TheRPGSite

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.

(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/6b/72/52/6b72527251eaee3bde4b5af88a7488ab.jpg)

*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

(https://i.imgur.com/INUrjOn.jpg)

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.   

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.

The Lazlo Raw version of the book is out. From what I heard it is okay not great just has too much just WTF. For example Lazlo could make better or equal tech then all it's neighbour s yet chooses to make lesser tech to not antagonize its neighbours who got the most many want Lazlo dead. Again WTF.

Quote from: Chainsaw Surgeon on December 16, 2022, 11:58:15 AM
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.

Agreed. The brief SW:Rifts game I ran (set in the New West) didn't bother with the Tomorrow Legion. I didn't see the need for it and it feels a bit off to me.

But SW:Rifts is a great system for all my Rifts stuff, even Phase World (although BESM is a good engine there as well). What I like about it is it showed what you can do by customizing a stock SW chassis. I haven't gotten SW:PF, but I get the impression it does something similar.

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. On to something else.

Lets not soft-sell the CS. Yeah, to some extent the anti-DB and anti-magic prejudice is understandable. I think they carry it too far, but it's understandable in context. But the CS has other issues. Only something like 15% of the CS has any real formal education, for example, and the CS likes it that way. They have an entire slave race they've bred almost exclusively as soldiers. Even setting aside the slavery, they are an extremely class-based society, with elites, plebs, and everyone else.  There's no concept of "rights" in the CS, it's basically everyone is subsumed into the military-state, or pooly-educated laborers, or scum/fodder.

Their uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

Not that I haven't played my share of CS characters. Although I admittedly have a real soft spot for dog boys.

Is every single Dbee, psyker, mutant or alien evil?  Of course not.  However, if the Coalition told their soldiers that, they'd stop and analyze what threat the encountered actually pose, and the Coalition would have no soldiers, they'd all be dead, enslaved, zombified, etc.

The Coalition's methods are brutal and can be cruel.  They're also working.  The Coalition is clawing humanity back from the brink, as is the New German Republic who has similar policies.

Lazlo has the luxury of being able to be a Post-Apocalyptic Athens.  They don't constantly fight the Federation of Magic, Atlantean Slavers, Xiticix, and a thousand other threats all while holding down the mega rift at Old Chicago.

Is the Coalition filled with functioning Sociopaths and Psychopaths?  Sure.  So is Corporate America. 
Do they have soldiers who want to commit genocide on all aliens? Yep, and they kinda have a point. 
Does the Coalition use propaganda on its citizens?  Every government has and does, even Lazlo.

The Coalition also has people working and fighting for the survival of humanity every day against truly EVIL supernatural and extra-dimensional beings.

The argument is not and never has been "the coalition are ineffectual ninnies".

Coalition States creed is pretty simple.  If it wasn't here before the Rifts came, it needs to go. 

There is damn near zero chance that they can succeed at that goal. 

Of all the things the Coalition States needs, Atlantean Stone Magic would be the most important.  That's the only thing I know of in Rifts Lore that can actually stop Rifts in a real and substantive way.  Build a pyramid on a nexus point and lock that shit down.   

Until there is some technology that can compete, it would seem the best anti-magic defense is magic itself.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PM
Their uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/fa/ff/44/faff44f65cdc8e7e9a93820581e6cac5.jpg)

(https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/resizer/W-W_SU20_pO3foVS9b11ZwQamio=/1024x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/archetype/YWIAYOLFT5HHHIMVYUQXMJLJ64.jpg)

(https://d1ldvf68ux039x.cloudfront.net/thumbs/photos/1612/3094098/1000w_q95.jpg)

And so on...

The discussion around the Coalition usually comes around to this, after literally decades. It's not freaking hard. The Coalition are the baddies, but they're also the baddies keeping the worse baddies at bay. Thus you get interesting drama and situations for your role playing game sessions.

People who defend the Coalition a little too much are just as annoying as those who reject the idea that not all Coalition are slobbering monsters.

I guess it's like the Star Trek vs Star Wars debate. Nerds gonna nerd out.

    Coalition as illiterate is another big speed bump as well....super high tech ... but we can not read?  Very stupid.  If we are going to parallel Nazis...they were extreme but not illiterate.  People can follow a bad path and still be educated and smart.  College campuses have been showing us that for a few decades now.  The CS are considerably LESS extreme than say the imperium of man in 40k as well.  I always took them as a KS version of the imperium of man he just is much more blatant with spelled out Nazi parallels.   The problem of course being writing a bunch of stuff about how bad it is to be extremely humancentric that humans are reading might not have the effect KS was looking for. 

  I put a lot of it aside in my Rifts games both Palladium and SW (I also dump the Tomorrow legion crap) and the CS operate in ways that the group may  work with or against like any other expanding empire.  I do not treat them as enemies to be attacked or shot and I do not mind if players want to be one of them (which SW seems to largely discourage versus palladium).

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 17, 2022, 12:37:06 AM

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PM
Their uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

And so on...

I think that was a reference to this excellent sketch from Mitchell and Webb

 

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PM
Lets not soft-sell the CS. Yeah, to some extent the anti-DB and anti-magic prejudice is understandable. I think they carry it too far, but it's understandable in context

On an individual level, sure. On a policy level... the entire Earth has been devastated not only by magic, but by humans engaging directly in magic on the infernal level. So much so that even the main body of magic-users - the Federation are susceptible to those infernal corruption tactics. And in secret the "True Federation" is directly in league with the lords of Hell.

The question is: To what degree is anything in all-out war permissable? The answers are pretty clear, and yes it means that for poor "benign" magic-users, you're in deep shit. The fact that merely knowing magic isn't necessarily "evil" doesn't preclude the fact that the most powerful magic-entities in Rifts, and apparently across the Megaverse are *inhumanely vile and evil* and use dark magics to corrupt those very people.

That said - I don't think they should keep their people ignorant of the state of the world. Again, to me (and you) it's very understandable. This is a war of true existential crisis on several fronts. The CS is justified, but I'd agree there might be places where there can be more efficient policies that might have cut-outs for DBees.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PMBut the CS has other issues. Only something like 15% of the CS has any real formal education, for example, and the CS likes it that way. They have an entire slave race they've bred almost exclusively as soldiers. Even setting aside the slavery, they are an extremely class-based society, with elites, plebs, and everyone else.  There's no concept of "rights" in the CS, it's basically everyone is subsumed into the military-state, or pooly-educated laborers, or scum/fodder.

This ties in directly with why the CS keeps people illiterate. And while that might seem "ghastly" to you and the rest of us. Consider the reality of Rifts - where knowledge *can* actually corrupt you. They use basically Emojis to communicate which apparently works, and yet it's not precise enough to learn magic. I think it's kind of genius. Most kids today have a shit-vocabulary compared to children of the Depression-era, which is funny considering those kids in the past live probably closer to the CS standard of living in the Burbs than modern kids who are less informed.

