Traveller 5E

Y&T was a great 80s metal band. Then, their label forced them to make cheesy pop-rock music. Then, the band died. Longtime fans felt they sold out. The new fans never showed up after the original MTV video went into high rotation, and then everyone dumped them. They could never return to their deeper cuts, and they were stuck in limbo until grunge killed the genre.

So what do they have to do with Traveller 5E?

https://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/threads/traveller-5e.126195/

I see people saying, "If Traveller wants to survive, it needs to attract a younger audience." Yes, the Traveller players are getting older, but this new audience is not interested in the current Traveller. The universe is not engaging with them, and a new set of rules won't make it any more appealing. If it were, they would be playing it.

So next year we are getting Traveller 5E, which is a terrible name since we already have Traveller 5.

But repackaging the current Traveller universe is not as compelling to the players they are trying to attract. They will want dragonborn, tieflings, animorph races, fae creatures, talking plants, robot people, dark elves, puppets, space elves, and all sorts of cute and cool things running around in space. 

Frankly, Starfinder 2E is the better game for them, and it is not even close. What the younger players want from science fiction is not what Traveller will give them. Starfinder is the better game, with better player options, and it plays perfectly to its audience and knows what it is.

Starfinder also feels more relevant to today's mood and feeling, and it feels more like a game for young players than Traveller in a 5E wrapper will ever be. Starfinder is an exciting, engaging universe that feels fresh and is begging to be explored and used for adventures. Traveller has the best-established universe in science fiction, but if it hasn't already attracted these players, a change in rules won't do much good.

The above is an excellent video on the Y&T band and a recounting of the events around this label-forced mistake that ended a great run and wonderful music. Please like and subscribe, and watch it all the way through. Great music commentary is very cool to see, and I support thoughtful, engaging commentary.

But it is an example of trying to be what you are not.

And trying to appeal to new fans who won't be there for you in the long run.

5E is not a universal solution to every problem with marketing and aging audiences. Companies that feel 5E is the answer to every issue will alienate their core fans, and the new fans they thought would be there will go right back to their Baldur's Gate 3 adventures and cartoony player options they are comfortable with. But if younger players like these things and it lets them express themselves fully, that is cool, too. Having fun is what gaming is about.

We are clearly in late-stage 5E, where every company is rushing to get its game on the platform. I fear the announcements of Runequest 5E, Rolemaster 5E, Tunnels & Trolls 5E, Call of Cthulhu 5E, Twilight: 2000 5E, Savage Worlds 5E, Paranoia 5E, Lamentations of the Flame Princess 5E, OSE 5E, and who knows what else. The modern audience will save us all, right?

Tell that to the band.

I get it, Traveller's audience is getting older. Tell that to every '80s band when grunge came out, and the kids walked away. There are times when there is not much you can do but try to please your core audience. The answer is not in rebranding; the answer is always in creating something new that speaks to the next generation.

You don't need to wrap Traveller with 5E.

You need to do what Starfinder did, and build a new universe that appeals to younger players. The best they can do is fork the Traveller universe and fill it full of neon-colored fantasy races. I know, it sounds like heresy, but you need to play to what your audience wants.

Starfinder 2E wins this fight before it even begins.

The Birth of Subclasses

During the life of AD&D 2E, they released these books in the "Complete" line, which introduced "kits" for the various classes, allowing you to flavor your class along a particular theme, such as a pirate, swashbuckler, barbarian, or gladiator. This was the birth of the subclass, and also a lot of the "spin-off" classes, such as the barbarian in later editions.

The kits were a small collection of proficiencies, suggested gear, and minor bonuses for a particular character type, and they were cool and fun. They were not that complex or in-depth, and they did not have leveled bonuses or ability progression. All they were was a set of modifiers, kit abilities, limitations, and other modifications.

Subclasses that become treed progression paths and that load new abilities on you every few levels are far too much overkill for a fantasy game. In the end, a barbarian should be a "fighter kit" and not its own class, and the barbarian with subclasses feels like going into far too much depth for a game that is supposed to be simple and straightforward.

Subclasses these days feel too overdone, and classes that should be subclasses (barbarian) end up being their own class. There is something to be said for "keeping all fighters under fighter," using simple kits to flavor the fighter, and keeping the core class identity strong. We end up with a bloated game that is not easy anymore, and classes that go too in-depth with subclass progression, and the complexity shoots out of the roof.

