Rifts to GURPS: another way to look at it.

[Greystar]

Okay being a Palladium Game System player AND A GURPS player I have an easier time getting new players to player Heroes or RIFTS then I do with GURPS because building a character from points often takes more time then picking a race and a template or a super character from heroes and playing it. Now it would be easy to create a RIFTS like game in GURPS especially if (like me) you have all the RIFTS books to be usable as references for your RIFTS world. Palladium Games is/was having financial issues but last time I checked they are still keeping their head above water and are making a strong attempt at staying there. GURPS has more survivability potential then other systems due to its flexability. Also I just wanted to mention what happened WEG (West End Games - used to be home of Star Wars RPG) and it filed for Bankruptcy but its comming back with new systems of its own. It wouldn't surprise me if WotC looses the rights to Star Wars in the near future because they really aren't doing anything new with it, so maybe SJ Games can watch for that to open up and make an Official GURPS: Star Wars and then do all the supplaments from novels and every other source Lucas considers Cannon.


I'll play Palladium Games as long as I can get players to play it or groups to join but I'd like to focus a bit more on GURPS, but as I said it is sometimes overwhelming for people new to gaming to jump into GURPS (even though it only uses d6).

[PK]

<MOD> (This is a good example of a post that meets the conditions for resurrecting the thread -- furthering discussion about the existing topic in a meaningful way. This is fine.) </MOD>

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by krank

Umh... I really wouldn't call RIFTS a "genre". Isn't it more like sloshing everything from every setting every into one setting, sprinkling with a fair dose of bad rules and less structure, and just kinda hoping the end result will work? C'mon, vampires AND dinosaurs AND cyber-knights AND aliens AND magic AND mutants AND robots?

Yes. That's exactly the selling point. It's the classic 'crossroads place' where anybody could potentially meet anybody, there are a lot of them in SF, fantasy, and gaming. In the case of RIFTS, it's our own Earth that becomes that crossover place because of all the dimensional gates.

As a source of ideas and inspiration, I've mined RIFTS extensively.

Also, the RIFTS 'magic zone' is my home territory, I'm a native of Illinois and I'm quite familiar with many of the towns and places around the Ohio River that are the heart of the danger zone. It's kind odd, but fun, to see such familiar names of tiny towns in that context.

Why anyone would ever want to play RIFTS, even with GURPS rules, is frankly beyond me.

The setting needs work to be really good, but it has immense potentials. The earlier RIFTS stuff, set mostly in North America, IMHO is the best, it's a workable well-past-apocalyptic setting with re-emerging advanced societies. The later stuff set in other continents gets out of hand, IMHO, though.

A weakness of the crossover setting is embodied in the scale problem, though. RIFTS is a setting where low-power characters can get splatted fast. Likewise, a character high-power enough for the RIFTS setting can be a major force in lower-intensity places and times, which in RIFTS can be a step away through a dimensional portal.

They part solve that by assuming that the high 'background level' of magical energy makes both personal magic and psi powers (not the same thing in the Palladium universes, but linked by a common underlying power source) stronger. Thus a magic-wielder or a psychic from another low-intensity setting will usually find his own powers jump up while he's in the RIFTS world, and fade back to normal if he goes home. That even makes sense in terms of the way the setting works.

Technology is a tougher issue. Say a full-conversion borg from the RIFTs time goes back in time to 2016 in company with a wizard and a mind-melter. It could easily happen, time travel is well within the capacity of the rift portals.

In 2016, the mind-melter and the wizard will find that their powers weaken. There's less background supernatural/psychic energy for them draw on. The full-conversion borg, OTOH, is limited only by the supply of spare parts. He's now the Terminator, and arguably harder to stop.

[Bruno]

RIFTS is just a traditional Supers setting (as in everything is happening, and it's all happening on Earth). Unlike a Supers game, the world has been changed by the everything happening, rather than looking weirdly like our own.

Player characters are potentially a random grab-bag mishmash of concepts, powers/power sources, and power levels - like many super-teams. Their rogues gallery is equally diverse.