And it's not true that everyone are slaves bred to be soldiers. I just finished reading the Coalition War and Secrets of the Burbs - there is *nothing* in those books that indicates life in the CS or the Burbs is anything like that. Shockingly, the CS troops are *volunteers*. I'm not downplaying their ruthless policies in practice. But even the Burbs have *tens of thousands* of DBees that would rather live there as second-class citizens than live in the wild frontier. Regular people are inside the CS Fortresses living their lives quite nicely as citizens. Outside in the Burbs - it depends on the Burb. But people set up businesses, they trade, some Burbs are very genteel (and bigotted against Dbees like all get-out), because the carrot being dangled is citizenship.

It's easy to paint the lives of the plebs in the CS as "shit". Honestly it looks more like the Roman Empire and as long as you follow the rules, and avoid badmouthing the Pogrom, you'll do fine. As a Dbee? Probably not so much. But getting out of the CS is one thing. Surviving making it to another place where you'll be accepted is quite another.

Life in the CS is *way* more complex than people think. Sure at a 30k-ft view you can make these claims (and you're entirely not wrong) but the sauce of the game is down on the ground.

One of the things I'm kind of enjoying is the idea that Emperor Prosek is getting slowly undermined by his son in terms of policy. Joseph Prosek seems to be more "soft" on the Dbee/Supernatural thing - but only insofar as it makes the CS stronger. He seems to lean much more in favor of Psionic than Magic... naturally. Does anyone else feel this way? Or am I reading into things. PSI-Batt has full blown fucking Mind Melters on staff. That's a HUGE decision... perhaps they don't realize how freaking powerful Melters and Bursters are? Or maybe they do and are finally leveraging it for the CS under Joseph's orders?



Their uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

Not that I haven't played my share of CS characters. Although I admittedly have a real soft spot for dog boys.
[/quote]

Quote from: oggsmash on December 17, 2022, 05:41:40 AM
    Coalition as illiterate is another big speed bump as well....super high tech ... but we can not read?  Very stupid.  If we are going to parallel Nazis...they were extreme but not illiterate.  People can follow a bad path and still be educated and smart.  College campuses have been showing us that for a few decades now.  The CS are considerably LESS extreme than say the imperium of man in 40k as well.  I always took them as a KS version of the imperium of man he just is much more blatant with spelled out Nazi parallels.   The problem of course being writing a bunch of stuff about how bad it is to be extremely humancentric that humans are reading might not have the effect KS was looking for.

The GENERAL populace is kept illiterate, using their sophisticated emoji-speak and audio-queues. Technical folks are educated normally. Plus a LOT of their technical needs are maintained by robotics. Remember they churn out Skelebots in the *hundreds of thousands* to supplement their forces.

Yeah it's probably stupid to keep the masses illiterate. But then after seeing all the propaganda that's proliferated through our own culture, how much worse could it be if doing so allowed people to accidentally sell their souls the Dyvals and Demons? HAHAHAH

Quote from: oggsmash on December 17, 2022, 05:44:25 AM
  I put a lot of it aside in my Rifts games both Palladium and SW (I also dump the Tomorrow legion crap) and the CS operate in ways that the group may  work with or against like any other expanding empire.  I do not treat them as enemies to be attacked or shot and I do not mind if players want to be one of them (which SW seems to largely discourage versus palladium).

Same. In fact when I run my first CS campaign, I intend to make some "changes" to policy. Maybe I'll have Joseph take the throne as a starting point...

Quote from: crkrueger on December 16, 2022, 07:39:18 PM
Is every single Dbee, psyker, mutant or alien evil?  Of course not.  However, if the Coalition told their soldiers that, they'd stop and analyze what threat the encountered actually pose, and the Coalition would have no soldiers, they'd all be dead, enslaved, zombified, etc.

The Coalition's methods are brutal and can be cruel.  They're also working.  The Coalition is clawing humanity back from the brink, as is the New German Republic who has similar policies.

Lazlo has the luxury of being able to be a Post-Apocalyptic Athens.  They don't constantly fight the Federation of Magic, Atlantean Slavers, Xiticix, and a thousand other threats all while holding down the mega rift at Old Chicago.

Is the Coalition filled with functioning Sociopaths and Psychopaths?  Sure.  So is Corporate America. 
Do they have soldiers who want to commit genocide on all aliens? Yep, and they kinda have a point. 
Does the Coalition use propaganda on its citizens?  Every government has and does, even Lazlo.

The Coalition also has people working and fighting for the survival of humanity every day against truly EVIL supernatural and extra-dimensional beings.

Exactly. It's WAY more complex. And for me that's where the fun in the gaming is. In fact I think it makes gaming more compelling rather than dumbing it down. While the Tomorrow Legion smells of that on the surface, it does provide an option for something to exist in the mix, literally between two very polarized fronts of the Federation and the CS.

And while it's not really interesting to me, I can see how some people new to Rifts would like it. But I don't like broadstroking the CS as "just the baddies" when as you said - there are some true horrible horrors out there the CS are taking the fight to. We can settle up with everyone else after. I don't think it's propaganda to claim "humanity is at risk" in the Rifts world... And consider the things the CS *doesn't* know about... even their most hyperbolic propaganda might not even rise to those needs if they did know.

Who here knows anything about the Federation of Magic - or what are everyone else's favorite locales and factions? Pour it on!

Quote from: tenbones on December 17, 2022, 10:05:47 AM
This ties in directly with why the CS keeps people illiterate. And while that might seem "ghastly" to you and the rest of us. Consider the reality of Rifts - where knowledge *can* actually corrupt you. They use basically Emojis to communicate which apparently works, and yet it's not precise enough to learn magic.

Except that there are numerous examples in-world that say that that's all full of shit. The NGR has a 90% education and literacy rate. Nemo's New Navy, it's 100%. The remnants of China in the Geofront are near or at universal literacy and education, also. I couldn't find statistics on Ishpeming, but from what I can gather it's about on par with late 90s/early 2000s era education and literacy in most areas. And those are just "big players", at least in their regions, and I'm discounting returned Japan because they're basically a complete anomaly at this point, and time will well.

The CS does it for control, pure and simple. An ignorant population is easy to control.

Quote from: tenbones on December 17, 2022, 10:05:47 AM
And it's not true that everyone are slaves bred to be soldiers. I just finished reading the Coalition War and Secrets of the Burbs - there is *nothing* in those books that indicates life in the CS or the Burbs is anything like that. Shockingly, the CS troops are *volunteers*. I'm not downplaying their ruthless policies in practice. But even the Burbs have *tens of thousands* of DBees that would rather live there as second-class citizens than live in the wild frontier. Regular people are inside the CS Fortresses living their lives quite nicely as citizens. Outside in the Burbs - it depends on the Burb. But people set up businesses, they trade, some Burbs are very genteel (and bigotted against Dbees like all get-out), because the carrot being dangled is citizenship.