I could say even Old School Essentials suffers from the "too many specific classes" problem, too, along with many OSR games that just keep adding and adding without putting a foot down to keep the game's design clean, streamlined, simple, and uncluttered.

Kits are "class flavors," and they work well that way, and help us differentiate one fight from another. Yes, there can be more generic fighters, but gladiators are a special flavor of fighter; they are still fighters at heart and should not stray too far from the core fighter concepts and core abilities.

And they are optional. Can you be a "gladiator" without them, just using the core book? Yes, pick a fighter and say you are. Do these add flavor? Yes.

These books work perfectly with For Gold & Glory, the 2E retro-clone that stands out as a perfect, community-supported, throwback 2E set of rules with one of the most generous redistribution policies I have seen in the OSR. One of the things I love about AD&D 2E is that TSR positioned the game as a competitor to GURPS 3E in the late 1990s, and they made an honest attempt to be "everything generic fantasy" by splitting out the D&D, setting-specific, and generic fantasy parts in distinct lines of books. This wasn't TSR "dividing the market" more than it was "making sure the core line of books could be used with any specific setting." The "Complete" line of books could be used with the Forgotten Realms just as well as they could with Dark Sun.

Contrast that with today, we get new 5.5E Forgotten Realms books with subclass options that everyone will backport into every setting anyway, and all of a sudden, everything is a mixed-up mess in a stewpot. Today's organization of books and setting guides is one long run-on mess of content.

I love the organization of the product lines in AD&D 2E. It makes sense to me: I can focus on a specific setting, have the rules-sourcebooks that support it, and a core of the 2E rules forming the foundation. The idea that TSR published too many campaign settings is a simplification; they should have just focused on the Realms and Dark Sun, possibly combining Birthright and Greyhawk, and the Realms and Spelljammer.

Then again, Dark Sun never really had a great direction in 2E, and the setting feels like the lore ran dry, and nothing interesting was happening after the dragon kings were deposed.

Ravenloft should have been expanded to a whole world to take on Vampire: The Masquerade, along with a LARP option. This is where they lost a lot of ground in fantasy role-playing in the 1990s. Vampire and Magic: The Gathering were the death of D&D.

The Complete books work perfectly with FG&G, and if you want a source of "subclass-lite" kits for your game, check these out. I like this design theory; they aren't writing hundreds of pages of new classes, and the kits aren't all that complicated. They serve as "flavoring" for a class that can seem a bit dry and dull, turning it into something unique, special, and fitting its purpose in the world.

And you are not supposed to use everything in every Complete book. If you have a gladiator-themed game, just use that with the core rules, and don't try to use everything in every book. Again, the design theory feels like GURPS: you don't use it all at once; just stick with the core rules and drop in the bits you need. Again, this is unlike 5E these days, where our character creation tools bloat and die with too many options. I have had new players get scared off by those bloated tools in my 5E game, and I dislike them.

If you play a lot of 2E and are looking for optional expansions for FG&G, check this line out. These are worthy.

Nightbane

I am starting to post articles exclusive to my Life in the Megaverse blog, and today's Nightbane article is an absolute banger that twists our current reality and contrasts it with the world of Nightbane.

Nightbane

Or does the global zeitgeist and consciousness, and "streaming shows" that support the fantasy systems of today, signal a larger, more sinister plot to drain the Earth of its dreams and imagination? Is the corporate version of "accepted fantasy" some attempt to limit it? By thinking we are expressing our identities through this framework of rules and limitations, are we killing those ideas of self-expression and marching them into corporate idea prisons in the AI cloud?

...it is some excellent, mind-altering stuff over there today. Check it out. My game-focused blogs let me go deep into ideas and thoughts that are less suited for a general gaming blog, like the ones here on SBRPG. I appreciate having a space where I can drill into Palladium topics and get these deeper thoughts out.

And check out Nightbane. This game is seriously cool and frees my mind from today's strictly interpreted ideas of fantasy and self-expression.

The Golden Age: The 1990s

The 1990s were the Golden Age of role-playing games. This is the era when Magic: The Gathering killed D&D, Vampire: The Masquerade took over the goth subculture and LARP play, and D&D's last best edition reflected the world through the insanely popular novels of AD&D Second Edition. This was the time when Rifts was born and blew up gaming, and all the great Palladium SDC games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blended 90s comics and roleplaying.

