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 definitely sucked up the oxygen in the room for a long time when it was released. Truly a marvelous setting for selling splat books. I'm still surprised to see new rifts books on the shelf when I visit the big game store in the metro 2 hours from me. Surprised that people are still buying into the "setting".
ReplyDeleteI was tempted to check out the savaged version of it, which would actually have a decent system that might be more balanced. I think that the ship has sailed for me on this setting though. Very cool back in the day.
I've recently picked up the Savage Rifts books, and, while I haven't gotten a chance to run them yet, the rules are more organized and seem more playable. Sadly, though, it's lacking the page-after-page of nearly identical Siembieda-style weapon lists...
DeleteSure, SW is a way better system than Palladium's, but for me it just miss the overall mood. Too "simplified" to meet the standard gonzo and "rullings-yourself" for Rifts game, if that make sense.
DeleteThere was an astonishingly short-lived Rifts CCG also, believe it or not, which, in true Palladium fashion, came out in 2001 -- long after the CCG boom had ended. I have a pile of it around here... somewhere.
ReplyDeleteRifts was the "Everything but the kitchen sink" RPG at the time. When it came out back in the early 90s, it was everything I wanted to live out every power fantasy I had, being in my early 20s. It looked like it jumped right out of the pages of Heavy Metal magazine, let alone the movie.
ReplyDeleteBut did I every actually play it?
No.
Funny. it was one of those games where everyone talked about it, but I don't recall anyone playing it.
Extremely common experience with the game as far as I can tell. Rifts may have the lowest "purchased to played" ratio of any RPG in history, which says a lot about both its theoretical popularity and its actual playability.
DeleteOur gaming group in college played it in between more "serious" endeavors. It's very much of the That's Cool/ Let's Blow It Up mindset. Good, stupid fun that got done in (IMO) by ever-power escalating sourcebooks.
DeleteDefinitely a game that played better than it read. Yeah, the rules were a hot mess on paper, but in practice, I think the Palladium "system" plays quite well as long as you aren't dwelling too hard on the underlying mechanics.
ReplyDeleteKevin Siembieda really is a rare case in the RPG publishing world (the stakes are so small I hesitate to call it an industry). Kevin has managed to keep both ownership and operational control of Palladium Books ever since he founded it back in 1981, and that’s not something many of his peers can claim. Most of the big names from the foundational era: Gygax at TSR, Dave Arneson with Adventure Games, Greg Stafford at Chaosium either lost control of their companies or eventually passed them along to others.
ReplyDeleteThat said, Kevin isn’t completely alone. Steve Jackson still runs Steve Jackson Games, which he founded in 1980, and it’s stayed independent all these years. Ken St. Andre held onto creative control of Tunnels & Trolls for decades, even though Flying Buffalo eventually changed hands before his death in 2020. And Marc Miller, while GDW didn’t survive, was able to buy back the rights to Traveller in the ’90s and continues publishing it through Far Future Enterprises.
Slight correction here: Ken St. Andre is still alive. The person who died in 2020 is Rick Loomis, the owner of Flying Buffalo, the company that published Tunnels & Trolls. Sadly, Ken has lost the rights to T&T (though he still owns Monsters! Monsters! and continues to support it).
DeleteDoes Fantasy Games Unlimited count? Their games are heterogeneous, but Scott Bizar has kept the name going.
DeleteFGU is an odd one. They don't really publish new stuff.
DeleteChaosium is an interesting one, with Greg Stafford leaving it for some time, and now he has passed, yet they continued to publish Call of Cthulhu, and have regained RuneQuest.
"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water...If I find in myself a desire, which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." - C.S. Lewis
ReplyDeleteAlthough it is often said that throughout history, humanity has focused, worried about and feared its own demise; usually as sort of a dismissal of current apocalyptic concerns (nuclear holocaust, global warming, social collapse, everyone gives a TEDtalk, whatever), I think it is more likely that humanity has always been right: the End is coming. If the End is "near" and recorded history were condensed to a week of time, each "day" would be about 1000 years, give or take. We would be in the evening of the 7th day ("Saturday").
That means that the apocalyptic concerns of early Christians (1st century AD or so) began on the 6th day ("Friday") which makes the introduction of "The Last Days" make more sense: they were, eschatologically, literally in the "last two days" of history. In this framework, the 16th-century prophetic craze of the Florentines of an imminent End carry more truth than hype: the collapse of the Medicis and the social unrest was an unbearable "birth pang" to the common people, and the concept of living at "noon" of the Last Day, instead of inspiring dread, was in fact, a hopeful look forward to a coming New World.
This concept would put Judgment Day (at the earliest) at 2100AD, and at the latest 2320 or so, at least according to Sir Isaac Newton, who calculated that the Great Tribulation (a time before the very Last Day of current-earth history) would begin (again, at the earliest) in 2060 AD or so.
