RIFTS

Rifts is a roleplaying game made by the Palladium Books publishing company. Rifts takes place on earth about 300 years after a nuclear holocaust caused a magical reawakening and killed over two thirds of humanity. In the course of the apocalypse many things changed in the world, Atlantis rose out of the ocean which flooded most Atlantic coastlines (killing even more people), the four horsemen appeared in Africa (where they killed more people), the Lord of the Deep was awakened (He didn't kill anyone at the time), and most importantly Rifts began to open up which let numerous alien races spill out into the world. Where many of them were and are still being killed. Rifts, for which the game is named, are what makes Rifts Earth so incredibly crazy. These Rifts allow for dimensional travel and allow everything from friendly fluff balls to malevolent alien gods out for a stroll onto Earth. So all the while the people who thought their lives couldn't get any worse now have to compete with displaced extra-dimensional beings trapped here. Those not content with just being friends with everybody chose to fight even the nicest of D-Bee's (Slang term for dimensional beings). Thus the Coalition was formed. Made up of a bunch of pricks who managed to take control of ancient super-city/fortresses wage constant war against Aliens, supernatural beings and magic users. Meanwhile all kinds of other horrible things go on all across Rifts Earth. This is a really shitty place to live.

Disclaimer

Every Rifts book begins with a disclaimer that warns that the book contains violence, war, magic and the supernatural. Which is redundant since every cover of every source book contains an image that shows at least one, or more commonly all four of them. The disclaimer is often accompanied by some artwork that depicts some violence or one of the other four as well. This disclaimer was a response to the wave of anti-RPG hysteria in the 80s and early 90s, and its inclusion in saner times is one of many things that shows the game's age.

Setting(s)

As noted before, the primary setting of the world is Earth, specifically North America(mostly Eastern-to-Middle America and Canada). A few other dimensions got looked into from time to time as well. On top of that, compatibility between Palladium systems means that every other game, from Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas and Superspies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Robotech are also part of the Palladium Megaverse, copyright permitting on those last two.

One of the most important new old features of the transformed Earth are the Ley Lines, line crisscrossing the Earth that act as a network of magical energy. In the supercharged magic levels of Rifts' Earth, Ley Lines appear as huge walls of energy miles long, and half a mile wide, that glow blue-white in the night. Where two ley lines meet, they form a Nexus, a powerful font of magic power that sometimes open into Rifts leading to other dimensions, where monsters and peoples can enter the world, sometimes whether they want to or not. Where three ley lines crisscross each other like a triangle, things get even weirder. Bermuda Triangle-weird.

Coalition States(North America)

The former United States is completely broken, with a few new kingdoms and empires clawing their way out of the Post-Apocalypse. The largest of these is the Coalition States, a Nazi-like state that keeps its people illiterate, lies about history, and is genocidally vehement against Magic and non-human beings. If you didn't get the memo about them being bad guys before, their soldiers also wear all-black Stormtrooper armor with a skeleton motif, and they like putting skulls on the front of their vehicles and mechs whenever possible. The Coalition States are:

• Chi-Town: Claiming Iowa and parts of Illinois,. Chi-Town is a massive fortress-city near the haunted ruins of actual Chicago that is the capital of the CS.
• Missouri: Located in the eponymous state. Mostly farm and empty land earmarked for future development.
• Iron Heart: In southern Canada immediately north of Lake Huron. An industrialized state that cozies up to Chi-Town actively.
• Arkansas/El Dorado: Most of Arkansas is forest wilderness, with scattered Human and D-Bee towns. The primary exception is the City-State of El Dorado, which was friendly with the Coalition for years, ultimately joining during the Tolkeen war.
• Lone Star: While the CS claims the entirety of the Lone Star State, in truth they only run the Panhandle and some the area south of it. The main reason they do so is the Tex-Am Complex, a Pre-Rifts compound of Genetic Engineering labs, where the CS clones their army of Dog Boys. The man running the place, a Doctor Desmond Bradford, is a bit of a Mad Scientist.
• Free Quebec: Laying claim to the Canadian state with a legion of Glitter Boys. Quebec is... well, it's Quebec. Very French and very arrogant, they eventually split off from the Coalition, sparking a civil war.

