Wednesday, September 3, 2025
Retrospective: Rifts
Deeper considerations aside, it's easy to understand why: apocalypses offer unique opportunities for adventure. The breakdown of the old order creates lots of space for heroes and villains who make their own rules, just as ruined cities are the perfect places for such people to loot and explore. The post-apocalyptic world might not be a great place to live, but it often sounds like a great place to play an RPG, filled as it is with danger, mystery, and the promise of carving out something new amidst the wreckage of the old.
Over the years, there have been many post-apocalyptic RPGs, some of which I’ve greatly enjoyed. As readers know, I’m currently refereeing Barrett’s Raiders, my ongoing Twilight: 2000 campaign, so it’s a genre that has long appealed to me. That’s why, when Palladium Books released its own entry into the field, Rifts, in 1990, I took notice. Written by Kevin Siembieda, like most of Palladium’s output, the game now feels like the perfect encapsulation of its era’s RPG culture: exuberant, excessive, self-confident, and utterly unconcerned with its own contradictions. Even more than three decades later, Rifts remains both instantly recognizable and difficult to pin down. To call it merely a “post-apocalyptic” RPG misses the mark, because Rifts was (intentionally) never just one thing. It was a collision of genres and ideas – science fiction, fantasy, horror, superheroes – whose very incoherence was what made it so compelling.
At the time of its initial release, I was already familiar with Palladium through a few of the company's earlier releases, thanks in large part to my college roommate, who was a fan. Consequently, I wasn't surprised when I saw a big rulebook filled with evocative, comic-style artwork and Siembieda’s signature blend of dense rules and poor organization. What I wasn’t prepared for was the scope of its setting. Here was Earth, centuries after a magical cataclysm tore open rifts in space and time, unleashing every kind of horror, wonder, and menace imaginable. Dragons and demons rubbed shoulders with cyborg mercenaries, mutant animals, and alien warlords. The North American continent was a patchwork of techno-dystopias, barbarian kingdoms, and wildernesses haunted by supernatural predators. Almost anything was possible in Rift by design, since one of its purposes was to provide a setting where elements from other Palladium games could be dropped in easily.
The original rulebook – the only one I ever saw – had a clear appeal. Its black-and-white illustrations (by artists like Kevin Long and Siembieda himself) were part of its appeal. Likewise, its cover painting by Keith Parkinson immediately communicated the tone of Rifts: over-the-top, bombastic, and larger than life. Rifts didn’t just allow for power fantasies; it practically demanded them. Whereas Dungeons & Dragons offered a gradual "zero to hero" style of advancement, Rifts lets you begin the game as a cyber-knight, a near-invulnerable walking tank, or a ley line–powered sorcerer who can bend reality.
That excess was both the game’s great strength and its great weakness. The rules were built on the already creaky Palladium system, with its notorious combination of percentile skills, mega-damage mechanics, and endless lists of powers, spells, and combat options, not to mention character classes. "Balance" of any kind is effectively nonexistent. A city rat with a pistol could be in the same party as a dragon hatchling with spellcasting and mega-damage claws, but the game's overall approach was, more or less, that Game Master can make it all work somehow. Honestly, that's not necessarily terrible advice, though I'm sure it wouldn't satisfy many gamers, especially nowadays.
Looking back, Rifts is a fascinating snapshot of where the hobby was at the time. By 1990, D&D had already begun its transformation into an ever more baroque monstrosity with a plethora of options and settings, while White Wolf was just about to launch its World of Darkness storytelling games, forever changing the face of the hobby. Rifts, by contrast, reveled in excess, giving players the keys to the toy store and daring them to see what happened. The result was chaotic, but, based on what longtime fans tell me, immensely fun. In the years that followed, the flood of supplements, world books, and sourcebooks only expanded the game’s already immense scope, making it simultaneously baffling to outsiders but also exactly what its fans wanted.
Rifts will never win any awards for being elegant or balanced, but, speaking largely as a disinterested party, I think it largely succeeds on its own terms. It offers a vision of roleplaying that is anarchic, imaginative, and gloriously insane. For many in 1990, Rifts was a passport to a multiverse where every idea anyone ever had from comics, cartoons, or science fiction could live side by side. That’s no small achievement, even if it's not for everyone, myself included.
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Before the Dark Years"
[Historical Note: The original version of this, from April 23, 2011, was not part of The Articles of Dragon series but a stand-alone post. However, since the article it discusses did appear in Dragon, it seemed appropriate to fold this report into my revival of the series.]
While the way that TSR looted the corpse of SPI was shameful (and likely had a deleterious effect on the wider hobby), it had one positive effect from the perspective of my youth: the advent of the "Ares Section" of Dragon. I've always been more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy one, so knowing that every issue of Dragon would devote two or three articles to the genre each month was a good thing in my view. (This also probably explains why the issues of Dragon I was most fond of ran from 80s to the early 100s – corresponding very closely to the lifespan of the Ares Section).