Rifts got me into the Palladium games. Since then, I have stuck with the SDC versions of Palladium RPGs and have come to love them all. They are still out of storage and have never really been put away for the last 5 years, sitting in a secondary room, and I am happy to have them out. Rifts, these days, I am avoiding, since I know that it is a considerable investment to rebuild my library, and I don't play it enough to warrant that.

Oh, and I know that some used the Palladium SDC games to "trick" players into playing Rifts, where a GM would promise a superhero or fantasy game, then pull a switcheroo and teleport them all into Rifts. Most of the time, this never worked, and I tend to keep my SDC universes far away from the Rifts multiverse. There does exist a parallel universe where only the SDC universes exist, and this is where my primary fantasy and superhero universes are set.

But let Rifts be Rifts; that is the best way to go. And if you play Rifts, let everyone know before you begin, and don't pull the wool over their eyes. And yes, Rifts was part of the reason why AD&D 2nd Edition died for us. By the end of the decade, the writing was on the wall, and everyone was moving on, much like today.

Rifts was much cooler than D&D, and it still is. Rifts is the final boss of role-playing games.

The 90s were the last best decade of RPGs. The 16-bit consoles were battling for living room supremacy, and we still had VHS tapes and VCRs, CD-ROM music, with the DVD appearing at the decade's end. The Internet was AOL and CompuServe, while computers were Intel 486s hooked to dot-matrix printers.

This was the decade gaming became a powerhouse and cultural influence.

Tabletop roleplaying was dying, but this was one of the best eras to be a gamer in. We had the best versions of every classic game, and others like Champions 4th Edition and GURPS 3rd Edition kept the dream alive. Rolemaster was hot. By the time we get to the year 2000, TSR is bankrupt, Wizards releases D&D 3.0, which is not compatible with AD&D and turns characters into powergaming builds, and we have been on that road ever since. GURPS would go to the 4th Edition, Champions would see two more editions, but the Palladium games are wonderful time capsules looking back into that era.

People complain about the rules, but the rules are not why we play these games. I could roleplay using a ham sandwich for the game's rules. Today, the rules are far too important to the game, and people feel that their enjoyment of a game directly depends on the novelty and powergaming present in the rules. Every level has to "give me something," and I need a lot of choices on my character sheet. I need my build. I need my combos. I need my power synergization.

Here's the problem: the more choices you have, the fewer choices you have.

There will always be an optimal sequence of attacks and best powers in these games, where they could give you 20 choices, but really, you only use one or two every turn.

In contrast, my AD&D 2nd Edition (For Gold & Glory these days) bard did not have spells at level one, and it took three turns to get their combat song going. They had a d6 hit die and could fire a bow as a support class, or swing a shortword in chainmail, but leather armor was the better way to go for encumbrance and a lower STR. They were not front-line fighters. They did not have a complete set of rogue powers. I had to be creative and use my mind to make that class work.

I had more fun with that bard than I had with any bard in D&D 3.5E, Pathfinder, 4E, or 5E. The bard got worse over the years, and it just keeps going downhill. The more powers they pile on the class, the more I have no clue what the heck the 5E version is supposed to be. It isn't even about performances or music anymore; it is just a do-it-all caster class with light melee and a variety of rules tricks.

In contrast, Palladium Fantasy splits the bard into a collection of entertainer OCCs, such as acrobat, actor, bard (spoken word), minstrel (music), stage magician, and juggler/knife thrower. None of them has magic, but these feel better and more focused to me. 

"They are also alter-egos requiring a greater degree of role-playing to be most effective. This will challenge some, and tum off others . It' s up to both Game Master and the players to make their own choices. Just give it your best shot and enjoy." - Adventures on the High Seas, p14.

Are they as powerful as casters and other pure adventuring classes? No, nothing in this game is built on the same power level, but we can make conscious choices to play OCCs that are a challenge, and find ways for them to excel at what they do. Palladium Fantasy's classes are not balanced against each other in all areas! Some are far better at magic and combat than others. Some are highly skill-based, such as entertainers, and will require role-playing and creative use of skills to be effective.

In all Palladium games, the best class at something will be the best class to do it. The game will not go out of its way to artificially balance other classes against it, or sprinkle in options and buffs to keep all choices on the same power level.

