Chaos Earth

Overall score:

Palladium has been talking about Chaos Earth for years, and the idea has gone through several different versions, but it wasn't until last year that they firmed things up and gave us a good idea of what the book was going to be--a standalone game that takes place not after the Apocalypse, but during it. The chance to live through the technological, magical, and natural chaos that accompanied the coming of the rifts. It's a fascinating idea, and it brings a lot of new and compelling ideas to mind: an environment of darkness and chaos, where the world is viciously destroying itself and civilization is collapsing further and further every day. A game of desperation, horror, and survival unlike anything the gaming world has ever seen.

That would have been cool, don't you think?

Now the game is finally out, and one look at the garish cover--complete with brightly colored flag and shiny power armor--should quickly crush whatever hopes you had for this game. Palladium, by which I mean Kevin Siembieda, has taken Chaos Earth in a direction that it should never have gone. It's basically just another Rifts supplement, but with less horror and intrigue and a lot more hack and slash--and that's saying something. What could have been a game of brutal everyman survival has turned out to be yet another high-powered monster-blasting hero game full of giant robots. What's the point? There's nothing you can do in this game that you can't do with normal Rifts. Sure, it might be fun to set a game in your hometown, but since the narrow focus of the game requires you to play a military specialist from a roving band of warriors, you'll quickly lose any personal flavor that such a setting could give you.

Now, I know the justification--I've been playing Palladium games for most of the company's existence, and I know how Siembieda's mind works. His roleplaying games require larger-than-life heroes and over-the-top action, and anything less isn't worth the trouble. I should have been expecting that Chaos Earth would focus on capable heroes rather than desperate civilians, and to a large degree I was. And, truth be told, there's nothing wrong with heroic roleplaying--I do it all the time in the other games I play. But if you already play other games, do you need Chaos Earth? No, you don't--any nuances of apocalyptic flavor it may have had have been diluted past recognition, and what's left is so close to Rifts that it's pathetic. They even recommend that you use Rifts sourcebooks to supplement your Chaos Earth games, making the game both homogenous and lazy.

But enough of my biased ranting. If the game is that bad, I should be able to summon up some concrete examples, right? Indeed I can. Please skip the next few paragraphs if graphic depictions of lost potential offend you.

Example 1: Failure to provide options. If you want to play Chaos Earth, you do so as a member of NEMA, the Northern Eagle Military Alliance (on top of everything else it's a stupid name), and you're a well-trained military powerhouse with access to cool equipment. There's a couple of magic-sensitive classes, which are basically members of NEMA who know a lot about monsters, and there's the "Militia" class, which is basically a trained civilian who joins NEMA, but that's as varied as it gets. This tight focus turns it into a military game without providing any firm military structure, and restricts your play opportunities. Want to play as a normal guy trying to protect his family and find food and water in a ruined city plagued with looters and demons? Want to play a magic-user experimenting with new powers produced by the coming of the rifts? Sorry, this game only supports monster-bashing.

Example 2: Failure to provide a complete game. Even at $17.95, this skimpy book is overpriced. In 160 pages it manages to present an admittedly large number of OCCs, but they're nothing you don't already have if you own books like Rifts, Triax and the NGR, and The Coalition War Machine (i.e., the generic grunts and officers and military specialists prevalent in any technological army). Then there's a handful of robots and power armor--again, nothing you can't get anywhere else--and then there's a huge section that reprints the same old rules you can find in every Palladium game ever made. The weapons are recycled from Rifts (including the pictures, which is both a cop-out and an inconsistency with their time-line), and things like cybernetics and psionics are completely absent, despite being mentioned in the class descriptions. The only new material in the book comes in the fiction that establishes the setting, and it's all pretty bland, vague stuff that you could come up with yourself after reading the back cover. The book promises many more supplements to follow, but leaving so many of the fundamentals out of the core book is inexcusable. That the game is subtitled "a complete roleplaying game" borders on the insulting.

Example 3: Failure to provide antagonists. This could have been included in #2, but it's so prominent that I felt it deserved it's own paragraph. Simply put, there's nothing to fight. Where are all the monster stats that the adventure section tells me to use? Where are the rules for dealing with natural disasters? This book contains absolutely no bad guys, other than the perfunctory suggestion to either buy Rifts books or wait for the Chaos Earth supplements. I'm sorry--if you can't be bothered to include some bad guys in the core book, then there's no way I'm going to reward you by buying a second one. And if you already own some Rifts books and have access to some monster stats, why are you playing this hideously underdeveloped excuse for a game? Just play Rifts, ramp up the rift activity, throw in a hurricane, and you've got it.

Example 4: Failure to treat the subject plausibly. The world descriptions have some pretty wild yet realistic ideas--for example, the Yellowstone caldera has erupted and completely covered North America (probably most of the western hemisphere, actually) in ash and volcanic winter. We're fine so far. Unfortunately, there are no rules for it and not one single picture in the entire book depicts it; once they've told us it's there, they forget about it completely. There's a foot of ash in the "flavor" section of the book, and no way of dealing with it anywhere in the rules and no discussion of it anywhere in the adventure section. What is it like to live under conditions of permanent night with a constant ashy snowfall, unrelenting earthquakes, and random fluctuations of weather? How does that affect typical survival measures? How does it affect combat and visibility? I have no idea, and if Siembieda does then he's not telling.

Example 5: Failure to treat the subject properly. This is perhaps a matter of personal taste, but I just can't imagine the slow destruction of civilization as a heroic setting--and by heroic, I mean, "big heroes with big powers bravely fight back the tide of evil." Since this is essentially the prelude to Rifts Earth, we've seen the future and we know that you're going to lose--nothing you do will have any lasting effect on the world, because the monsters win. 200 years from now, man is only beginning to crawl out of the mud and fight back. If I want a heroic game with monsters and robots, I'll play Rifts--if I play an apocalyptic game I want it to reflect the inherent horror, desperation, and helplessness of the situation. There's a lot of incredible ideas to be had in that, and some wonderful roleplaying opportunities, but since that's never as good as an old-fashioned shoot-em-up in Palladium's eyes, we're stuck with a redundant clone of their headline game. That NEMA is one-dimensional and only half thought-out only makes it worse.

Example 6: Failure to provide a good story. The adventures in the back of the book are literally dungeon crawls: monsters have overtaken an important facility, so you need to go through and clear it room by room. Yes, there's a different feel when you're doing it with lasers instead of longswords, but that doesn't make it any more interesting in the long run. The very nature of the setting makes a recurring villain impossible (other than the good old "corrupt ally" ploy), but the nature of the characters make a recurring villain necessary. Let's say you're going to run a Chaos Earth campaign: what's your end goal? To fight your way across the country, picking up survivors and fugitives as you go, until you get to the other side and find...the same monsters and chaos you started out with? Do you just keep fighting back monsters until you get overwhelmed? That would be very interesting to explore in another game, but not in a heroic game like this is trying to be. What this game needs is A) an overarching villain, which it can't have, or B) a safe haven to flee to, which it doesn't have. It's just fight after fight, with no plot and no development.

I could go on, but I'm really getting tired of this. Chaos Earth is unfinished, poorly-conceived, overly narrow, and ultimately disappointing. If the promised string of supplements manages to salvage the game's lost potential I'll be sure to let you know, but for now I ask you to please stay away from this stupid, stupid game.

Written by Fellfrosch on July 02nd, 2003