RIFTS? Never heard of it…
(Just kidding. Sound off here with a post if RIFTS is your jam, you filthy casuals…)
For those who don’t know, RIFTS was the game that was such a hit in the 90’s that it kept Palladium on life support for the next twenty-five D&D-dominated years, and was even optioned for a movie (and then discarded into development hell as a cashed-in bargaining chip in their strategy to get a better price for the rights to the Transformers franchise. But still, a Hollywood movie! That’s never worked out horribly for the RPG in the past except for every single other time it’s happened…)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would like to find the RIFTS sourcebook again. It was a great thing.
Everybody remembers ARCHIE and the robots, but the monsters from that book are also classics. Some of the robots are corny, but that’s RIFTS for you. I feel like Kevin Long drew these as a joke.
“Despite the moniker being more appropriate to the NG-V7 Hunter Mobile Gun (above right), the NG-M56 Multi-Bot (above left) is commonly known as the ‘Thundergun,’ a nickname it received from collecters of pre-Rifts media artifacts for esoteric reasons having to do with the weather conditions in the now-lost city of Philadelphia.”
Ramon Perez rules!He does indeed! Ramón’s illustrations for In Nomine are some of my favorites.
Palladium’s
angelsspirits of light are elemenal in nature, and its demons are infinitely varied, so this illustration works well in the Megaverse too…Are you familar with his webcomic, ButternutSquash?
It’s like Oglaf, right? Some say he took down all his racy stuff when he became a professor.
I’d say it’s more slice-of-life, like early Goats, but set in Toronto with more attractively drawn people.
Most of Palladium’s artists did pin-ups for the swimsuit issues of The Rifter
I know you just said to tone down hornyposting, but I found one!
What’s up with that cool glow effect? Did you take a picture of a monitor with your phone?
I’m pretty sure the Rifts sourcebook has been re-released. I saw it in a comic book store when I was browsing for D&D crap. I almost picked it up as a nostalgia buy, but I don’t think I could withstand the psychic damage of reliving my teens.
There’s a “Krugatch thread” about Palladium’s re-release of OG Rifts to expunge all Ninja Turtle references from the Megaverse. Sounds to me like Shredder and
KrangDoc Feral are up to their old dimension/time-travel tricks again! Thanks to Transdimensional TMNT, the Turtles had their own little Megaverse going on before RIFTS came along. They can’t publish for it, but we can still play it.I still love me some D&D, but after the d20/Pathfinder glory days, I could never get into 5E or PF2. I got back into Palladium during lockdown and discovered Dead Reign (close to home during COVID) and Nightbane (the Palladium-predicted apocalypse that more-or-less really did happen after 9-11), which have been easier to collect and digest than the massive sprawls of RIFTS, Heroes Unilimited, or Palladium Fantasy. After years of edition wars, it was really refreshing to find that Palladium hasn’t changed their “broken” system (but that’s a topic for its own dedicated thread).
I’m saying this for myself more than anyone, but let’s keep it SFW, y’all; this is RIFTS, not
Vampire: The MasqueradeApocalypse World!(Googles “Apocalypse World”)
Glitter boys represent!
YAAAS!
In all seriousness, this is who Glitter Boys are to me; the other dedicated robot pilots in the core game are either RPA-Elite fascists or Headhunter cyborgs. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the body-horror in RIFTS, and the essense of the Glitter Boy is that their armor is strong enough to keep their bodies and their souls from being ruined by the world (fun bit of trivia; the game was originally going to be centered on GBs and called “Boomers” before copyright issues forced a name change…)
P.S. I don’t care what’s canon; a woman who pilots the armor is a “Glitter Boi,” end of story.
I need to reread the source book. I don’t remember any body horror, but my standards have changed as I age.
It’s a subtle theme throughout RIFTS; as a kid, it didn’t read to me as body horror, although I did feel bad for poor Frommalaine (who couldn’t even die). I just thought it was the authors’ way of making ultra-cool cybernetics and bionics less appealing to psychics and wizards. I was young (and able-bodied) back then; now that I’m getting long in the tooth and the gradual failure of my own body is more of a lived experience, I can’t imagine wanting to willingly undergo something like bionic conversion (except as needed to prolong life).
In part because of RIFTS, I was big into transhumanism until pretty recently. As I’ve come to (the personal) conclusion that stuff like robot bodies, mind uploading, and technological singularity are just new versions of the same myths, rationalizations, and wishful thinking peddled by old religion, I’ve come to appreciate the stodgy “bio-chauvanism” of RIFTS over trendy Eclipse-Phase-style transhumanism. That’s not to say I don’t like or want AI and cyborgs and such; I just have more sympathy their estrangement from baseline humanity, and a greater appreciation of the same than I had as a teenager who hated my body.
Genndy’s Tarts, my proposed group of short-haired all-star cartoon babes for a Lemmy-based RIFTS campaign (would Fang and Monkey be included? Fingers crossed…)
Left to right: Mira (Primal), Ikra (Samurai Jack), and Agent Honeydew (Dial M for Monkey)
Samurai Jack spoiler
Ikra would be a shifter with Aku as a patron, not Aku in disguise, obviously
Nice! This is exactly the sort of copyright-infringing game that wouldn’t fly on a company-moderated message board. Character builds for Spear, Samurai Jack, and Dexter, would, of course, be obligatory…
RIFTS (core)
Mira : Wilderness Scout
Ikra : Shifter (with combat training)
Honeydew : CS Military Specialist (minor psionic)
Turtle Prime (no-MD, old school) Mira : mutant hominidon (Transdimensional TMNT)
Fang : mutant t-rex (Transdimensional TMNT)
Ikra : Ashmedai (Nightspawnbane)
Honeydew : agent (Ninjas & Superspies)
Monkey : mutant monkey (TMNT Adventures and Heroes Unlimited)I’ve only played RIFTS (Ultimate Edition, if it matters), but I’d be down to try Transdimensional TMNT.
I like playing dark characters, so if I had to pick one of the three Tarts, it’d be Ikra for sure. I’ve never played a shifter or any other RIFTS caster; would an Ashmedai (whatever that is) be simpler to play?
Ashmedai are shapeshifting worms that hail from (but may not be native to) the Darklands, the dark dimension of bad guys that’s just adjacent to Nightbane’s Earth (behind every mirror). They’re the closest thing to Aku’s “race” in the Megaverse that I’ve come across, and they’d be easier to play than a RIFTS shifter, for sure.