The best option to play a 5E-like bard in Palladium Fantasy? Create a music-based superhero in Heroes Unlimited and drop them into the fantasy world. This will work, give you a complete choice of powers, and be 100% compatible. This will also be a lot of fun to play, and will work for many of the "fantasy superhero" character types if you want to go this way.

"Fantasy Heroes 

This is an option similar to the Medieval Heroes setting mentioned previously, but instead of being set within a historical Earth time frame, it is set in a world of fantasy, magic, and legend, such as the one presented in The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, 2nd Edition . In this setting, dragons and magic are very real and the characters mesh easily into it with their super powers, psionics, and other strange abilities. The G.M. can make super abilities available to all inhabitants of this world, or have the player characters belong to one particular race or class of people that demonstrates these powers." 

- Heroes Unlimited GM Guide, page 70.

And Heroes Unlimited allows for superhero fantasy games? Well, there you go. This book even mentions giving paladins light blast and karmic powers, and these powers aren't artificially limited by stamina or energy systems, so you can light-blast away and smile as you are divine enough to resist anything thrown your way. This sounds a lot like what they tried and failed to do in D&D 4E, and it sounds a lot more fun here.

Create a fantasy superheroes world, give it a He-Man sounding name like Grimrune, have everyone create a random fantasy superhero, steal monsters from Palladium Fantasy, and play! Make sure to place this world on the SDC or MDC ley lines so you can fold it into the megaverse later.

Similarly, some of my Ninjas & Superspies characters feel more compelling to play than any modern spy game characters I can create today. Sure, everyone is stuck in 1985, but to be honest, who would not want to be stuck in 1985? This was the peak of the 1980s. Any character designed with these rules was a nightmare to get started, but in play, they were easy and straightforward. Once you have been through the system a few times, you know how it went.

For us, the 1980s were Aftermath, Car Wars, Star Frontiers, Space Opera, and a few other games.

In the 1990s, AD&D 2nd Edition got us back into fantasy. Rifts captured my science fiction imagination. Vampire did the dark and brooding. Battletech was in here, too, along with Warhammer. While everyone wants to wax nostalgically about the 1980s, the 1990s were the golden years of roleplaying for us, and all the best games came out during this time, along with the highly evolved editions of our favorites.

In the mid-1990s, we watched our hobby shops shrink their role-playing sections in favor of table space for Magic: The Gathering. The owners of stores we talked to said nobody was buying these games anymore, and they had to shrink shelf space to fit in a few more tables, and the profit margins were far better for the cards. This was the beginning of the end of TSR and most of the hobby, and even today, the card side of the hobby is still far larger than the D&D side.

You could make the argument that buying D&D was a waste of time and money for Wizards, and they could have been far more dominant and larger had they kept their focus on the card games and other transformative gaming experiences. This is what they did well, and version after version of Wizards D&D shows they have not cracked the code, nor made it a profit-maker.

Even today, Magic thrives while D&D struggles and takes too much support to run a game, with VTTs, character creation tools, versioned books, and a DM, and hours of prep time needed to run each game. The Sigil VTT was a colossal waste and highlighted the massive amount of support D&D needs to "run one game" correctly. A card game? No prep, no DM, no setup, just a table and a deck. The games play fast, and you are onto the next. Everyone needs cards, so the profits are far higher.

Where card games are like airplanes and can land anywhere there is an airport, tabletop role-playing games are trains that need rails and infrastructure all the way to their destination.

Wizards supporting D&D is like Apple supporting old computer hardware, like dot-matrix printers. If the goal is "playing a game around a table," then eliminate the barriers to play and maximize profits. Let the OSR handle D&D, and move on to games that support fast play with minimal support needed. I am not against tabletop roleplaying, Wizards, or D&D; I recognize the model is all wrong for what the company wants the thing to do.

D&D will never be a billion-dollar brand since it requires too much support to get playing. What Wizards bought was expectations, and those consumer expectations are holding them back. They feel like the American car company in the 1970s, shipping gas-guzzling cars with fins and wood paneling. The trouble is, this is what their fans expect, and they are stuck trying to please them when the OSR does a far better job for far less money and support.

With Wizard's "brand" in quick-playing, no-DM-needed, fast, fun, player-on-player experiences. All you need is a table to play. In comparison, the D&D brand needs a few tons of scaffolding and days of preparation to get started.

Yes, they have been at it for 25 years, but D&D never fit the successful mold of what they do best.