I played in a brief RIFTS game 15-odd years ago, we were Combine slave-soldiers. I most remember the game because I tried to play against type: a small, dexterous, attractive cat-girl. Random dice rolls in character creation handed me a two-ton mutant tiger woman that did mega-damage with her bare hands, and could survive (small) mega-damage hits. They kept her in a very sturdy cage and only let her out when they needed her to smash something up. So, apparently even the dice want me to play ugly bruisers.

I remember we had an airship and one of the party members was a dragon hatchling, while someone else had a battle suit of some kind.

That's RIFTS for you, and it was a lot of fun.

Systems like GURPS and HERO are good choices to do a RIFTS-like game in; for GURPS, I'd recommend sitting down and seriously thinking of it as a Supers game as far as power levels and such go, if not attitudes.

You can start players at different point levels or not; I'd say you should have a conversation about that decision with your players first, though. They may all have character concepts that are pretty similar in power range, at which point you might as well just start them at the same points. Some may have variable concepts, and some may be the "go shopping and see what I get home with" types. Some rules-wonks may want to make a RIFTS character (or other Palladium-system character), and rebuild that with some fidelity. Find out what your players want, and will agree to.

The basic rule of all RPGs is "Whatever makes you and your players happy, and helps you have fun, is the right choice."

[Phantasm]

I've done (and am technically still working on) a Rifts -> GURPS conversion, covering the original Rifts Main Book and (the non-revised) Sourcebook 1, and am starting a GURPS Rifts game next weekend. Point values are across the board right now, but averaging about 400-500 points. (We have one micronized Zentraedi who fell through a rift who is skewing the curve, as she's about 750 points.)

From what I could tell, the world circa 2100 just prior to the collapse was a TL10 world with some experimental TL11 stuff out there. The widest deployment of nanotech was internal surgical units, from what I can see. Now factor in 20 years of apocalypse, approximately 200-300 years of After the End with the twist of magic and demons returning, and about 100 years of "okay, we're well into rebuilding, but for your own safety don't travel outside the areas we control", and you're in the time of Rifts. :) There's other things - the apocalypse phase-shifted the island-continent of Atlantis back into position between Bermuda and the Azores, for example - but that's the timeline in a nutshell. I tend to put the TL of the setting as a whole at TL9, but advanced in weaponry (lots of TL10 laser weapons in the setting).

Of course, the game I'm running is going to be set in a town "outside the areas we control" on the Atlantic seaboard, which means plenty of possibilities for rock-em-sock-em-robots fun. ;)

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

Can't help but wonder about Cyber-Knights. Their sword is easy enough, just a variant on indefinite duration whereas the mindmelter pumps damage instead. Their cyber-armor (particularly the upgrade to organic healing kind in Siege on Tolkeen) would be more complicated, guessing I'd need Transhuman Space or something. Their tech-sensing abilities would also be pretty tough to adapt, being able to sense missiles and cloud radar and stuff.

To be fair, I haven't touched the later Siege on Tolkeen stuff, so I really can't say. My own cyber-knight package is based on the one in the main book, not the later stuff.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

From what I could tell, the world circa 2100 just prior to the collapse was a TL10 world with some experimental TL11 stuff out there. The widest deployment of nanotech was internal surgical units, from what I can see. Now factor in 20 years of apocalypse, approximately 200-300 years of After the End with the twist of magic and demons returning, and about 100 years of "okay, we're well into rebuilding, but for your own safety don't travel outside the areas we control", and you're in the time of Rifts. :)

One of the neatest aspects of the setting from a fluff-text POV is the origin story. RIFTS is actually a sort of sequel of an earlier Palladium game, Beyond the Supernatural. That was set in the 20th century, the modern-day world, it's a story of secret magic, monster hunting in the shadow of modern cities and technology, etc. It sets up a secret history of the world, a background magic, and a fluff-text character named Victor Lazlo (whose creator still insists was not consciously named after the character from Casablanca).

The thing is that Victor Lazlo is a parapsychologist who is trying to convince the world that the monsters and old magic are real, and that there is Danger being ignored. He emphasizes repeatedly that the biggest danger about magic is not whether it's used or not, but that the modern world is blind to its very real presence and power, and the monsters associated with it.