So, yes, every era has had The End reflected in its cultural eye, but that doesn't mean that every era, including ours, views themselves at the same point on the timeline toward the End, nor does it invalidate the apocalyptic beliefs of previous eras, just because we have our own. Nor of course does it make every apocalyptic belief correct or prophetic. Among the most apocalyptic writings, warnings against deception and "false revelations and messages" are rampant.
I will say ours is certainly the only era that has created entire game systems around post-End dystopian adventure. I doubt very much that Newton or Girolamo Savonarola ever even dreamed of Role-Playing at the End of the World.
But I will also that humanity's psycho-spiritual "hunger" for The Last Day, and for surviving to "What Comes After", to me, indicates that its "food" indeed does exist in a coming future, to the satisfaction - or at the very least, the completion - of our withered souls.
And recorded history only covers 3% of the time that homo sapiens have walked the earth!
DeleteEven during recorded history, the Norse had Ragnorak, and the Ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, Hindus, Greeks all had end of the world myths.
Humans are pretty self-centered. The world is always going to end in our lifetime. How could it be otherwise?
I guess that's the antithesis of what I'm saying, but to each his own. My point is that the End is directly linked to the written word, therefore all of history. Ragnarok would have been a fairly strong belief at the very end of the "sixth day" of history, around the time of Beowulf, shortly before Snorri Sturleson and the Christianization of the Norse Vikers. Considering that Ragnarok was cyclical, the pagan Norse world did actually End relatively shortly before 1066AD, ushering in a New World (for them), and from their baptized perspective, they "entered the Kingdom" around the start of the "7th" Christian day.
DeleteAs to the Classical world BC? Their End times also came: The Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians and Aryans all ended, many at the height of power, and their End Times myths each had two prophetic stages: the first fall that ended their civilization as they new it, and the later second stage that resolved the interplay of nations.
Egypt, for example, who viewed their own End Times - much like Ragnarok - as a mythic cycle between Order and Chaos, were also judged in the Hebrew perspective to have a future that included falling to the Assyrians and others, and never clawing back to world imperial power until - perhaps symbolic - their own End of Days. Isaiah and the complete works of Ezra, including 2nd Esdras touch on this. But regardless of the perspective, there is no doubt that the cyclical "End" of the Egyptians actually did occur, quite dramatically. The Greek end is interesting tied to Egypt, as they fostered the weakened Ptolemies.
As I said, it is pretty easy to dismiss every culture as having a narcissistic false belief of the end times, but I think that misses the point: nearly all civilizations of any power have an end times perspective that runs the course of history. Obviously Isaac Newton did not see his own time as being The ( Big) End, but was obsessed with its calendar nonetheless. Obviously the Apostles understood the Last Days to mean a time period of 2 millennia drawn from the Book of Jude and by extension Enoch and Jubilees.
Apocalypse today popularly means "utter destruction" but that isn't what the word originally means in Greek: it means "revelation" or "uncovering." The apocalypse of the End is a pulling away of the curtain that obscures future history.
I think that's why Twilight 2000, Rifts, Shadowrun, etc. are really apocalyptic in nature: they explore the artifacts of the Beginning to better imagine the End, effectively hashing out the elusive "better days to come." Some of them are Egyptian/cyclical in style, and some of them are more Hebrew/utopic in approach. I think Metamorphosis Alpha is in many ways the latter: You eventually discover the true nature of the world, and, if you survive long enough, manage to literally take the helm and find the world beyond.
As the year 1000 approached, a fair number of Europeans thought that the end was imminent, not a dozen centuries in the future.
ReplyDeleteAnd they were 100% correct. Their pagan traditions and cultures died, the Great Schism occurred, the Mayan Empire evaporated at its peak, Byzantium began its 400-year fall, and the world was made new in the shadow of the Norman conquest, the rise of the Caliphate and the chaos that left three continents vulnerable to the Golden Horde a century or two later, was fomenting.
DeleteThe World certainly ended its 6th Day in dramatic enough fashion that I not only don't blame the Europeans of 1000 AD for believing it was The End, rather than the penultimate end.
I think we've grown accustomed to pitying the denizens of the past for their ignorance, instead of absorbing the lessons of their wisdom.
Hey, at least I survived Y2K, to witness our world reborn from the ashes of THAT apocalypse!
DeleteI think Corathon was referring to those Christians who thought the end was nigh. The pagan traditions were pretty much over by 1000 CE.
DeleteWell, I can forgive those Christians as well. After all the Cathar Christians who identified the pope as antichrist were executed en masse, the Orthodox Christians who broke fellowship with the Romans were excommunicated, The Roman Christians who identified their Christian enemies as heretic apostates saw the end of their traditional vicarage and were likewise excommunicated by the Orthodox.