And here we are in the age of smartphones and tablets, and transformative experiences abound in the mobile market. Even AR games and other technologies can innovate without needing to support the D&D model, which clearly drags these new ideas down, since people expect the traditional support model for the game.

In an alternate universe where Wizards never made the vanity D&D acquisition, where would Wizards be with this 25 years? They would have replaced D&D with a stronger, card-based, zero-prep game that defined fantasy gaming. You are beginning to see those types of designs in Daggerheart, but that still isn't a design that scales as well as an actual card game.

The 1990s were a strange time, marked by a seismic shift in gaming.

And a moment when gaming got trapped by nostalgia and never really moved on.

I am moving my Palladium SDC books to a most-played shelf tonight and getting them out to enjoy. This is one of the last, great, original role-playing games of the 1990s (and early 2000s), and it is still going strong today. They have new books coming out, a reprinting of the classic TNMT game, and new books in the pipeline for Rifts and a few of their other series.

Some games go so well together, not played, but played alongside each other. If I am back playing Second Edition with For Gold & Glory, then the Palladium SDC games are another potent dose of 1990s nostalgia and an excellent gam in their own right. They are an acquired taste, but thoroughly amazing and well put together.

The Palladium games are my guilty pleasure, and while people may call them disorganized and broken, they are every bit as good as any music or pop culture that came from the 1990s. They bring me back to those days, and that is all I need them to do.

Life in the Megaverse Blog

Life in the Megaverse

I started a Palladium-focused blog and pulled 4 years of my best Palladium articles, grammar-checked and cleaned them up, and reposted them there. I am going through my blogs and keeping the best of the best, and reducing support for the ones I don't have as much interest in.

This new blog will feature only Palladium-focused content and serve as a resource hub for all things in the Megaverse that interest me. I have 30+ years of experience with the system, love the books, and I have a lot to say. The new blog will cover MDC games like Rifts and SDC games like Palladium Fantasy. I love them all!

The main SBRPG blog here will continue to cover all games, including Palladium, but I like the game-specific blogs that let me get in-depth on a tabletop game and dig deep into the nerdy parts of conversions, rules, and other topics.

This is like the GURPS blog I also run, which is very GURPS-focused and a beloved site in that community. I also love Palladium, and with me playing less 5E overall, Palladium can pick up the slack there. Head on over and enjoy the new look and the best-of-the-best articles on the game!

The Little Things Matter

Thank you for ordering some of our products. We know times are tight, and yet you’re making a great decision to explore and play in the worlds we’ve created. Your purchase today means we can keep creating for you tomorrow. Be sure to tell your friends about Palladium Books!

I got the above on a shipping notification for a Palladium Books order, and I love the little things companies do to take a moment to thank you. I am rebuilding my long-ignored Rifts library from the early 1990s in a big way, and I bet they saw the orders today and their jaws dropped.

Thank you for keeping Rifts alive.

I hope people out there become fans, too.

Give them a chance.

I will do everything I can with my voice and blog to spread the word. The games you make are cool, equal to 5E in every way, and beloved by many. Even if Rifts is not your thing, check out Palladium Fantasy, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural, Dead Reign, After the Bomb, TNMT, Splicers, or Nightbane.

Rifts Chaos Earth is cool too, and a new game in the universe with a different timeline where you play as "the Earth Defence Forces" and rescue people. This is a game where you play the "X-Com-like" group protecting the world from incursions and invasions, and you work to save people and do good. This is the Rifts' origin, but it is not tied into the Rifts timeline, so the outcome can be up to you.

I first ordered that, and it was so cool, I pulled the trigger on rebuilding my entire library.

Dead Reign is also a game that does not get enough attention. This is the best zombie game on the market, and it does things with zombies that no other game does. And there are so many types of zombies in here! There is always a new type of flesh-eater wandering around the next ruined building, and you have no idea what you are encountering next.

There is a game for you on the Palladium Books store.

I have something like this happen with Goodman Games earlier this year, with one of their warehouse people and convention personalities, DJ Foxy. Again, the same thing, it is little touches like this that turn me from a customer into a super fan.

And seriously, there is much more out there than the OSR and D&D. Palladium Fantasy is older than the OSR, and just as old as BX. You want "old school gaming?" Try this! It is just as easy to pick up as BX, and the characters are far more satisfying.