Mad Haven

New York got pretty much wiped off the map during the Great Cataclysm. Sometime during this, Manhattan Island itself somehow got slammed into the mainland, making it into a peninsula. The ruins, only lightly overgrown despite the centuries, are haunted by spirits, madness, and mutants.

Archie 3

In the Aberdeen Proving Ground, the mega-corp Cyberworks created a powerful A.I. called A.R.C.H.I.E. Three. This A.I. was moved to the supreme headquarters of NEMA, an oragnization tasked with defending North America. On the bright side, the world ended before he went Skynet on us, on the down side, that didn't stop him from going crazy anyway. Archie has decided that the only way to make sense of this crazy world is to take it over, and he has command of a surprisingly well-preserved robot factory to do it. But rather than march across the country with an unending tide of tireless death machines, Archie has decided to be more subtle, starting with an army of hot robot warrior women riding mechanical dinosaurs as his front.

Lazlo

Where the city of Toronto once stood is now the city of Lazlo, a self-styled City of Learning. Named after a pre-Rifts scholar who theorized the existence of Ley Lines and other supernatural phenomenon that later turned out to have been right all along, Lazlo is one of the birthplaces of Techno-Wizardry, and one of the unquestionably "Good" places on Rifts' Earth. It is also home to adventurer Erin Tarn.

Tolkeen

Another center of Techno-Wizardry located in Minnesota. Tolkeen was a place of acceptance and magic much like Lazlo, but found itself way too close to the Coalition States. This inevitably led to war, which took Tolkeen's leaders down a dark path that ultimately failed to save it.

Criticisms

• Every now and then the fluff makes you feel like you stopped reading the book and started smoking a joint rolled from one of the pages. Some material is really weird. Like vampires with feet on their arms and hands on their legs. There's a mix of awesome, dumb, and awesome-dumb throughout.

• There is no balance between Races or Character Classes. NONE. You can literally have one player playing a demigod and another a hobo, with all the power disparity that implies.

• The system is notorious for constantly one-upping itself. Every source book seems dedicated to making the weapons in the last source book look like a bunch of kitten launchers. It's not really a linear progression so much as up-and-down, but considering the books your players are most likely to pull out it's reputation for escalation is not unwarranted. Beware most of the books written by C.J. Carella.

• It's very grimdark. Not as much as 40k- there's both good factions and hope around, some heroes would fit in well with Noblebright settings- but pretty much every continent has it's own extinction level threat or two, and the biggest power block on the planet by far is the Splugorth of Atlantis, who's leader Splynncryth is the answer to the question of "what if Cthulhu was a capitalist?". Having a continent-sized nation of interdimensional slave trading monsters under an eldritch abomination sounds like about as bad as things can get, but at least they don't want to rule everything (just raid it for live stock occasionally), and their presence discourages even worse eldritch abominations and supernatural hordes from descending on the planet en mass. They still descend upon the planet of course, just with more subtlety so they don't have to take the armies of Atlantis straight off.

• MOAR MEGADAMAGE! An infamous feature of the Palladium engine is the idea of Mega-Damage. Essentially Damage Reduction on steroids, it was originally designed for Robotech to reflect the idea of how conventional weapons are almost always useless against the gear of alien invaders, but the new/prototype weapons of the heroes work just fine. The gist of it is that every point of Mega-Damage(MDC) equals a hundred points of normal Structural Damage/Hitpoints(SDC). In short, traditional guns don't scratch an MDC being/mecha unless they go straight to anti-tank weaponry, while an MDC being can punch through a tank. Rifts takes this and fucking runs with it. Even basic arms and armor inflicts Mega-Damage, with the books explicitly stating that a man in body armor and carrying a laser rifle packs the toughness and firepower of a modern Main Battle Tank. Then Rifts stacks power armor, giant robots, and tanks on top of that, plus monsters tough enough to be a threat to all of those.

• "I just spent 10 hours making a character. Oh, shit it's 4AM. When are we going to play? Never? OK then."

• TRADEMARK ALL THE THINGS!

• While it is about complex as DnD 3.5, the layout makes it seem more complicated than it actually is.

• There is a Savage Worlds edition now, in case you want a modern ruleset.