compete at scale of the big threats has these views.

And it's not like the Emperor Prosek isn't empathatic - it says quite clearly that he believes everything that he says, and he does say that he feels for those DBees that might otherwise be "benign", or for humans that have developed powers without their own intention. But the quandary of this position, mostly pointed out by magic-users is that Rifts are here to stay - so that position in untenable.

I love that kind of friction. While the Magic-users decry the CS for its brutality and bigotry, they ignore the very accusations the CS makes - that when push comes to shove, those Magic-users will resort to the worst possible practices in order to protect their position - which ultimately is anti-human. Tolkeen kinda proved that.

And the added dynamic of the fact that for two-centuries, many DBees are refugees here and have never known another home. I like the little story about the CS Troopers bunkered with these DBees against a demon incursion, and one of the DBees (A Quickflex gunslinger) paraphrases - "I speak American just like you. I never knew where my people came from. This is my home, and I have the same beliefs as you. This is the only place I've ever known, why are we fighting?"

Yeah I love that stuff.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 15, 2022, 05:38:16 PM
What really bugs me is that after the first worldbook, Siembieda went on a gobal jaunt, making world books for every major area of the world except north america. I feel like if he had focused on just one country, we could have gotten a more cohesive and rich setting. We still don't have a worldbook for one of the major powers in the NA area, Lazlo and New Lazlo.

Isn't there a mini-writeup of Lazlo in one of the Rifters? Or am I wrong? I'm drinking from a hydrant on Rifts right now... so its starting to blur. I'm trying to take one section of the world at a time.

I understand your frustration with the world-jaunting. While I'm interested in the other parts of the world... I'm more interested in the localities I'll be running games in, which would be North America. I'd consider Europe... but not until after I got a good handle on all the insane shit in NA.

It's been decades since I read them and I lost my RIFTS books over the years (I think I may have lent them to a friend and never saw them again), so I don't remember all the details now. But one of my bigger beefs with Palladium RIFTS (aside from the system) was the inconsistencies in terms of power levels, not just in terms of stuff presented within a single book, but also between different world books altogether. It made them even more difficult to mash together than the sheer overwhelming amount of disparate information across books already did.

It was interesting AF, and amazing the amount of detail that went into carving out different parts of the world—all of them with their own details for region-specific character related data and options. But it was just so overwhelming and inconsistent it was difficult to parse, and just made it frustrating.

Quote
So... I love the whole NEMA>Republicans and Coalition storyline. Especially the idea that each Glitterboy suit from that era has a pedigree of pilots with each suit having its own unique history. Are there any sourcebooks that talk about this? Like Glitterboy pilots having their own sub-culture? Reminds me of WW1 pilots on both sides of the war.

Rifter #85 has Glitterboy info, including fully AI glitterboys, talking Copilot AI Glitterboys, Glitterboys with different weaponry from cobbled together junk, repair rules, and Techno-Wizard gear to make an overpowered suit of armor even scarier.

There is a lot of good stuff in the old Palladium books.  The trick is always focusing it down and looking at it as a bunch of linked micro-settings instead of one big gonzo, kitchen sink setting. 

Juicer Uprising for an Expendables type game.  There is a ton on Juicer culture that can be mined.  If you can get all the players to agree to play a different type of Juicer, it is awesome. 

Vampire Kingdoms for a game like John Steakley's Vampire$ or the John Carpenter movie based on it.  The stuff on Reid's Rangers is great.   

The South America and Atlantis stuff is where Palladium probably had the most power creep but the lore on how the different factions interact is pretty good.   

Savage Rifts has really made the setting shine.  Personally, I think the Tomorrow Legion is a crutch.  I get why they did it, but Palladium was doing plot points in their books before Pinnacle.  They just didn't call them that.  You could play the Siege on Tolkeen from multiple viewpoints and it would likely run different each time.