Well, in the RIFTs world, he turns out to have been prescient. Very late in the 21C, there's a minor nuclear weapons exchange in South America. The problem is that it happens at the worst possible place (right on top of a major ley-line nexus area) at the worst possible time (one of the solstices, I forget which one). The magical energy released by so many deaths at once (the nuked city), at that worst possible place/time, sets off a chain reaction that simply wrecks the world...just the sort of disaster from ignorance that Victor Lazlo had warned about a century before.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

One of the neatest aspects of the setting from a fluff-text POV is the origin story. RIFTS is actually a sort of sequel of an earlier Palladium game, Beyond the Supernatural. That was set in the 20th century, the modern-day world, it's a story of secret magic, monster hunting in the shadow of modern cities and technology, etc. It sets up a secret history of the world, a background magic, and a fluff-text character named Victor Lazlo (whose creator still insists was not consciously named after the character from Casablanca).

The thing is that Victor Lazlo is a parapsychologist who is trying to convince the world that the monsters and old magic are real, and that there is Danger being ignored. He emphasizes repeatedly that the biggest danger about magic is not whether it's used or not, but that the modern world is blind to its very real presence and power, and the monsters associated with it.

Well, in the RIFTs world, he turns out to have been prescient. Very late in the 21C, there's a minor nuclear weapons exchange in South America. The problem is that it happens at the worst possible place (right on top of a major ley-line nexus area) at the worst possible time (one of the solstices, I forget which one). The magical energy released by so many deaths at once (the nuked city), at that worst possible place/time, sets off a chain reaction that simply wrecks the world...just the sort of disaster from ignorance that Victor Lazlo had warned about a century before.

IIRC, it was midnight (local time) on December 21 when the city on the nexus got nuked. According to the fluff text, juicers, crazies, the SAMAS, and the Glitter Boy power armors were pre-cataclysm technological advances, with psionics emerging into a real science due to the technology that made crazies showing that it was possible.

And it's fun that Victor Lazlo has showed up in Rifts as well; World Book 4: Africa, I believe.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

IIRC, it was midnight (local time) on December 21 when the city on the nexus got nuked.

That sounds right. The idea was that if the bomb had detonated an hour earlier or an hour later, there would have been no world-wide catastrophe.

According to the fluff text, juicers, crazies, the SAMAS, and the Glitter Boy power armors were pre-cataclysm technological advances, with psionics emerging into a real science due to the technology that made crazies showing that it was possible.

IDR if it ever was suggested in the fluff-text, but it always struck me as a reasonable suspicion that precise timing of the bomb in South America might have been the result of deliberate manipulation by one of the high-level monsters that Victor Lazlo was fighting and trying to warn the world about a century before. Maybe one of those people who cut a Faustian bargain with one of the cosmic intelligences, or a group of such, were in a high position somewhere...

Interestingly, for such a superhero-ish monster-munchkin bash as RIFTS, there are some genuine moral quandaries and difficult choices embodied in the setting.

For ex, the Coalition States are the largest remnant of the former USA. They are a re-emerging power in the middle part of the continent, centered on a new city near the ruins of Chicago. It's high tech, industrialized, and has a strong military that is extending law and order across an expanding are of the chaotic wilderness. It's probably the single force most responsible for the survival and now-improving status of humans in North America.

It's also deliberately oppressive, suppresses literacy and education, is intolerant of psychics, magic users, and literate people, is run by a dictator who consciously models himself on Hitler (absent the anti-Semitic ideology but definitely hostile to non-human intelligences), they employ what amounts to slave labor, it's a genuinely nasty outfit.

And yet...as noted, it's probably the primary bulwark in North America against the genuinely demonic powers that would devour the human race, if they could. There are more genuinely humane and decent governments in NA, but they are mostly city-states and survive in part because the Coalition States constantly pound away at the demonic enemies always trying to come in through the rifts. Their presence probably also is part of what discourages the vampire kingdoms in the former Mexico from invading the northerners.

So if the heroes get a chance to knock down the Coalition States, they have to ask themselves if the CS isn't the lesser evil. If the Coalition goes down, it's not unlikely that the human race in North America is done.

I haven't read most of the recently 'released' versions of earlier RIFTS stuff yet, but I did glance through the release of the Vampire Kingdoms, and I notice something I find pleasing. I've noticed a general trend of late toward turning vampires back into monsters, less focus on vampire heroes, and it looks like the RIFTS rerelease is going that route.