This thread, spun off from the palladium thread, is for people to discuss what you should do to prepare and run a good RIFTS adventure.

RPGPundit

Well, as the GM for one of the more popular Rifts campaigns ever posted online, I suppose I should weigh in.

Some initial thoughts:

* You can't remotely come close to including all the material you find cool in the books.  Just start small and work your way out.  There is no way to swallow that elephant whole.

* Your players will quickly realize they need a lot of money just to keep their armor repaired from mission to mission.  Make sure the rewards are suitably tempting.

* Don't overdo the fact the bad guys are everywhere and superpowerful.  You want them to be intimidating, but you don't want the campaign to quickly degenerate into running away from everything.  It's extremely easy to do - back in high school, one player brought this to my attention by pointing out the campaign had essentially become "running from the Coalition" so I had to change it up.


Most importantly -
* Play the damn game seriously like any other regular RPG.  Think Shadowrun or the more serious post-apoc type settings.  Use those same ideas for adventures.

Way too many people see the more kitchen-sink / gonzo aspects of the setting and assume it should be played like a wacky cartoon.  I've found that trying too hard to be over-the-top is a great way to make a game boring fast.  If you want wacky, go with Gamma World.

Feel free to ignore the metaplot, especially the craptastic Tolkien stuff.

Try to keep the opposition roughly equal to the players. If the gamers are all glitter boys and juicers, their enemies should be bad ass. If they are all rogue scholars or similar, let them encounter minor threats like dog boy patrols.

Check out Russia. It's a great area for adventures.

Everybody has a weak spot. Most of the "combat monster" characters like Borgs, Glitter Boys, Dragons and Tattooed Men are very, very conspicuous. Sure, Dragons can shapechange, but they can still be sniffed by Dog Boys and Psi-Stalkers even if they look human. This is very relevant when dealing with human-supremacist societies like the Coalition and the NGR, less so in areas dominated by supernatural beings (e.g. Atlantis). In these areas, at least one ordinary (non-magical, non-psionic, non-enhanced) human PCs is an invaluable asset as "party face." Rogue Scholars have a breadth of skills that makes them excellent for this role, but City Rats, Vagabonds, Wilderness Scouts, and even soldier types can do this.

If you're not into metaplot, and if you find the CS a bit too over-the-top, Europe is a great, underrated place for a campaign. The NGR are human supremacists too, but not as bad as the CS. There are vast swathes of undescribed territory (just about everything outside of the British Isles, Germany, Poland and Russia), making it ideal for the enterprising GM to craft a sandbox of his own.

Don't be afraid to ruthlessly rip-off everything that you like and would want to insert into your campaign. I have myself ripped off Fallout, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Soylent Green, countless video games and comic books and tv series into my campaign. You can fit almost anything into RIFTS Earth with just a little bit of work and my players always enjoyed themselves when they recognized these characters and places. They once had the crew of the Serenity as the mercs they were dealing with, for example.

Dont stress over the rules. The Megaversal system is not one made for RAW rules lawyering. You decide how the rules work and you should houserule everything that you think needs changing.

Don't give a rat's ass about sourcebooks that you know you're not going to use. Just because one of your players happened to read on a pdf of the South America book doesn't mean he gets to use it. Pick the things that you want and ignore the rest. Throw "canon" out the window and make the setting into your little bitch.

Make it clear to the players that characters can and will be woefully imbalanced between each other, though this should be clear once they learn that you can have a beggar and a dragon as starting characters. Don't be afraid to fuck em up if they make a mistake or you think its appropiate for the game. They need to learn that at it's core, Rifts Earth is still an ultra-violent shithole that hates you with a burning passion and wants you dead, even if you can play a battle-armored psionic killer whale.

I'll think about more stuff once I get back home.

Before you do anything (and I mean anything)...

have a very basic idea of the kind of campaign or adventure you want to run. Whether it is sneaky spy type stuff, digging up relics from the past in ancient ruins, fighting the vampire plague in Mexico, epic space opera in the Three Galaxies, straight up space survival in Mutants in Orbit, demon hunting in Russia and the Far East... have a setting in mind.

The next step is to provide the players with a list of OCCs and RCCs that you have already decided would be appropriate for the campaign. While a mixed bag of human City Rat, Great Horned Dragon hatchling, elf body fixer, Rottweiler Dog Boy, and Grackletooth Wilderness Scout dimension-hopping from Earth to Wormwood is certainly playable; it might be too much for a newly appointed Rifts GM to handle.

I've run Rifts games where everyone was SDC, others where it was a mixed bag of SDC and MDC, and some that were all high powered beings with MDC in the hundreds. All were fun and successful because the players were made aware of how the game would be from the start; if I designed a campaign with the characters as space pirates in the Three Galaxies fighting Cosmo-Knights and Star Hives, a player would be pretty disappointed if I didn't inform him of this before he rolled up his Coalition Technical Officer with no space piloting or language skills.

Also, it's a big fucking universe. The players will want to do all kinds of crazy, zany shit - let them!