RPPR Episode 81: Mega-Damaged

Oh Rifts-chan, never change ^_^ News: Check out the newest Story Bundle! My book, Zombies of the World, is one of the bonus ebooks you can get if you pay the average of $8 or more. The bundle also features F. Paul Wilson and other great authors!

I also wrote up a detailed post-mortem of my recent Call of Cthulhu one shot based on the indie video game, Hotline Miami.

Synopsis: I asked Tom what he wanted to do an episode on and he chose the Palladium game system. So here we are. After going over our history with the system, we go over the game, from its mechanics to the setting of Rifts. It’s not pretty, but hopefully entertaining. Tom’s letter is about Rifts of course, and we have shout outs, a listener letter, and an anecdote.

Shout outs:

  • Story Bundle: Buy these ebooks! They make great Christmas gifts ๐Ÿ˜€
  • SSSSSSS: A 1970s horror movie about people being turned into giant snakes because of reasons.
  • The Drift: New SG-1 Stargate novel. Interesting plot, characterization, and excellent attention to detail.
  • A Monster in Paris: CGI animated film about a monster (in Paris).
  • Miskatonic River Press and Punktown Kickstarter: Get Lovecraftian games and fiction!
  • HP Lovecraft books Skyrim mod: Reading Lovecraft books in real life get you down? There’s got to be a better way!
  • Dead Pixels: A new indie game on Steam about shooting zombies, so you know I dig it.
  • Legend of Grimrock: Indie CRPG modeled after old school games like Eye of the Beholder. Clever puzzles and fun combat.

Song: Multidimensional Consciousness by the Flavor Foundation

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11 Comments

  1. So when is RPPR going to interview Kevin Siembieda?
    Seriously. Someone has to do it?


  2. ::clipped from facebook::

    love the show, listening to the new episode now. Have to point out, since Rifts Palladium has come out with Splicers (man vs. robots), Nightbane (man vs. monsters), Systems Failure (man vs. bugs), Dead Reign (man vs. zombies), and the new Robotech Shadow Chronicles (not technicaly a new game). That’s off the top of my head, of course I did just order my x-mas grab bag so my memory is fresh. I’m saying any of these games use a newer (better) game engine. I love palladium, but I typically use GURPS or BESM d20 to run the games.

    BTW: you guys were the first podcast I had ever listened to. I stumbled on you guys via Myspace back in 2005 or 2006. Now I listem to over 30 RPG podcasts, and it’s all your fault. Thank you so much, you’ll always be my first. Game on!

  3. You guys should really try out Savage Worlds, it’s a simple to learn universal generic role-playing system, and though it can sometimes be too much pulp action, it does a great job of allowing any setting to be played in it.

    By the way Tom, about your letter about the end of the world, try to remember Caleb’s Cthulhu Dark game, Revelations. It was a pretty good game set in the end of the world, where (almost) nothing that the players could do would be able to save it. You were a player in it, too. ๐Ÿ˜›

  4. Glad to hear you’ll be on our neck of the woods Tom (I assume that’s to meet with Andy).

  5. I think I know why I struggle so much with D20. It is my Palladium.

    It is my game where it was all I knew, then I discovered other systems and realized what a colossally insane crunch it is.

    I understand now why there is little sympathy for my struggles amongst RPPR players. I whine because I don’t want to go back to my hometown after leaving for the big city, whereas the rest of the guys were raised in the RPG rules equivalent of a muddy hole partially covered by sheet metal. My complaints about D20 must seem quaint.

  6. Yup, visiting Andy in the Northwest. And I might make a detour to the King Tut exhibit. And run some Eclipse Phase for the Andy and his group.

  7. “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. Good news: we got rid of the lemming infestation by driving them off a cliff and into a rift…bad news is the rift connects to another rift in geosynchronous orbit above our town…and all the lemmings are now supernatural creatures…INCOMING!”


  8. It pleased me to hear *the* legendary system, so perfect it never required any change to the rules, run by the RPPR group … however, my sympathies, because the group gets a wee bit rabid with different GMs … if this and the horrendous “The Haunting” episode are any indication!

    May you always roll a natural 20,
    ~A

  9. As someone who always saw the Rifts game book (which did look appealing with it’s sci-fi level of madness on the covers), I wound up diving more into the world of D&D as well as Gurps, the madness of WoD and many other game systems. So thanks for letting me know after all these years of being curious about Rifts that there are many who enjoy the game but your review & later looking into the books proves it far too much of a dinosaur wreck of the nostalgic 80s for me to dive into now as it seems after all this time that the folks running Palladium would do some evolution to their system of books or even just copy the format of other generic systems to organize things a bit. Still think right now what you said in the episode is the best move for Palladium right now which is to detail out their worlds in a rule light or rule-less system for people to adapt in the system they feel comfortable with working than the mess they have now. After the time spent with playing Call of Cthulhu, seeing Rifts now with the aspiration of having a level 10 hobo really seems silly as hell & as hard to take serious as a set of rules where amid all the charts, the GM is left to make as much up as possible. Thanks again for the great episode guys, looking forward to the future fun work appearing at RPPR.

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