I'm not referring to city rats and such, I'm talking about dog boys - a literal engineered slave race of fully sentient, sapient humanoids that the CS almost exclusively uses as soldiers.

Quote from: tenbones on December 17, 2022, 10:16:12 AM
Who here knows anything about the Federation of Magic - or what are everyone else's favorite locales and factions? Pour it on!

I love ARCHIE. He's sort of a faction of his own, and I adore him. I like Ishpeming, because I'm a Michigan boy, plus it's like a slightly less crapsack version of the CS.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 17, 2022, 12:37:06 AM

And so on...

Quote from: dbm on December 17, 2022, 08:17:20 AM

I think that was a reference to this excellent sketch from Mitchell and Webb

Yeah. It was a direct reference to Mitchell and Webb.

But it's not a bad comment. Sure, some groups use skull iconography, but... c'mon. The CS revels in it. A necromancer would look at the CS's aesthetics and say "Guys, tone it down a bit." It's not meant to be subtle. The CS are nuanced, yes, but they are "bad guys".

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 17, 2022, 12:54:01 AM
The discussion around the Coalition usually comes around to this, after literally decades. It's not freaking hard. The Coalition are the baddies, but they're also the baddies keeping the worse baddies at bay. Thus you get interesting drama and situations for your role playing game sessions.

People who defend the Coalition a little too much are just as annoying as those who reject the idea that not all Coalition are slobbering monsters.

Right. This. Exactly this.

Quote from: dbm on December 17, 2022, 08:17:20 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 17, 2022, 12:37:06 AM

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PM
Their uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

And so on...

I think that was a reference to this excellent sketch from Mitchell and Webb

I know. And it's a funny bit. But the problem with it is that plenty of the guys on "our side" have used skull iconography.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 17, 2022, 10:56:22 AM
I love ARCHIE. He's sort of a faction of his own, and I adore him. I like Ishpeming, because I'm a Michigan boy, plus it's like a slightly less crapsack version of the CS.

I recently read the Northern Gun books, and they're great. They're not particularly political, but have to be involved in some politics. (Their non-aggression and sometimes maybe work together policy towards the CS) They're anti-magic and anti-D-Bee, but they're not fanatic or jingoisic about it. Just, don't be casting spells or making a scene in Ishpeming and they'll sell you some guns, man. It's a Goldilocks "Just right" faction. They have their badasses (Loss Prevention) that will come down on you if you f**k with them, but mostly they just want to keep what's theirs and sell you some bang-bangs.
I really like the idea of multiple Kingdoms scattered throughout the world, and NG is a nice break from Tech = Fascism that the CS gives off.

As usual, it's got some Siembieda "Wut?" in it. There's a whole page about how the average Adventurer (by that I take it to mean the PCs) won't be able to afford even a power armor, much less a robot vehicle. But this is a game where a core class starts with arguably one of the most powerful PAs in the game. (The Glitter Boy) It's true that PCs proably won't be buying power armors off the showroom floor, but they're going to be able to scavenge, steal or salvage some robot vehicle tech at some point. And a borg is usually a match for a PA or robot anyway.

The one thing that seems to temporarily unite most of the North America factions is the Splugorths. NO ONE likes the Splugorth.

I think most of the early World Books, like from 2 to 10, need a good revised update now that the game has been out for 30 years. They did revision for the Vampires but none of the others.

And they need a Colorado Baronies book.

One of the adventure hooks in the NG books is that one of the Robodome pilots is using Naruni Tech to keep his standings. Afraid he will get caught as that tech is very illegal.

I'm like your in the NG get an equivalent weapon from the supplier.

Another issue is that in the first Rifts core book the Coalition RO pilots lacked the RPA pilot skill beyond being illiterate. In the more recent Coalition sourcebooks the CS have apparently softened their stance on Pxychics which is imo a load of BS imo. For years the CS considered Pdy hivs as the enemies and second class citizens at best and now they reverse the c position due to reasons and feels.

Quote from: tenbones on December 17, 2022, 10:08:51 AMThe GENERAL populace is kept illiterate, using their sophisticated emoji-speak and audio-queues. Technical folks are educated normally.

The problem with this model of organization is that it becomes a lot harder to find the people capable of receiving that technical education and providing its services if you don't have a wide pool of generally educated people to draw from in the first place.

A realistic representation of life in the Coalition should talk a lot about how incredibly, constantly short-staffed the C-States are in terms of drafting people smart enough to play tech support, and the fact that the training programs for those people have to be even more propagandistic than usual, lest the I.T. crowd realize just how much the rest of the Coalition depends on them and pull a general strike at a critical moment.

Quote from: RebelSky on December 17, 2022, 03:29:14 PM
The one thing that seems to temporarily unite most of the North America factions is the Splugorths. NO ONE likes the Splugorth.

I think most of the early World Books, like from 2 to 10, need a good revised update now that the game has been out for 30 years. They did revision for the Vampires but none of the others.

And they need a Colorado Baronies book.

Unfortunately they way the good aligned factions are written on Rifts Earth it's not going to happen. The evil faction are united. The good factions are written as stubbornly stupid independent. Which many not trusting each other.

So unless we get a major rewrite on a united good aligned faction is not going to happen.

Tritonia does not trust the New Navy and vice versa as an example.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 16, 2022, 07:23:57 PM
Lets not soft-sell the CS.

Who did that? I merely pointed out how PRAGMATIC the Coalition is about Rifts Earth. You make it sound like the Coalition-style of government is bizarre and unrealistic, when the reality is that is entirely too realistic...hey some Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, let's throw all the homegrown ones in interment camps. Yeah, that sort of stuff never happened, right? I'd take the Coalition as written over some horseshit Utopian nonsense far too prevalent in a lot of other games. "Oh yeah there are horrible demons roaming the world and you could be murdered at any instant, but if you live in our city you get to eat bon bons and listen to soft rock all day, unfettered by the worries of harsh manual labor."

QuoteTheir uniforms have skulls on them. Yes, Hans, they are the baddies.

You did read the books, right? They literally have a skull motif to intimidate people. I mean, you have normal dudes going up against all sorts of supernatural foes, they need whatever edge they can possibly get, even if it's only to make themselves feel a little better about getting killed.

As far as keeping the populace uneducated and illiterate goes, do you really need to know how to read to do menial jobs? They're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, not everyone gets to study Chaucer and drink brandy by candlelight, some of those people are going to be digging ditches 15 hours a day. Realistically, I think this has more to do with complete and utter lack of resources than outright comiicbook evil suppression.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 17, 2022, 10:56:22 AM

Except that there are numerous examples in-world that say that that's all full of shit. The NGR has a 90% education and literacy rate. Nemo's New Navy, it's 100%. The remnants of China in the Geofront are near or at universal literacy and education, also. I couldn't find statistics on Ishpeming, but from what I can gather it's about on par with late 90s/early 2000s era education and literacy in most areas. And those are just "big players", at least in their regions, and I'm discounting returned Japan because they're basically a complete anomaly at this point, and time will well.