The Rifts game is cool. I am happy to be back on board in a big way. The books and world are among the best speculative, mind-bending, crazy science fiction ever put to paper. This beats any post-apocalyptic setting ever written, hands down.

Wake up! The 1980s were not just D&D and the OSR.

In the last season of Stranger Things, the kids should all be playing Rifts. That is what we did. It was either Rifts, Battletech, or GURPS 3rd Edition. The Rifts game was for the true geeks and nerds, and for the social outcasts who were the coolest kids in school. And the Stranger Things universe is closer to Rifts than it is D&D. Seriously, if your mom got you the RPG with the girls with the thongs on the cover, your mom was the coolest.

She knew, too, that Rifts was cool.

And she wanted her kids to be cool, too.

So she bought us Rifts.

And guess what?

We were instantly cool.

Other kids came over to our house to play Rifts.

Hell yeah.

I fell in love with this game in the 1990s, when it first came out, and I love just how vast and interesting every part of the world was painted. There are dangers everywhere. There is always something interesting going on. Humanity lives in small enclaves, fortress cities, and protected zones. I worked in the university computer lab, and used my paychecks to buy the expansion books, which were the first gaming books that I purchased with my own money.

And here I am, back again.

Instantly cool again.

Thank you, Rifts.

Off the Shelf: Ninjas and Superspies

You get one Palladium SDC game out, you get them all out. I like Ninjas and Superspies. No game does as many martial arts types as this one. This is all the same Palladium system, so you don't need to learn much new to play.

The fact that this game is stuck in the mid-1980s with its weapons, gear, and vehicles list is good with me, and it has its own charm. This game is stuck in 1980s action movies like Rambo and Commando, and every Chuck Norris movie ever made. Also, the game draws on 1980s supercars, spy shows like Airwolf and Knight Rider, and TV shows. The James Bond spy movies also influence gadget-based agents, while cyber-enhanced agents perform missions similar to those of computer-enhanced agents in Terminator, 80s anime, or other action shows.

Everything feels like a comic-book reality, which is a massive appeal of Palladium games. You play these games because you want to have fun and do cool stuff. This is just like TNMT or Heroes Unlimited, but with spies and ninjas.

This game would make a great GI JOE role-playing game, especially if set in the 1980s. This is probably what I will do with the system, and it pulls off that heroic, cinematic action with the SDC system, making the first few bullets and blows miss and deplete that invisible stamina pool before the real wounds begin. We played GI JOE with the Aftermath system, but Ninjas and Superspies is also a great choice, especially if you lean into the ninja side of the lore.

Each character gets pretty detailed as well, so the team size should be smaller, like a three-person team handling problems and going undercover in hot spots of the 1980s, such as Central America, Libya, Beirut, and exotic locations such as Italy and France. Fewer sci-fi toys and lasers, and more realistic spy and commando actions are needed.

And if this is set in the 1980s, a good reference book on timelines and history is needed, at least to get into the vibe. There are a few of them on Amazon. Nothing is stopping me from setting this in the modern era. I need more references on modern weapons and vehicles, and all of that is available online. I grew up in the 1980s, so I am familiar and fond of the era, and this is when the cartoons first came on TV.

There are some heavy political and military overtones in the 1980s as well, along with lots of terrorism in the world's hot spots. We have the farm crisis, the multiple savings and loan collapses, inner city gang violence, the Drug Wars, Iran-Contra, Central American wars, Chernobyl, cruise ship hijackings, the strikes on Libya, the wars in Beirut, the Iran-Iraq war, the mining of the Straight of Hormuz, airline hijackings and bombings, embassy takeovers, hostage rescues, SDI, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the echoes of the Vietnam War, hostage takings, and plenty of material to use in a commando-style game. Things will get dark and gritty at times if you cut a swath through 1980s history and draw inspiration from it.

Truth be told, setting a game in the retro-modern 1980s will insulate your game from current-day politics, and it may be the only way to play a modern game these days with other people and not have fights break out at your table. Since I play solo, I can get along with myself pretty well, but I can see this being a problem with other groups and online play.

There is a genre I will call 80s-Punk (Neonpunk, Reaganpunk), and these transformative years of neon-opiate flash and a very dark undertone of societal change into a technological era and new world order, which we live with today. Clearly, this is a throwback 80s-Punk game with bright neon colors and some of the best music ever made, set against a dark, sinister, twisted undertone of a nation's loss of innocence and the coming tide of crushing global and technological change.