Gamma World was well represented in the Ares Section, frequently presenting articles penned by creator James Ward, which I appreciated, given my obsession with official-dom. One of my favorite articles from Ward was published in issue 88 (August 1984), called "Before the Dark Years." It presents a historical timeline of the Gamma World setting, beginning (as all post-apocalyptic timelines do) in 1945 with the first use of nuclear weapons and ending in 2450, which was the approximate start of the 2nd edition of the game (1st edition began later, in 2471 – why the change, I wonder?).
It's true that the article appealed to me back then because it scratched a completist urge to know it all, an urge I have long since – and happily – abandoned. But back then it was simply awesome to know, for example, that the starship Warden was launched in 2290. Re-reading the article, I still love it, but for rather different reasons. I like it for entries like this one:
Gamma World didn't take that approach. Instead, it's set in the future and the weapons that usher in the Dark Years include not just nuclear missiles but also "dimension-warp" devices and other weaponry undreamed of in our age. I think that set Gamma World apart from other post-apocalyptic games, imbuing it with a more "wondrous" quality and also, if I may wax sociological for a moment, making it a little less frightening to kids like me. The Morrow Project, to cite one example, postulates that the End would come in 1989 as a consequence of Cold War foolishness and, however absurd its specifics, that was a scenario many people genuinely believed might occur in their lifetimes. But a 24th century terrorist group called the Apocalypse? Using dimension-warp weapons and striking at not just Earth but space colonies as far away as the Oort Cloud? That's clearly fantasy and a lot less terrifying.
As I noted recently, my preferred way to play Gamma World is to treat the post-apocalyptic world as largely a blank slate, one utterly unfamiliar to the characters, who not only grew up generations removed form the Fall, but are played by people for whom even the pre-Fall world is alien. That pre-Fall world included settlements on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, is supported by robots, cyborgs, and A.I.s, and is launching extra-solar colonization efforts. That creates a lot of scope for terrific adventures and campaigns; I might even go so far as to say that, as developed in this and other articles, Gamma World provides a canvas every bit as large as that offered by Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, the game has largely been treated as a joke by its custodians over the years, its full potential never quite realized and that's too bad.
Gamma World was well represented in the Ares Section, frequently presenting articles penned by creator James Ward, which I appreciated, given my obsession with official-dom. One of my favorite articles from Ward was published in issue 88 (August 1984), called "Before the Dark Years." It presents a historical timeline of the Gamma World setting, beginning (as all post-apocalyptic timelines do) in 1945 with the first use of nuclear weapons and ending in 2450, which was the approximate start of the 2nd edition of the game (1st edition began later, in 2471 – why the change, I wonder?).
It's true that the article appealed to me back then because it scratched a completist urge to know it all, an urge I have long since – and happily – abandoned. But back then it was simply awesome to know, for example, that the starship Warden was launched in 2290. Re-reading the article, I still love it, but for rather different reasons. I like it for entries like this one:
2322 – Processed-iced asteroid (guidance circuits damaged by terrorists) strikes Mars; eight-year duststorm and climatic disruption result. All colonies on planet isolated; Federation charter suspended for the duration.Or this one:
2331 – Trans-Plutonian Shipyards assume control of their own programs and generate robotic "life."The reason I love entries like these is that they hit home that Gamma World's apocalypse doesn't happen in the here and now but in a science fictional future. That ought to be obvious, given the presence Mark VII blasters and black ray guns and so forth, but, somehow, it's easy to forget, perhaps because, in the 70s and 80s, worrying about the End of All Things focused on the present, not the future. Indeed, lots of people didn't think there would be a future, thanks to the Damoclean threat of Armageddon.
As I noted recently, my preferred way to play Gamma World is to treat the post-apocalyptic world as largely a blank slate, one utterly unfamiliar to the characters, who not only grew up generations removed form the Fall, but are played by people for whom even the pre-Fall world is alien. That pre-Fall world included settlements on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, is supported by robots, cyborgs, and A.I.s, and is launching extra-solar colonization efforts. That creates a lot of scope for terrific adventures and campaigns; I might even go so far as to say that, as developed in this and other articles, Gamma World provides a canvas every bit as large as that offered by Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, the game has largely been treated as a joke by its custodians over the years, its full potential never quite realized and that's too bad.
Monday, September 1, 2025
Lessons Learned
With The Shadow over August now complete, I’ve been reflecting on the experience of writing it. This was the first time I’d ever devoted an entire month to a single “theme,” unless you count those old blog challenges that used to make the rounds back in the early days of Grognardia. I took part in at least one of those during what I like to call the First Age of the blog. However, The Shadow over August was different in both purpose and content, which is why it’s left me with so many thoughts.
In fairness, it wasn’t completely unlike a blog challenge in one key respect: it gave me a convenient frame for my writing. One of the hardest parts of maintaining a blog – especially when aiming for daily posts – is figuring out what to write. I’m never short of ideas, but not all of them are ready to be developed and my attention tends to bounce between a dozen threads at once. That usually results in an eclectic mix of posts, which I know some readers enjoy, but it also makes it harder for me to build momentum toward something more substantial.