The CS does it for control, pure and simple. An ignorant population is easy to control.

I didn't say they were *right*. I said (or intimated based on their own ignorance) that's how they rationalize it. And it makes sense if you truly believe "Magic is Inherently Evil" - and Prosek *absolutely* believes this. And yes, he's wrong.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 17, 2022, 10:56:22 AMI'm not referring to city rats and such, I'm talking about dog boys - a literal engineered slave race of fully sentient, sapient humanoids that the CS almost exclusively uses as soldiers.

Ah. Sure, I thought you mean the citizenry. Well Clone Troopers are Clone Troopers regardless of franchise.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 17, 2022, 10:56:22 AM
I love ARCHIE. He's sort of a faction of his own, and I adore him. I like Ishpeming, because I'm a Michigan boy, plus it's like a slightly less crapsack version of the CS.

Oh yeah! All the ARCHIE stuff is super-interesting!

I'm a little surprised at how much I'm getting into the Psi-Stalker backstories, even through it's spread out across several books. I find them more intriguing than just "magical-vampires"... I didn't realize they were out in such numbers! Plus I like how their tribes have their own respective histories - gives me Mad Max vibes with barbarian tribes of Germania tossed in.

The Coalition's forced illiteracy never made sense to me. I think that it comes from the early days of the Rifts game when different thematic elements were being combined to create the setting and the Coalition in particular.

The Coalition was inspired largely by Nazis, but also other authoritarian fiction like 1984. Aspects of the Coalition suggest that it is the citizens of the Coalition who are the enemies and who need to be controlled and suppressed - like the people of 1984. In the context of the Rifts setting, this is silly, because the enemy is very clear and obvious. Its those demons that lurk just outside of Chi-Town's walls who are poised to devour or enslave defenseless humans.

The Coalition doesn't need to lie to create an enemy, they don't need to keep their population ignorant to make them loyal. Humanity is literally fighting for their very existence against aliens and demons who have invaded Earth.

So I drop the forced ignorance thing. Obviously, the Coalition doesn't believe in freedom of speech and they crack down on dissent, but they don't need people to be illiterate or generally ignorant for that.

The Coalition can still be portrayed as evil for what they do to DBs or magic users, or even the general harshness of their policies - they don't need to do even evil hand wringing for them to be villains. I like them with shades of gray.

The Coalition is pretty damn villainous, yeah.  They are basically "Aberrant" by Palladium alignment standards, right there in the evil section, aside from being pretty willing to kill innocents and unarmed foes as a matter of policy.  They may have personal levels of distaste for it, but not likely any actual remorse.

Can you imagine a Coalition that wasn't a complete bag of tyrannical inquisitors and supremacists?  Being able to secure their territory with Coalition Let Line Rangers?  Bolster defenses and infrastructure with a Corps of Arcane Engineers?  Maybe having an air force officer that is a dragon?  Having genuine allies instead of people they will probably kill later after the actual demons are put down?

Good job surviving, CS, but that is all you are doing.

I think I'd be happy to play Savage Worlds Rifts, though.  Aside from the Tomorrow Legion, just because I don't think the setting gains anything by having a Legion of Superfriends.  Orders of heroes are neat and fun and a cyberknight being in a mixed party is cool, but the T.L. feels as tacked on as it really is.

I think I would have preferred a new Free City somewhere or maybe make the Colorado Baronies a better Last Best Hope than the CS pretends to be

Quote from: Manic Modron on December 19, 2022, 12:18:08 PM

I think I would have preferred a new Free City somewhere or maybe make the Colorado Baronies a better Last Best Hope than the CS pretends to be

Given how little is known about the Colorado Baronies or anything west of the Continental Divide, that's all pretty easy to do. My brief SW:New West was set around modern Estes Park and was about restoring a town initially controlled by DeeBees that, if it had lasted, could have been the seed of a new best hope.

Salt Lake City, rebuilt under the leadership of some radical Mormons who were prepared for the End Time materially and spiritually, could be a pretty intestering setting. I've toyed with lifting a version of Hellstrom's Hive straight from the novel whose organization allowed the area to survive the Rifts but stunted the Hive enough that they are in an uneasy alliance with the "wild" humans of the area ever since.

The home of the Cyberknights is some between the Rockies in the Cascades (Idaho if memory serves).

The reality is the Great Basin and the West Coast are completely unused in Rifts. They are a great place to get away from the core books and run with your own ideas.

Quote from: tenbones on December 17, 2022, 10:16:12 AM
Who here knows anything about the Federation of Magic - or what are everyone else's favorite locales and factions? Pour it on!

I was always partial to Wormwood, even though my group only got a small taste of it.

Related: what is a compelling reason to use Savage Rifts over the Palladium stuff I already own?

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 02:40:08 PM
Related: what is a compelling reason to use Savage Rifts over the Palladium stuff I already own?

As a whole, the rules are lower friction in character creation and play.

Also, if you don't already have a group, I suspect in most places there is a deeper base of SW players than Palladium system players.

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 06:19:31 AM
Who did that?

You. You're still doing it.

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 06:19:31 AMI merely pointed out how PRAGMATIC the Coalition is about Rifts Earth. You make it sound like the Coalition-style of government is bizarre and unrealistic, when the reality is that is entirely too realistic...hey some Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, let's throw all the homegrown ones in interment camps. Yeah, that sort of stuff never happened, right? I'd take the Coalition as written over some horseshit Utopian nonsense far too prevalent in a lot of other games. "Oh yeah there are horrible demons roaming the world and you could be murdered at any instant, but if you live in our city you get to eat bon bons and listen to soft rock all day, unfettered by the worries of harsh manual labor."

Kindly stop arguing with a straw man.

I never said the Coalition wasn't realistic. I never said I wanted them to be some Star Trek Federation-style utopia. They're evil, fascist totalitarians. No, not every single CS citizen, not even every CS soldier. Hell, likely not even more than a modest minority. But the regime as as a whole, it's policies and practices, yes.  That's plenty realistic.

And that's okay! Just... stop trying to pretend they're just post-apocalyptic Hard Men Making Hard Choices. They aren't.

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 06:19:31 AMYou did read the books, right? They literally have a skull motif to intimidate people. I mean, you have normal dudes going up against all sorts of supernatural foes, they need whatever edge they can possibly get, even if it's only to make themselves feel a little better about getting killed.

Mm. From strawman to ad hominem. I've been playing Rifts since the early 90s. I have multiple products signed by Kevin, I do the Palladium Christmas Box most years. I could go on. Is that enough of a pointless geek flex?

You're trying to present a Watsonian justification. That's fine. But from a Doylist perspective, obsessive skull iconography is pretty much always shorthand for "These guys are baddies."

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 06:19:31 AMAs far as keeping the populace uneducated and illiterate goes, do you really need to know how to read to do menial jobs? They're rebuilding civilization from the ground up, not everyone gets to study Chaucer and drink brandy by candlelight, some of those people are going to be digging ditches 15 hours a day. Realistically, I think this has more to do with complete and utter lack of resources than outright comiicbook evil suppression.