DeleteApocalyptic visions do not occur in a vacuum just because societies like to think of themselves as the Last One. If they did, there would not also be so many date-setting prophets from the past who place The End at past the 2nd Millennium AD.
My point is that we are looking at these societies' beliefs all wrong: yes, our own has frequently "jumped the gun" with global cooling, nuclear holocaust, global warming, Y2K and the early days of 9/11, the Mayan Calendar, and more recently the initial Covid panic all being among the major "misses". Societies in the past had that as well, especially around particular (roughly 500-year periods) compound catastrophes.
These false readings however, do not invalidate the possibility of a correct reading. Moreover, they may not even be full false, but more a picture or a "birth pang" of a compounded worse fate (and/or brighter future) to come.
I think this is why apocalyptic games are so fun, why Thundarr the Barbarian was such a brilliant cartoon, and why using words and gameplay to explore imaginary apocalypses may very well be rooted in a reality that is as old as the "real" history of the world.
I bought "Rifts" when it was first released, despite being in college at the time and a few years removed from the hobby. I bought it because: (1) somehow I had heard about it, and that it was Palladium's post-apocalyptic RPG, (2) I was already familiar with the Palladium System from 'TMNT and Other Strangeness' and 'Heroes Unlimited years earlier, and (3) it was stocked in the RPG section of a chain bookstore I happened to be in one night looking for something to read. (And point 3 can't be understated in importance.)
ReplyDeleteI was not at all prepared for the wild, gonzo, inter-dimensional, multi-genre game setting that it actually was.
As another post-er above already mentioned, I never did play the game and never did know anyone who did. Nonetheless, I did end up making it a point to buy many of the early supplements (and some miniatures), all of which I still have in a box today. I never go back to them, but I can't bring myself to part with them either. I even bought Savage Rifts for 'old time's sake' and never played that either.
Palladium stuff was always great inspiration for our GURPS campaigns. " Neat idea! Now let's do it our way with a system we actually want to play."
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed Rifts in theory. In practice, you really needed a dedicated group that was willing to make characters together so you could avoid MASSIVE power imbalances. Maybe, if your friend wants to play a glitterboy, you shouldn't play a rogue scientist who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag. Unless that's what you're into.
ReplyDeleteRifts is a great setting with a subpar system. I played and DM'd it a lot (mostly DM'd). The setting was so unique while being familiar at the same time. I see someone above said they did a Savage World's version? Color me intrigued because a cleaner system would have been a game changer to go with their creativity in the setting
ReplyDeleteYes, Rifts SW version do exist. As a long time fan of both systems I can say it's both a softened Rifts and a hypertrophied Savage Worlds.
Delete"Dense rules and poor organization" is right on the money. I've often wondered if the infamous Palladium mechanics would make more sense if the books themselves had been better organized and edited - curbing Siembieda's enduring obsession with abbreviations, for example. Interesting to think about.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I will say is that a good GM can make it all work - or make it look like he's making it work, at least. A good friend ran long term Robotech and Heroes Unlimited campaigns back in the day, and as much of a mess as the rules were, we had a blast in both. And that's what matters in the end.
My group played this a bit...it was wonky. Some of us could do megadamage and could NOT be harmed by standard damage. Others couldn't. It was tough on the GM...how do you make everyone feel important when some people are destroying buildings with one strike, and others can't scratch them?
ReplyDeleteA friend owned it and this is exactly why we never played.
DeleteWe played a Rifts campaign back in the day - and, as you presciently imagined, it was fun for sure - an over-the-top, bizarre amalgam of genres and players. I was a futuristic soldier in advanced body armor with sci-weapons, and was without question the weakest member of the party - as you said, you'd blend a hyper-steroid merc, a guy in a giant robot, a powerful wizard, all together - and then somehow, they'd adventure through the world together, and the GM had to make sure the encoutners were balanced enough to not bore the more powerful characters and be not kill the "squishier" ones (my character ended up losing both arms to a missle that would not have scratched the other members of the party).
ReplyDeletebut that also has it's limits, and the power creep of the books is too much. But as other have said I also take my hat off to the fact that Palladium is STILL cranking out rifts books, decades later! And the world has always been one of the coolest in the TTRPG sphere.
So yeah - I played Rifts decades ago, haven't since then (though that goes for things like Shadowrun, too), and still have a weird fondness for it.
I have a large number of Rifts books and I always say any given book has crazy cool ideas for a dozen campaigns, but trying to fit them all into one would require mad, mad genius of a GM. I used to mine Rifts for weird stuff for my Shadowrun campaign mostly, but some it appeared in my D&D games as well.
ReplyDelete