Rifts

Rifts is a sci-fi rpg from Palladium. Using the basic Palladium rules system ensures compatibility with all the other games in the Palladium line, such as Palladium, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The basic world of Rifts is a post-apocalyptic future, where the ley lines have become over energized, creating rifts between worlds. Anything can come through these rifts, the only limit being your imagination. Predominantly based in the USA, with most of the core rulebook material focussing on the areas around chicago, there are a large number of interesting ideas in the core game. Alien invasions, creatures coming through the rifts, the energization ...  Read the complete review

This is an old game, it's been around for a while under a variety of publishers and hasn't changed much. There are about 17 books describing worlds that can be played and thats about the best thing going for this game. The rules are heavy, lots of tables and number crunching, they also allow for imbalance and tend to steer players towards combat orientated characters with weapon and fight skills and little else. Un fortunately this makes good roleplaying less likely as adventures tend to be combat orientated to fit the characters. A storytelling idea may be to run characters against each other as they will then be less inclined to fight physically and may try ...  Read the complete review

Oh what to say about good old Rifts. Its sad to say that the SETTING for Rifts is awesome. If it were just that, I would give it a tops rating. Now, the reason I gave it the red thumb is that the rules are just painful to manage. Not only do you have damage that is one hit kill types, but you have classes that are totally unbalanced. One player could be playing a Dragon that can shrug off laser fire in his sleep, kill people with a puff of his nose. The other player could be playing Bob the homless guy begging for change on the street. Combat comes, the dragon lives, Bob makes a new character. The damage rules are just crazy too. Armor is much more tough than damage ...  Read the complete review