Though not strictly forbidden, the CS frowns upon formal education and literacy for the masses. It prefers to keep the majority of it's people ignorant and unable to read so that it can spoon feed them whatever it wants through spoken and visual presentations on television, radio, and pictures. [snip for brevity] The concept is that if the majority of people cannot read, then they can't be as easily influenced by outside forces and different (corrupting) ideas. Isolating people inside a fortified paradise where they and there families are safe, and the written word is not important, helps to enforce their goal of 90% illiteracy.

Surprisingly few people realize this is a deliberate plan on the the part of the Coalition government, or don't believe it.

[snip for brevity]

Ironically, Burbies waiting for citizenship to a Coalition fortress city don't realize that if they can read, it is an automatic disqualification for eligibility. [snip for brevity] From the coalition's paranoid point of view, Literacy is like a hereditary disease. If the parents have it,they will probably pass it along to their children, and the disease of literacy may also be spread to friends and acquaintances, and the CS wouldn't want that now, would they?

This is why Rogue Scholars and Rogue Scientists are branded as criminals, dissidents, traitors and madmen - they are contaminated with an open mind, and their world view corrupted by different cultures and ideas. They have had, through reading, experienced many different cultures and ideas, events, and concepts. They have a different understanding of life and a larger view of the world. All of that makes them question the status quo and want to learn new things and uncover more knowledge, history, and truth. Things the Coalition States discourages. The CS wants happy, complacent sheep, not explorers and philosophers.

Rifts: Chi-Town Burbs: Forbidden Knowledge, p.21-22.

The same section also talks about how the coalition raids the homes of anyone caught with books, how any books on history are double-extra-banned, how the CS rewards collaborators who turn in people who can read or have books, and so on.

Can we please stop pretending the poor CS is just misunderstood?

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 19, 2022, 03:25:04 PM
Some stuff

Sure, whatever makes you feel better.

EDIT: LOL @ ad hominem...read a fucking logic book, sir. This is Zak S level of stupidity.

I'm sorry you were wrong.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 19, 2022, 04:28:44 PM
I'm sorry you were wrong.

Okay, Zak.

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 04:30:53 PM

Okay, Zak.

Man, you're the one making up positions I don't hold and have never espoused, assuming I'm ignorant about the subject matter, and then, when I cite fucking chapter and verse proving your claim wrong, you get catty and decide to take issue with me using slightly too floral vocabulary to point out you were attacking me instead of actually addressing my point.

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 02:40:08 PM
I was always partial to Wormwood, even though my group only got a small taste of it.

I'll need to get a copy and check it out. I'm mining a stack of material now!

Quote from: Brad on December 19, 2022, 02:40:08 PMRelated: what is a compelling reason to use Savage Rifts over the Palladium stuff I already own?

That's a good question. For *me*, I only played Rifts (and a bunch of Palladium Fantasy previous to that) for a couple of campaigns. More than enough to be familiar with the system. But I never ran it afterwards. So flash-forward 25+ years and I managed to get my crew into Savage Worlds. All of them die-hard D&D players (but I got them into other games: MSH, Star Wars, etc.) but Savage Worlds was a *huge* bet, and it paid off. It's not perfect, but it is so damn versatile.

The case I'd make to you and other Palladium fans is not as strong as I'd make to those who never played Savage Worlds. But it would be this: the mechanics of the system are *insanely* lighter and modular. Where Palladium goes all in on minutiae, Savage Worlds is about Tropes-as-Mechanics.

Sure there's stats and it can get some decent crunch, its nowhere in the league of Palladium's Rifts. What it does better is abstract the hard values of Palladium's system's conceits down to small manageable numbers and make it flow faster. There is very little you can't do with Savage World's system, even on the fly. If you're interested in seeing Palladium's Rifts running on a lighter mechanical chassis, but with relative equal octane, it might be of interest.

If you're die-hard about Palladium Rifts system, then there is little I can offer from SWADE. Contentwise there is very little new (mostly adventures and the in-setting Tomorrow Legion faction material, which I can take or leave). I'd also add that the Savage Worlds system is probably a lot easier on new players to come into the Rifts setting, but there is added value in that the Savage Worlds core rules can be used as Siembieda intended to include anything else from the Savage Worlds settings (or genre splats) to incorporate directly into the Savage Rifts game with far less jickery. Savage Worlds in many ways realizes what Rifts should be on that front, because of it's superb flexibility.

It definitely seems to have won a lot of Palladium fans over to Savage Worlds, and the Siembieda's partner is the guy running the line for Pinnacle, so there is a lot of cross pollination. Palladium's current books that are coming out will have Savage Worlds conversion stats included. Kevin seems to really like the arrangement (which *shocks* the fuck out of me), I assume it's given some new life to the IP.

It certainly has around my table - my players used to sneer at Rifts until I ran a game... and now it's all they talk about. Even now we're all picking up Palladium books for more juicy details, so it looks like it's win/win for Palladium and Pinnacle.

@Bruwulf

I'm not sure who *doesn't* qualify as Evil Totalitarian at scale. The NGR effectively has the same policy, at minimum the DBees it does tolerate are second-class citizens and those are exceptions. The real issue to me is not the moral/ethical policy of these states, it's the fact that without those policies, which I believe is even said in Secrets of the Burbs, that humanity might not have galvanized enough to fight back.

Propaganda? Sure. But the sad reality of Tolkeen is when *Tolkeen* was put on that morale precipice in their beliefs - that their way of life was under existential threat, they went full infernal. That is what confirms the absolute belief in the Coalition (i.e. Prosek's) vision. Sure it's an argument from ignorance, magic isn't inherently evil, but it's a case for given the power to do so, man is. Hell even with his 9.9/10 certainty, Prosek didn't go all-out and nuke Tolkeen because even the humans that practice magic there *matter* to him.

It's all well and good to have small scale factions have magic/science side-by-side, but the CS/Quebec/NGR they were there at the start, and did what they had to do. Ugly as it is. I do notice the CS is starting to be more lax in their treatment of certain supernatural folks - psionic ones especially.

As much as I love Palladium, their in-house system is kinda shit. I think a lot of players over the years have either house-ruled the system down into something more manageable, or switched to universal systems. Sadly, finding universal systems that can handle the... diversity... of RIFTS can be challenging. Savage Worlds is probably one of the better candidates, as much as I'm not personally fond of it.

I'm surprised there's never been an OSR RIFTS-alike that tried to create a codified, streamlined, and less janky system that would still be similar enough that bringing stuff over from the published books wouldn't be a huge hassle. Then again, I wouldn't envy anyone the headache.

I *suspect*... and I have ZERO evidence of this except that Kevin's new partner seems to be hard-charging and it appears the furnaces at Palladium games are lit again... that there might be something like that in the works.

