I have similarly basic needs, and I stopped distro-hopping when I found Q4OS a few years ago. It seems to run well on most hardware and, while I can’t speak as to how well-supported it is in German, its community is based in Germany.

That Jerboa doesn’t allow blocking of instances is a massive red flag. Users need to insist on that functionality and switch to a new app if they don’t get it.

It makes violence less fun to play than the alternatives; combat is bullet-time; skill use is a montage. That said, it’s not overtly anti-violence, allowing players to figure out that fighting isn’t the best approach (or not, if they actually like bullet-time battles).

It rewards experience for solving problems, rather than racking up kills. Modern gaming is too corrupted by the reductive influence of video games and the market-driven need to minimize GM workload to ever really break it of this.

It encourages groups to develop house rules by making changes to the “RAW” only very gradually, instead of constantly reinventing the rules.

I’m here to try to catch the podcast-driven wave of renewed interest in RIFTS to get more people into Palladium-style gaming (the system is broken so you can fix it to your liking).

I just use a spreadsheet for everything. Google Sheets is great, but in keeping with the spirit of the Fediverse, EtherCalc is a less-corporate alternative. If being in the cloud isn’t needed, Gnumeric is my go-to spreadsheet; it has a portable version for Windows and doesn’t need to load a whole office suite to open up.

If you want to recapture the feel of early D&D, ShadowDark (quickstart book) looks like it’s going to be pretty good. The simple tweaks to the current game make a big difference, and the artwork is spot-on. This is the image grabbed my attention when I fist saw it (and realized it was new).

Dave Trampier is the most obvious influence, but the art also reminds me of Garry Chalk’s illustrations for Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf books and the early editions of Talisman. Now that I mention them, Lone Wolf game books and the original Talisman board games are worth familiarizing yourself with if you really want to get into the old-school experience…

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.

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)

Keeping with this theme, there will also be “Rockers’ threads”** meant to celebrate Palladium and defend it from its many (many, many) detractors. In part because of how protective they were of their copyrights, Palladium Books was extremely slow to establish a Web presence, so just about everything about Palladium games on the Web until very recently was either unauthorized or negative, especially with respect to the rules.

** The same adventure that contains the Krugatch, Lancer’s Rockers, also introduced experimental mega-damage musical instruments, and the whole adventure built to a climax involving the player characters rocking out against a kaiju-sized Krugatch robot. It was peak late-80’s Silverhawks-style cartoon camp!

Bullets intruding into a gun-free setting made this feel like a very “Amber” moment:

What’s up with that cool glow effect? Did you take a picture of a monitor with your phone?

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 Krang Doc 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).

Did you go in through the holodeck?

I think thirsty’s a given, but Valejo is a neat bourbon to Oglaf’s pink squirrel

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.

I’m saying this for myself more than anyone, but let’s keep it SFW, y’all; this is RIFTS, not Vampire: The Masquerade Apocalypse World!

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.”

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.

Most of Palladium’s artists did pin-ups for the swimsuit issues of The Rifter