I Was a Teenage Rifts Fan

This warning was like chems to a juicer.

My friends and I were born into the 80s sci-fi & fantasy boom. We were weaned on comic books and Saturday morning cartoons, and raised on early anime imports. Rifts felt like a synthesis of all those things, and we loved it.

It's been twenty years since I read through these books, and the system was already showing its age back then.

The core system has remained untouched since 1990. The Internet rose, nations fell, and Rifts was here, unchanging. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Thanks to that stubborn refusal to iterate on the rules, the decades of praise and criticism remain evergreen. You can load up Google Groups, pick a date and search^{1Palladium had an official mailing list throughout the '90s, but tragically it was never archived.}, and you'll find the same gripes and plaudits.

What I'm saying is everything that needs to be said about Rifts has been said.

So I'll run through my basic impressions, then I can move on to the nostalgic navel-gazing of which I am so fond.

Caveat: I broke from Rifts in 1997-98, when the Coalition were still clear-cut fascist villains, before the tail wagged the dog and they were turned into grim anti-heroes:

1. The setting is bonkers.
2. The supplements are loaded with interesting threads for GMs and players to pull at (or daydream about, as it were).
3. The systems are messy, but they work. The shagginess matches the setting.
4. The illustrations are classic '90s Cool. Kevin agrees, and isn't shy about reuse, but it's cool.

Okay, with that out of the way, like most of my nostalgia bait topics this one is my dad's fault. His copy of the main book and first source book were my friends' and my ground zero. They spawned a small but devoted fandom of teenage dorks who bought whichever Rifts book we could find and afford, but barely actually played the game.

Good games that go unplayed aren't a rarity. It's a bummer, but that's life. This was different. This was people buying books with no especially strong interest in the game those books described. The art and setting were undeniable, but convincing 7th and 8 graders to read and digest a monster like Rifts was too tall an order.

To be fair, Rifts was the very first TTRPG any of us had laid eyes on, and there were no older brothers or cousins to show us the ropes. When we did talk about playing we couldn't even decide what kind of Rifts we wanted to play. Of course there was the kid who wanted to play a Dragon, and the natural born min/maxer who couldn't get over the Glitter Boy with its massive cannon. But then someone got the Mercenaries^{2Rifts - Mercenaries (Palladium Books, 1995)} book and suddenly we were faced with mixing SDC and MDC? It was doomed from the start. Remembering trying to herd everyone into classes in the same power level ballpark is giving me anxiety.

How different would those years have been if this system had been just a little less dense? A little more honest with itself about the parallel games it contained, and their fundamental incompatibility? It's a story as old as, well, Rifts: Gamers (or would-be gamers in our case) dig the setting, but can't hang.

With hindsight there was definitely a lot of, er, "inspiration" from Gundam in the designs, but the aesthetic hooked us. To semi-rural tweens it felt grimy and dangerous. It was a vibe "where magic is real, demonic creatures and monsters stalk humans and weird science, psychic abilities, ancient gods, supernatural horrors and alien beings are commonplace."

We'd all fallen off by the time Spirit West^{3Rifts World Book 15 - Spirit West (Palladium Books, 1997)} dropped, but I still own all the books from those days. I even took in strays from friends who decided to get rid of their collections. I see Palladium eventually put out the best titled book of all time: Rifts World Book 26 - Dinosaur Swamp. With the all-timer section title, "Alien Dinosaurs & Beings." They've still got it!

Did this poster inspire this post, or just the graphic? We may never know.

It's disorganized, unbalanced, unclear and fundamentally incompatible with itself. Every detail is spelled out and expanded on ad nauseam, and the same maximalist approach was applied to the system itself. Yet despite its verbosity, so much of it is extremely difficult to parse.

But it had dragons and robots and guns, and robot dragons with guns, and more arcane symbols than you could shake a ley line at.

I'm just courting the man's wrath at this point, but come on.

Wait, is Palladium still ridiculously litigious? Does Palladium Books still exist as a proper publisher with writers, editors and artists? What was I talking about?