Palladium with a unified system 2.0 is one of the few times I think a new edition is in order. And I think they'd make a lot of money. I'd add - with the OneDnD fallout that is sure to come, Palladium could do well for itself with a relaunch of Palladium Fantasy 2.0 to try and win some of the fallout over to their banner.

Quote from: tenbones on December 20, 2022, 08:48:24 AM
@Bruwulf

I'm not sure who *doesn't* qualify as Evil Totalitarian at scale. The NGR effectively has the same policy, at minimum the DBees it does tolerate are second-class citizens and those are exceptions. The real issue to me is not the moral/ethical policy of these states, it's the fact that without those policies, which I believe is even said in Secrets of the Burbs, that humanity might not have galvanized enough to fight back.

Propaganda? Sure. But the sad reality of Tolkeen is when *Tolkeen* was put on that morale precipice in their beliefs - that their way of life was under existential threat, they went full infernal. That is what confirms the absolute belief in the Coalition (i.e. Prosek's) vision. Sure it's an argument from ignorance, magic isn't inherently evil, but it's a case for given the power to do so, man is. Hell even with his 9.9/10 certainty, Prosek didn't go all-out and nuke Tolkeen because even the humans that practice magic there *matter* to him.

It's all well and good to have small scale factions have magic/science side-by-side, but the CS/Quebec/NGR they were there at the start, and did what they had to do. Ugly as it is. I do notice the CS is starting to be more lax in their treatment of certain supernatural folks - psionic ones especially.

I'm really not talking about their attitude towards magic or D-bees, which I've said is understandable, even if I think they carry it too far. I'm specifically talking about their actual internal domestic policies, like the fact they suppress literacy to keep the population docile and controllable, outright suppress any history other than the state-sponsored version of it, suppress any knowledge of the outside world that isn't their own propaganda, and use gestapo tactics to accomplish all of the above. I'm talking about how the citizens have no rights. I'm talking about the fact they breed slave soldiers.

Most of the other human-centric powers on RIFTS Earth don't do those things.

Well if there is a crime to the CS its the silly idea that they can rid the world of Magic. This is true.

I think their policies, in practice, is what gives the CS slant to the game so much fun gaming friction. Apparently I'm going to learn this first hand in our upcoming game. Looking forward to it.

Savage Rifts doesn't shy from it, and it gets into the nuance of CS soldiers on the frontier, and even in the Burbs having to second-guess their orders. Sometimes it's simply a policy, other times it's simply unrealistic. From what I've read in the CS War Campaign and Secrets of the Burbs, it appears pretty prevalent there too, though the bad shit from those policies is *everywhere*.

I'm less familiar with the NGR stuff... I'm trying to focus my reading right now to stuff pertinent to my character (Psi-Stalker Mind Melter working for Psi-Batt... yeah... this is gonna be ugly).

Speaking of which - anyone have thoughts on Psyscape?

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 19, 2022, 04:43:06 PM
Man, you're the one making up positions I don't hold and have never espoused, assuming I'm ignorant about the subject matter, and then, when I cite fucking chapter and verse proving your claim wrong, you get catty and decide to take issue with me using slightly too floral vocabulary to point out you were attacking me instead of actually addressing my point.

You literally said my throwaway comment about you having even read the books was an ad hominem. THAT is a Zak-level victim mentality. I directly attacked your argument by stating very specifically that skull motifs don't automatically make people bad guys; the whole "did you even read the books" is similar to what you'd say in a bar argument when someone says LeBron is better than Jordan. "Have you ever even watched basketball?" This is only an ad hominem if you're an absolute autistic moron intent on pushing a point well past any sort of defensible position. Further, you then proceed to directly use a hasty generalization to support your position, hence my advice to read a logic book. Oh skulls? BAD GUYS LOL if you disagree you're using a strawman! Pathetic.

Further, I never said the Coalition was good whatsoever. You're the one who keeps saying I said that, so I still don't understand WTF your point is. I am sympathetic to their cause in-world because it is a logical position to hold. I didn't say I agree with it, just that it makes sense. Stop equivocating sympathy with promotion. "I understand why you killed that dude, but you still need to go to prison." Am I advocating murder here? No, I simply understand WHY someone was murdered. If you can't understand the difference, there is zero reason to think you're capable of making an actual argument.

Quote from: Brad on December 20, 2022, 09:40:14 AM
You literally said my throwaway comment about you having even read the books was an ad hominem. THAT is a Zak-level victim mentality. I directly attacked your argument by stating very specifically that skull motifs don't automatically make people bad guys; the whole "did you even read the books" is similar to what you'd say in a bar argument when someone says LeBron is better than Jordan. "Have you ever even watched basketball?" This is only an ad hominem if you're an absolute autistic moron intent on pushing a point well past any sort of defensible position. Further, you then proceed to directly use a hasty generalization to support your position, hence my advice to read a logic book. Oh skulls? BAD GUYS LOL if you disagree you're using a strawman! Pathetic.

I wouldn't know. I don't get into drunken bar arguments. It seems it involves making stupid personal attacks instead of actually discussing the issue, though, so I'm going to suggest I'm not missing anything.

Quote from: Brad on December 20, 2022, 09:40:14 AMFurther, I never said the Coalition was good whatsoever. You're the one who keeps saying I said that, so I still don't understand WTF your point is. I am sympathetic to their cause in-world because it is a logical position to hold. I didn't say I agree with it, just that it makes sense. Stop equivocating sympathy with promotion. "I understand why you killed that dude, but you still need to go to prison." Am I advocating murder here? No, I simply understand WHY someone was murdered. If you can't understand the difference, there is zero reason to think you're capable of making an actual argument.

There is a difference between being sympathetic and apologetic. Is the CS in a rough spot? Sure. Them, along with everyone else on the planet. That doesn't mean I'm going to brush aside what they do as just being "pragmatic', or being low on resources, or whatever else your next justification will be. Prosek justifies terrible atrocities because he believes them to be the only way to save humanity. But that doesn't make him right, any more than any other extremist is right that their atrocities are justified because of what they believe. History is full of examples of that, hell, our present day is full of people who are absolutely convinced that they are on the right side of history, and anything they do to support that is justified. But they are wrong.

Which is why I am sympathetic to the CS citizens, and even most of the military, but not to the CS itself. The books make it quite clear, spell it out explicitly in fact - the CS is a fascist government, Prosek is misguided, and individual Dead Boys and the like are absolutely heroes more often than not.

Or, to go back to our previous exchange - I pointed out my issue with the CS suppressing literacy and education. You claimed it was just a lack of resources and not "comic book villany", or words to that effect, and I cited very clear, textual refutation of that. That's why I say it seems like you're trying to soft-sell the CS. You're trying to paint a picture of them that the books are very clear isn't correct.

These are the EXACT arguments I imagine happening in back rooms of bars in the Burbs... before the CS Troops walk in. HAHAHAHAH!!!

