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Palladium Rifts RPG

Rifts RPG Review

February 13, 2018

This article is taken from my previous RPG blog. I will be slowly translating my old articles over in an effort to consolidate all the information in one place.

I have a personal goal of reviewing at least a small amount of books that I have sitting on my shelf. I am known to some of my friends as a Palladium Fan-boy so this review may seem someone biased but I will try to remain objective.

I first started playing rifts as one of my first RPG when I was around 14 years old, having previously learnt about role-playing from the Palladium Fantasy game and have since collected a large collection of its various expansions and spin-off books some of which can be seen in the photo below.

Rifts is a multiple genre role-playing game created by Kevin Simbieda in August 1990 and published continuously by Palladium Books since then. Rifts takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, deriving elements from cyberpunk, Sci-Fi, fantasy and many other genres. It is often referred to the kitchen sink of genres.

The Setting

The foundations for the Rifts world was originally developed in Beyond the Supernatural, which uses Lovecraft storytelling techniques for a role-playing experience based on horror fiction.

The Rifts world is Earth, but hundreds of years into the future. Magic energy exists and is called potential psychic energy (PPE). PPE can be found in certain places, objects, and animals, but one of its greatest sources is human beings. While this has a variety of applications, upon a human's death, the energy is doubled, and then released into the surrounding environment. Ley Lines, lines of magic energy, intersect the earth forming supernatural areas such as the Bermuda Triangle.

In Rifts, points where ley lines intersect, called a nexus, are places of powerful magic, such as the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge. If a ley line nexus grows very strong, the very fabric of space and time can be torn thus creating a rift, a hole in space-time leading to another place, time or a new or parallel dimension. Ley Lines are normally invisible, but in the magic-saturated world of Rifts Earth, they become visible at night as massive bands of blue-white energy half a mile wide and stretching for many miles. If the PPE nearby is extremely strong the Ley Lines could be seen during the day too.

Rifts history first begins with, that there will be a golden age of humanity with tremendous advances in science, technology, military, and society. Humanity as a whole will get along as a majority of Earth's nations decide to stop a world war and begin to share ideas and technology freely. Much of the solar system will be conquered, humanity's wars will end, and harmony will reign.

Second, this golden age will be followed by an apocalyptic nuclear war that starts with a border incursion by NEMA (North American Economic Military Alliance, comprising Canada, The U.S., and Mexico) forces in South America during the year 2098. The special circumstances of Earth's mystic position in the Universe at that changes what would "normally" be the deaths of a few million living beings into a psychic energy flood that triggers the eruption of ley lines and triggering natural disasters across the world and also causes the return of Atlantis which raised the water levels causing even more death. The additional deaths, in turn, releases even more mystic energy in a vicious cycle.

Ultimately, the psychic energy of billions of human beings dying nearly simultaneously, multiplied by the mystic alignments mentioned earlier, energized the ley line networks crisscrossing the globe and caused many rifts to open, both on Earth and throughout the Megaverse - while simultaneously ripping untold numbers of alien beings from their own homeworlds and alerting the Great Powers of the Megaverse of a new planet to conquer.