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(More customer reviews)I've played Palladium games since I was first introduced to the system in 1986 by way of the Robotech RPG. I was one of the first adopters of the original Rifts in 1990, and followed the line fanatically and faithfully for many years. I'm no stranger to Palladium products. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt, so I lost my enthusiasm for Palladium products and stayed away for several years. When I heard about a new edition of Rifts, the hype was enough to bring me back.
Big Ol' Overview
As you may have guessed by now (the title may have been a hint), this is a review of Rifts Ultimate Edition, the latest version of Palladiumbooks' most popular RPG. Occasionally in my review, I'll save a few keystrokes by abbreviating references to Rifts Ultimate Edition as "RUE."
The first thing I'll get out of the way in this review is the debate on whether this is genuinely a new edition of the game or not. In my opinion, it is. There are many drastic changes in the rules, and the timeline has been advanced almost 10 years from the original starting point of the old Rifts rule book. "Ultimate" is code for second edition. Keep that in mind.
The presentation is a mixed bag. There are two versions of the book. One is a collectors' or "Gold" edition and the other one is the regular version. The only differences between the two variants are the covers and the prices. The regular version has an art cover and is $33.95 US MSRP, while the "Gold" version has a leatherette cover and is $70.00 US MSRP. The book itself is 376 pages long with simple double column text. There are also 3 color plate sections of 8 pages each spaced evenly through the book. Art is generally placed well, common enough to break things up, but not so common as to feel obtrusive. The book feels durable whatever cover variant you have, and my copies have already endured a LOT of page flipping with no sign of stress. However, most formatting looks like it was done by tab spacing in Word. Charts are not offset and placed in actual formatted charts, for example. They are simply absorbed as part of the text and look like large paragraphs.
To continue with the bad, errors abound in the book. Many of these are typos which existed in text copied from the 15 year old first edition of the book. There's at least one instance of columns being randomly switched around, and many errors have the appearance of being things which were overlooked while cutting and pasting from other sources. I have to say the sheer number of errors ranks as the highest I've seen in an RPG product, and I have a collection of between 600 and 700 RPG products. It really gives the whole thing an amateurish instead of "Ultimate" feel. However, I should note that while a multitude of blunders exist, the editors made sure that every trademark and registered trademark symbol is in place. For instance, the Glitter Boy Pilot character class (a character type devoted to piloting a legendary suit of mechanized power armor) may not get the skill to pilot their power armor, but the editors made damn sure to let the reader know that "Glitter Boy" is trademarked by Palladiumbooks, and every use of the word Rifts has a registered trademark symbol next to it. It's nice to see what was considered important in the editing and proofreading process.
Then there's the overall organization of the book. The big picture of the organization can be summarized as: Setting, Characters, Kewl Powers, Enemies, Equipment, and finally Rules. This, I suppose, makes enough sense. However, the book frequently references terms you would not know unless you were already familiar with Rifts (much like this review probably does, but hopefully not as prevalent). Some things are buried in places which might make sense but aren't where you'd actually expect them to be. Reading and referencing the book becomes a sort of hunting exercise. This is especially true when reading it straight through, as nearly every game concept and mechanic is hurled at the reader before the idea (usually expressed as abbreviation) is explained or defined.
An omnipresent huckster atmosphere permeates the book. Every character class description features one or more blurbs to run out and buy some Palladiumbooks product or other. The Elemental Fusionist class is itself a sort of advertisement for an upcoming Rifts video game, and the book lacks some of the class's basic spells in order to direct the reader to purchase a Palladiumbooks product called Book of Magic. Then there is a sort of "catalog" of all Rifts products which takes up 3 pages near the end of the book, explaining why you should buy all of them. To top it all off, the book also features a 2 page color advertisement for the upcoming Nokia Rifts video game, a Palladiumbooks mail order form, and back cover blurbs for other Palladiumbooks games. It's excessive by any measure you care to use.
Oh, and here's a note for old timers who get the book. The advertising blurbs said this book would be 95% new. That's technically true. The book is about 95% different from the old Rifts corebook, but it isn't because of brand new writing. Nearly everything in RUE can be traced to another Palladiumbooks product where it was cut & pasted from. This is good if you aren't a completist, as RUE has now absorbed updates from dozens of books worth of material. If you are a completist, this may not seem too cool. Nevertheless, it does turn out to be something of a benefit to have all that stuff concentrated in this brand new corebook rather than scattered over a zillion other books.
The question now is how do I proceed with the rest of this review? I think I'll take a cue from Kevin Siembieda himself, the author of Rifts Ultimate. In one of his designer's notes he says the most important things in RPGs are, in order of priority, characters, followed by a setting for them to romp in for continuing adventures, and finally a rule system to accommodate their actions. Let's see how the rest of the review goes following those same criteria.
Characters
Once again, in RUE, Kevin Siembieda says that characters are the most important thing about a RPG. He certainly attempts to deliver on that. Characters are randomly generated and class based, but there are a wide variety (30 or so) of character types to choose from.
Rifts has a little bit of everything. There are knights, hard-bitten mercenaries, combat cyborgs, mecha pilots, Indiana Jones types, cyberpunks, wilderness rangers, spell casters, magic device technicians, psionics, and even freakin' DRAGONS. I'm going to get completely subjective here. If you can't find a character template you want from all that, something is wrong! The character section is probably the best section of the RUE book.
While parts of character generation are random, random roll seldom restricts a player from the class they'd like to play, as requirements are fairly low, but it can happen. Plus, players get to pick from a large list of skills and selectable powers to customize their characters.
Buried in this section is a note by the author about how Rifts is perfectly balanced and playtested. While he defends his sentiment by saying that balanced does not mean equal, I can't say I agree with his application of the statement. While some classes have their particular niche protected, and are indeed balanced against others in different ways, there are some areas where things just aren't developed very well. For instance, the Robot Pilot O.C.C. is no better at piloting a robot than some other character who happens to choose the skills, and is, in many ways, worse than other character options for piloting robots. Then there are characters like the Rogue Scientist and Rogue Scholar. Where does one niche end and the other begin? Some classes have tons of fluff text describing them and numerous bonuses and special abilities while others get tiny descriptions and nearly no perks for their job choice. It seems a bit unbalanced to me.
If anything, the one thing that unmitigatedly mucks up making characters is the author's admitted equation of time spent making a character to character depth. Characters in Rifts take a long time to roll and write up. My playtesters took about an hour per character. There are a few other glitches as well, the major examples of which are references to cybernetics when cybernetics are not defined in the text and references to equipment like robotic horses which aren't in the book.
In the final analysis, I think this section deserves a rave. You get tons of character templates and a decent degree of customizability. There are definitely some problems with how the characters are balanced against each other, and the previously mentioned pervasiveness of advertising is troublesome. Overall though, I think it's pretty fair to say that the sheer variety in the selection of characters definitely delivers on the promise of characters as the most important and detailed element of the game.
Setting
The book describes its default setting by comparing it to the two movies Nightmare on Elm Street and The Day After Tomorrow crossed together. I don't think that's a very good way to summarize it. I'd compare it to Road Warrior crossed with Hellraiser crossed with Fist of the North Star crossed with Robotech, but that may be just me. The point is that the world of Rifts is our Earth transformed by a magic cataclysm of cosmic proportions. It has become a world of high powered technology and unbelievable supernatural power. Magic lines of energy crisscross the planet, and where they intersect they form nexus points where periodic Rifts to other dimensions form. Creatures that can only be called Demons roam the earth. It's a pretty bad situation all around.
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