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 19, 2022, 03:25:04 PM

Though not strictly forbidden, the CS frowns upon formal education and literacy for the masses. It prefers to keep the majority of it's people ignorant and unable to read so that it can spoon feed them whatever it wants through spoken and visual presentations on television, radio, and pictures. [snip for brevity] The concept is that if the majority of people cannot read, then they can't be as easily influenced by outside forces and different (corrupting) ideas. Isolating people inside a fortified paradise where they and there families are safe, and the written word is not important, helps to enforce their goal of 90% illiteracy.

Rifts: Chi-Town Burbs: Forbidden Knowledge, p.21-22.

Well, nice. That's how I usually play the CS and literacy/illiteracy. Read enough to do your job, even if that amount is zero. Anything else is suspicious.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 20, 2022, 08:51:47 AM
As much as I love Palladium, their in-house system is kinda shit. I think a lot of players over the years have either house-ruled the system down into something more manageable, or switched to universal systems. Sadly, finding universal systems that can handle the... diversity... of RIFTS can be challenging. Savage Worlds is probably one of the better candidates, as much as I'm not personally fond of it.

I'm surprised there's never been an OSR RIFTS-alike that tried to create a codified, streamlined, and less janky system that would still be similar enough that bringing stuff over from the published books wouldn't be a huge hassle. Then again, I wouldn't envy anyone the headache.

Some of the jankiness is built in. One of the Juicer signature abilities is Auto-Dodge, and the concept of not having to use an action to dodge is integral to the Palladium/Rifts combat system. Likewise with MDC/SDC and how it's an actual factor in world building.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on December 20, 2022, 09:17:12 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 19, 2022, 03:25:04 PM

Though not strictly forbidden, the CS frowns upon formal education and literacy for the masses. It prefers to keep the majority of it's people ignorant and unable to read so that it can spoon feed them whatever it wants through spoken and visual presentations on television, radio, and pictures. [snip for brevity] The concept is that if the majority of people cannot read, then they can't be as easily influenced by outside forces and different (corrupting) ideas. Isolating people inside a fortified paradise where they and there families are safe, and the written word is not important, helps to enforce their goal of 90% illiteracy.

Rifts: Chi-Town Burbs: Forbidden Knowledge, p.21-22.

Well, nice. That's how I usually play the CS and literacy/illiteracy. Read enough to do your job, even if that amount is zero. Anything else is suspicious.

This is basically how Hive cities operate in Warhammer 40k. The comparisons track on many levels between the CS and Empire of Man. The primary difference of scale aside.

If you wanted another system that could run Rifts, that would be tough. 

I stick to the Palladium rules. 

There is one caveat.  I think the first Rifts rulebook is actually better than the Ultimate Edition.

There was only ever two house rules we used. We x10 the damage of the Cyber-Knight psi-sword to make it more useful, and we only allowed dodging ranged attacks when you can fly, have super speed, or you had cover.  We also let a lot of mundane things stop MDC shots as a result.  I would probably use the 1 MDC = 10 SDC rule from the conversion book, but it never really came up.  Using cover like this meant it probably should be used or everything is worthless cardboard. 

We did ditch a lot of the combat options like simultaneous attacks, roll with impact, or the max missile barrage you can dodge was 4. 

Simultaneous Attack was one that we had to ditch.  It was prone to abuse.  As written both combatants cannot dodge or parry.  If one massive combatant fights a team of smaller guys, the big guy can just use simultaneous attack every time and flatten everyone with free hits.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on December 22, 2022, 08:26:20 AM
If you wanted another system that could run Rifts, that would be tough. 

I stick to the Palladium rules. 

There is one caveat.  I think the first Rifts rulebook is actually better than the Ultimate Edition.

I agree.

QuoteThere was only ever two house rules we used. We x10 the damage of the Cyber-Knight psi-sword to make it more useful, and we only allowed dodging ranged attacks when you can fly, have super speed, or you had cover.  We also let a lot of mundane things stop MDC shots as a result.  I would probably use the 1 MDC = 10 SDC rule from the conversion book, but it never really came up.  Using cover like this meant it probably should be used or everything is worthless cardboard. 

We did ditch a lot of the combat options like simultaneous attacks, roll with impact, or the max missile barrage you can dodge was 4. 

Simultaneous Attack was one that we had to ditch.  It was prone to abuse.  As written both combatants cannot dodge or parry.  If one massive combatant fights a team of smaller guys, the big guy can just use simultaneous attack every time and flatten everyone with free hits.

Thankfully I didn't have players who abused simultaneous attack. I did use the MD/MDC = 10 SDC houserule, and usually some damage multipliers, especially for the really low powered melee damages.

My current houserule set is full of that kind of stuff. Little nudges to get the game from being completely wonky.

F'rinstance, I allow spells to affect people in MDC armor/robots, with a decent save bonus for spells that specify "Cannot affect targets in MDC armor, power armor, etc."

The Coalition State's evil, but it's an evil state that keeps people alive in a world overrun in horror.  If you're sitting around in the burning ruin of your house with your surviving family and your options are to go live in an evil dictatorship or get your blood sucked out by some alien abomination or outright eaten by the cannibal gang down the street, well, I know which option I'd be going for.  Their hatred of the supernatural and alien is hardly an unreasonable position given all that's gone on after the rifts, the problem just boils down to the leader being a megalomaniac and an asshole.

That's a thing I like about Rifts as a setting, "survival but at what cost" is a common sort of theme it explores, without flinching from the realities of the situation.  It has some unambiguous goodies, and a lot of unambiguous baddies, but the bulk of the setting is shades of grey.

There are places where Magic and Tech go together which makes for more open-play (their concerns of course are different or more immediate than the CS's which are scalar issues).

I'm a big fan of Arzno. It's a little nook of comically cool wild-west + tech and technowizardry. It's like Deadlands on Mega-'Roids. The CS doesn't even know it exists (and it would be a big problem if they did). It's a perfect sandbox that is very different than a CS/FoM based campaign where you can justify nearly anything. Plus it's a great jump-off point to deal with their main issue: Vampires.

The Vampire Kingdoms are pretty cool too.

Quote from: tenbones on December 23, 2022, 10:02:12 AM
There are places where Magic and Tech go together which makes for more open-play (their concerns of course are different or more immediate than the CS's which are scalar issues).

I'm a big fan of Arzno. It's a little nook of comically cool wild-west + tech and technowizardry. It's like Deadlands on Mega-'Roids. The CS doesn't even know it exists (and it would be a big problem if they did). It's a perfect sandbox that is very different than a CS/FoM based campaign where you can justify nearly anything. Plus it's a great jump-off point to deal with their main issue: Vampires.

The Vampire Kingdoms are pretty cool too.

That is a good topic, what other bastions of humanity are there in the world and how do they deal with a world overrun with horror differently than the CS?  I'm not fully up on lore on that, I don't know what Japan is like or Africa dealing with the actual four horsemen, or what sort of society the remnants of the US Navy actually has.

