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.