Having a clear focus last month, namely, Lovecraft and his legacy, helped channel my creative energy in a way I haven’t experienced in years. August turned out to be my most productive month of 2025, surpassing even July. More importantly, I feel the quality of my posts was higher overall, with at least one standing among the best I’ve written since returning to blogging five years ago. In that respect, The Shadow over August was a real gift to me, providing a framework that sharpened both my productivity and my creativity.
That said, that same framework also acted as a kind of restraint. Even though not every post last month was about Lovecraft, most of them were and, when other ideas occurred to me, I often hesitated to post them. On some level, it felt wrong to break the flow of Lovecraftian content with posts on unrelated gaming topics or news about Grognardia Games Direct. The focus was liberating but also limiting in ways I hadn’t expected. The flipside of this is that, now that The Shadow over August is over, I almost feel sheepish about making any more Lovecraft posts, despite the fact that I still have a lot more to say about him, his works, and his influence of roleplaying games.
That's, of course, one of the other unexpected outcomes of last month: I gained a new appreciation of HPL's Dreamlands stories, so much so, in fact, that I'm now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest. I certainly didn't intend to be so inspired that my head was suddenly overflowing with ideas for such a game and yet here I am. The Muse is mysterious. Rather than try to puzzle out her motives, I have simply decided to let her guide me where she will. Whether this results in anything substantial or just another half-finished project, who can say?
I think, on balance, the experiment was a successful one, so much so that I've already begun contemplating doing another one in the future, perhaps in January, which is the birth month of both Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (and J.R.R. Tolkien and Abraham Merritt and Edgar Allan Poe and ...). However, a lot will depend on how my various projects evolve over the course of the coming weeks and months. I feel as if I've been on something of a creative roll lately and I'm honestly struggling a bit to decide which projects deserve my attention.
While there's no danger that I will abandon this blog, is writing a post every day something I can sustain over the long term, especially when there's so much more I want to do (and that, I must be honest, literally repay the time and effort I put into them)? I really don't know, hence my experimentation with different platforms, formats, and content over the last few months. I can't help but feel that I'm in the midst of a long-delayed metamorphosis. Ultimately, I think that'll be a good thing, but the intervening stages might be a little ugly and messy and, for that, I apologize in advance.
The End(?) of Pulp Fantasy Library
In Grognardia's early days, one of its signature features was Pulp Fantasy Library. If you glance at the “Popular Topics and Series” box down the right-hand column, you’ll see more than 300 entries under that heading. The idea was simple: highlight the works of pulp fantasy literature that shaped not only my own imagination but, more importantly, those that shaped founders of the hobby of roleplaying. Like so much of Grognardia, Pulp Fantasy Library grew out of my conviction that you can’t really grasp the origins of RPGs without engaging the books, authors, and ideas that inspired it.
Of course, the series didn’t stay neatly confined. Over time, I pushed at its boundaries, sometimes gleefully so. I wrote not only about sword-and-sorcery or weird tales but also about science fiction, horror, comics, movies, and the occasional oddball work that defied easy categorization. I often made light of this stretching of definitions, but, in truth, I was doing something larger, namely, charting the imaginative landscape that predated and nourished the hobby. RPGs didn’t spring from nowhere, after all, and Pulp Fantasy Library was my way of mapping the soil they grew in.
The Shadow Over August reminded me of just how much I enjoyed this work. Revisiting four of Lovecraft’s stories made two things clear. First, there’s still a vast reservoir of older literature, much of it influential on RPGs, some of it simply worth reading, about which I've never written. Second, doing these posts properly is no small task. Reading (or rereading), researching context, and writing thoughtfully about them takes a great deal of time and energy, more than I can always justify with so many other projects competing for my attention these days.
Much as it might seem otherwise, Grognardia remains a hobby project and hobbies come with limits. That’s part of why I find myself asking whether Pulp Fantasy Library has already run its course and there's really no need to revive it – or perhaps is it ready for a metamorphosis of some kind? Many of the works I’d still like to tackle don’t sit comfortably within the strict “pulp fantasy” label. Maybe the time has come to evolve the series into something broader, which reflects the full range of the cultural and literary roots from which roleplaying sprang.
I haven’t made up my mind about whether or not I should return to the series and, if so, in what form or frequency. What I do know is this: I remain as fascinated by these seminal works as ever and I believe they still matter deeply to anyone who cares about where our hobby came from. The real question is whether readers share that conviction strongly enough to make it worthwhile for me to continue.
Do you want to see Pulp Fantasy Library return in some form? Is this the kind of writing you value from Grognardia? Let me know. Your responses and, frankly, your encouragement will help me decide not only the fate of Pulp Fantasy Library but also the future direction of the blog itself.