Quote from: tenbones on December 23, 2022, 10:02:12 AM
There are places where Magic and Tech go together which makes for more open-play (their concerns of course are different or more immediate than the CS's which are scalar issues).

I'm a big fan of Arzno. It's a little nook of comically cool wild-west + tech and technowizardry. It's like Deadlands on Mega-'Roids. The CS doesn't even know it exists (and it would be a big problem if they did). It's a perfect sandbox that is very different than a CS/FoM based campaign where you can justify nearly anything. Plus it's a great jump-off point to deal with their main issue: Vampires.

The Vampire Kingdoms are pretty cool too.

Vampire Kingdoms is my favorite worldbook. The vampire threat is sufficiently Rift-y. Monsters that don't need or want technology. They're immune to most forms of damage, and force characters to think outside the box. There's a kingdom that's downright hospitable to humans, and a kingdom that's horrific in how they treat their human livestock.

One thing to consider, and I had this thought while thinking about Beyond the Supernatural, but it applies to vampires in Rifts as well. Siembieda likes to quantify, name and explain things a lot. This does a good service for RPGs, where the GM has to know enough to run the creatures and societies in it, but the players and especially their characters may not understand that the reason Vampires are vulnerable to water and wood is because it's elemental nature. Or that staking a vampire doesn't necessarily destroy it, or even that vampire intelligences exist and are the source of vampires. That kind of stuff doesn't have to be spelled out right away, or at all if the characters never discover it. Play up the unknown part of the supernatural for as long as you can.

Quote from: Manic Modron on December 23, 2022, 11:52:39 AM
That is a good topic, what other bastions of humanity are there in the world and how do they deal with a world overrun with horror differently than the CS?  I'm not fully up on lore on that, I don't know what Japan is like or Africa dealing with the actual four horsemen, or what sort of society the remnants of the US Navy actually has.

Offhand... I've got most of the books, but some of them I read more than others, so some high points...

Japan is a complicated situation. It didn't fare too well with the coming of the Rifts. 99%+ casualties. There's a couple of pockets of remaining old-world tech that have formed sort of little city-states unto themselves, but the primary human political group is - or was - The New Empire, which has gone sort "back to the old ways"... Think Amish by way of the Japanese. They've deliberately reverted to approximately Edo-era technology, and gone back to a divine Emperor, a caste based society, etc. However, there's also, now, the Republic of Japan. The Republic of Japan is the result of a pre-Rifts science experiment being conducted at the exact moment the ley lines surged. A 100-mile wide sphere of Japan, centered on Hiroshima, basically ceased to exist, and was sent forward 300 years. As a result, they're probably the highest single tech level nation on Earth, having all pre-Rifts technology and education intact. The Republic is now the major power in Japan, although it isn't hostile to the Empire. As far as how they handle things - The New Empire has embraced magic, although they haven't gone gung-ho with it, and Dee-bees are... tolerated, but are considered eta. The Republic of Japan is still getting a feel for things, and doesn't really have any official stance on the issue yet.

China is a complete demonic hell - literally, with the Yama kings parcelling it up into their own hell-kingdoms. There is, however, the Geofront, a hidden subterranean city formed before the Riifts by the PRC. It's managed to go mostly undetected, and they've begun trying to slowly fight back on the surface, covertly. They've got pre-Rifts levels of technology too, but they weren't as advanced as Japan or America going into it. They're paranoid isolationists, though, for good reason, and keep magic and dbees out. Otherwise, while it's a military police state, it's actually reasonably a nice place, with good education, and fairly comfortable lives.

South America has a ton of little kingdoms and city-states, only a couple of really big ones. In broad strokes, you can find almost any time of group in South America. And almost all the major types of dee-bee threat, too.

Australia has two basic "regions". Perth and Melbourne has become humanocentric cyberpunk police states. They allow some psykers and such, but are mostly humanocentric and tech-over-supernatural. The two cities together could be a reasonable force to be reckoned with, but they are very insular. They do dream of eventually retaking Australia, but they haven't made much progress at it. The rest of Australia is collectively "the outback", and it's a post-apocalyptic mix of aboriginal tribal communities, Mad Max style nomads and scavengers, farming communities, and whatever pockets of civilization can pull themselves together.

England is... hooooboy. England is not doing well, from a humanity perspective. It's still got humans, plenty of them, but there's not really any major power groups except Camelot, which is "fine", but is lead by Mrrlyn, ultimately, who is an evil alien intelligence. So yeah, no real bastion of humanity there to talk about.

Africa is even worse. It's a complete write-off as far as humanity is concerned. There are still humans kicking around, but technology is gone, it's purely mystical stuff.

Russia is a war-torn land of various independent warlords each running their own kingdoms. There's about a half dozen of them. They vary in outlook and methodology, but they are technological, anti-magic, and to the extent they tolerate dee-bees, they use them as slaves. (Warning: There's a new book on Russia out now I haven't read yet)

The US Navy exists now as Nemo's New Navy. It's got a large undersea base and at least one surface port, too. Although they're militaristic, and everyone contributes to the state, they're reasonably decent sorts, and have universal education. They can produce a lot of pre-Cataclysm technology, but not all of it. They aren't a large faction, but they're growing slowly. But they've got their hands full with their own concerns, and outside of the oceans, they're basically non-players. They don't really have much use or interest in magic, but they do accept dee-bees to some extent - in fact, a dee-bee/human hybrid created from a rift encounter called Sea Titans are sort of turning into an elite caste within the Navy, they look human, but are basically better in every way, and immortal. (Not unkillable, but they never die of old age).

The NGR, of all the major human groups, is probably the most together, efficient, and effective. They aren't the biggest - that would be the CS - but they're not as... ramshackle and stratified as the CS. The NGR controls a good chunk of old Germany yet, including most major cities, they had a good pre-Cataclysm tech base to begin with thanks to Triax Industries, but recent alliances with CS and Free Quebec have given them some extra toys, like the ability to build Gitter Boys. The NGR didn't used to be anti-dee-bee, but that changed somewhat recently. Officially, dee-bees are "tolerated" now, but they are not and can never be citizens of the NGR, and must be registered. Other than that, the NGR is pretty... well, for Rifts Earth, practically egalitarian. It's got a functioning government, it's not a pure military state, it values literacy and education, and the average quality of life is pretty damned good. The population is spread out more than in many areas, with a few big cities and a lot of smaller villages. No real magic. The NGR would be sort of a great place... except that they're basically the major bastion of humanity in Europe, surrounded on all sides by dee-bees, and at war with the Gargoyle Empire, so despite everything seeming rosy, they're actually in a somewhat precarious position... One of the reasons they want an alliance with the CS.

... Ooof, gotta get back to holiday stuffs. Might post more later if anyone cares.

Quote from: Bruwulf on December 23, 2022, 05:47:53 PM
... Ooof, gotta get back to holiday stuffs. Might post more later if anyone cares.

Bruwulf, that was very interesting, thank you for the summary!