Rifts

Overall score:

Most roleplayers have heard of Rifts before, though what they’ve heard about it is different in almost every case. Some say that it’s full of imagination, while others say it’s wild and unfocused. Some say that it’s gritty horror, while others say it’s a swashbuckling adventure. Some say it’s the coolest game ever made, while others say it’s a powergaming munchkinfest. At some level or other, they’re all right.

Rifts was first published over 13 years ago by Palladium Books, an RPG publisher that had already seen a lot of success with their previous games: homegrown stuff like Palladium Fantasy and Beyond the Supernatural, and licensed titles like Robotech and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They used the same rule system for every game, and one of their big selling points was that you could combine the different games together. In many ways, Rifts is a direct result of this attitude: what possible explanation could there be for combining magic, elves, demons, superheroes, dinosaurs, ninjas, mutant animals, giant robots, psychic powers, bionic warriors, and alien invaders into a single game? Rifts gave people an opportunity to do just that, and did it without falling into a generic and flavorless rut. Rifts has more possibilities, and more background information, than almost any other game you’ll ever play.

The premise is simple: Earth used to be a very magical place, but the ley lines (circuits of magic energy) grew weak and thin, and magic all but disappeared. Technology grew and civilization advanced, until one day a small nuclear exchange in South America started a chain reaction. You see, each living thing contains a certain amount of magical energy, which is released—and doubled—at the point of death. When the bombs went off, localized though they may have been, an enormous amount of people all died at once and thus released an unprecedented surge of magical energy. The ley lines were re-ignited, magic rushed back in, and the face and fabric of the planet were changed forever. When the apocalypse finally subsided mankind was all but wiped out, and Earth had become a dimensional nexus linking innumerable worlds and realities—the most powerful such nexus in millennia, and therefore the most valuable resource in the “megaverse.” Demons and aliens and entities from all over the megaverse staked their claims on the new Earth, and the battle for ultimate control began in earnest. The story starts a few hundred years later, as man is struggling to win back a homeworld bursting with both magic and technology.

(A portal between dimensions, by the way, is called a rift. Hence the name of the game.)

Though the backstory is epic and immense, your adventures on Rifts Earth can take place at almost any level. You can play homeless wanderers in the Chi-Town Burbs, a vast shanty town plagued by violent gangs, supernatural predators, and oppressive military peacekeepers. You can play inside of Chi-Town itself, or any number of similarly high-tech human cities, full of cyberpunk hacking and espionage. You can venture into the wilds of North America and spend your time saving villages, searching for relics, fighting in massive wars, or delving into political intrigue—the typical D&D stuff, really, except that your elven wizard might be teamed up with a cyborg, an alien, and a psychic mutant dog.

And that’s just North America. There are five sourcebooks with supplementary material, three conversion books that help you bring in elements from other palladium games, four guidebooks that help you create and run adventures, and 23 World Books detailing other areas of Rifts Earth—you can go to Europe and fight with the New German Republic in its war against a massive army of gargoyles, or you can go to the risen continent of Atlantis where alien intelligences rule a society of monsters, and literally everything (including humans) is for sale. Russia is a constant battle of bionic warmachines and political intrigue, while Mexico is under the diabolical fist of the vampire kingdoms. Australia is a wasteland dotted with enclosed and exclusionary paradises, and the oceans are home to a number of seaborne civilizations both human and monstrous.

And that’s just Earth. There are six Dimension Books that explore other areas of the megaverse, from the gothic horror of Wormwood to the vast space opera of Phase World and the Three Galaxies (the Three Galaxies account for more than half of the dimension books, and is a remarkable setting in its own right that can be played without ever visiting Rifts Earth). Beyond that, there’s a handful of adventure books and even a six-part series detailing the characters and processes of a major North American war.

As you might be able to guess from these descriptions, Rifts’ biggest downfall is its sheer size and variety—there’s simply too much for a lot of people to deal with. When each player grabs their favorite race or class from one of the more than forty available books, it can be hellish for a GM to try to fit them all together into a cohesive group with a comprehensible motivation and story. It can also get tricky when you try to deal with a party that includes a giant robot or something similarly unbalanced—in a fight the robot ends up hogging all the action, while your wizards (and maybe even your other warriors) sit in the back and watch. Rifts’ background is expansive and its storyline is very rich, but trying to use too much of it at once causes an overload that has killed more than one of my campaigns. It’s usually best to sit your players down beforehand and discuss what and where you intend to play: are you going to travel all over the planet or stay in one place? Do you want to fight cybernetic outlaws in the New West or mystical oni in New Japan? Are any of the player races allowed (and there’s tons of them), or should you restrict it? Rifts will literally allow you to play just about anything in any setting, but on the down side an unwary GM can very easily find himself with more than he bargained for.

Regarding the system itself, well, it’s Palladium—most people already know it, and they either hate it or tolerate it (I know very few people who love it, with the obvious exception of Palladium’s owner and main writer, Kevin Siembieda). It’s a stat-oriented RPG system that allows for a lot of mixing and matching during character creation, but virtually no big changes during character advancement—no multiclassing and no new abilities, though your starting abilities continue to get stronger. Combat is more detailed than that of d20, which makes it a little deeper and a lot slower, but there’s a lot of ambiguity in certain areas that can call for (or allow, depending on your outlook) a certain amount of house rules. It’s quite accurate to call Palladium the largest indy RPG publisher in the world, because everything they do is essentially the vision of one man—Siembieda. If he likes the game system (and he does) then no amount of market research is wanted or needed to tell him that it’s incomplete or confusing. He would argue that the success of his company is research enough, but we all know the truth—people buy his books for their incredible ideas and enthusiasm, and then suffer through the less-than-perfect rules and poor organization out of necessity or loyalty. Palladium’s quarterly magazine, called the Rifter, has begun to publish player-made rules adjustments that help fill in a lot of holes, so perhaps change is on the horizon in that area.

But change is on the horizon in other areas as well—Palladium has signed a deal with Jerry Bruckheimer to produce a Rifts movie that is sure to spawn a lot of mainstream interest in the product line. Even if the movie is horrible (which seems likely, given the track record of both RPG movies and Bruckheimer action flicks), the game itself will receive a lot of attention that could make it a lot more popular. At the very least we’ll get some action figures and a bad video game; if we’re lucky, we’ll get a lot of new Rifts material and a lot of new players in the community.

The sheer quantity of books in the line can be daunting, so tune in tomorrow for The Ultimate Guide To Rifts: what you absolutely need and what you might want to steer away from.

Written by Fellfrosch on September 02nd, 2003