Terrorism is a symptom of a massive realignment in the social order, as violence is often the last resort of a dying way of life. We also see that, in war, as nations get boxed in a corner, war becomes the only way out. That is happening today, and the process is irreversible.

The synth-pop decade ended with hair metal and gave way to the hangover of grunge music and the tech-corporate 1990s, the budding Internet age. By the 1990s, the corporations and big data had won. By the 2030s, we will see the same shift again, but with AI winning and taking over every facet of human life, determining who lives and who dies. With AI denying insurance claims for lifesaving treatments, we are already there.

No drones, no public Internet, no AI, no search engines, no PCs, and no smartphones are a plus in my book, and make the action and communication a lot easier. Computers are all text-based terminals, and there are no home PCs. The closest thing to a cell phone is a vehicular radio phone, and those only work in major cities, are the size of a loaf of bread, are voice-only, and have a limited range. They had them in Miami Vice, and that is another good show for reference, plus a fun time on the DVD collection.

Nothing is stopping Ninjas and Superspies from being used in a Miami Vice game, either. GURPS has better police supplements, though. Miami Vice also had far fewer ninjas than GI JOE did. GURPS is still the better fit for this type of game, thanks to the excellent supplements on police procedure. The 1980s books are still just as valuable as the DVDs for both campaigns.

If I were doing any other historical game, I would use GURPS. But Ninjas and Superspies have the advantage of being written in that era and accurately reflecting its gear and technology. Even the weapons book comes from around that time, and it is a good sampling of guns and military gear for the era, making my job a lot easier.

While I would love to see a modernized Ninjas and Superspies game, it is easy enough for me to do, and having all this information on the 1980s in the existing books makes it perfect for throwback, action movie, nostalgia games. The game is slightly dated, but that makes it ideal for me. Still, updating the weapons and vehicles is a trivial exercise; just buy a modern gun book, the ammunition has not changed all that much (and the new calibers are mostly around 9mm and 0.45, with a handful of rifle calibers between 5.56mm and 7.62mm), and most vehicles have not changed all that much. 

The stats for all these things have not changed much at all from the 1980s, from a game perspective. A car is still a car, and a jet is still a jet. Multiply all the 1985 in-book costs by three, and you will have 2025 costs. That is actually shocking, in a way, now that I look back.

Why not use GURPS? For one, the SDC system in Ninjas and Superspies gives characters a buffer of soft hit points, lessening the lethality just a touch to a more action-movie level. Also, the martial arts rules are great, and put a massive spotlight on that part of the lore. This feels like 1980s James Bond movies, mixed with Commando and Invasion: USA. The system is fast and straightforward. GURPS is a slightly heavier game that leans more towards realism.

If I want that guns-blazing, martial-arts action, then Ninjas and Superspies is perfect.

Off the Shelf: Palladium Fantasy RPG

Palladium Fantasy RPG is fantastic. If you tire of the constant repetition of the OSR, where the same game keeps coming out again and again, you have a few other old-school games to lose yourself in. One of them is the amazing Rolemaster, and the other is the incredible Palladium Fantasy RPG. While Rolemaster has a new version, Palladium has not changed since the 1990s, and it is a fantastic time capsule of classic, not-D&D fantasy role-playing.

Rolemaster is slow and chart-heavy, but well worth diving into for something that gives you more in your fantasy game. Palladium Fantasy RPG is on the same complexity level as BX. Still, it gives us so many wonderful things, including an expanding action economy, armor damage, a complete skill system, parries and dodges, and some of the best magic systems in any old-school game. Palladium did worldbuilding right before most other games knew what worldbuilding was.

Palladium was the "better D&D" in the 1990s, and cross-compatible with every other Palladium Books title (with the second edition), adding a SDC system that created a pool of temporary "heroic hitpoints" that acted like a stamina system, allowing the first few hits to turn into near-misses, and once the SDC pool was reduced, the characters "meaty" hit points were lethal if those were all lost. This creates a heroic system with real consequences and allows those "first few hits" to become scratches, bruises, and near-misses, until the character's luck runs out and they start taking severe wounds that take forever to heal.

I become a hero in this system, and the character gains impressive depth. They feel real to me, skilled, with all sorts of special abilities and areas of expertise. Skills also modify ability scores, which is realistic since athletic training should increase physical stats. Skills that require physical training should raise stats! It galls me when a D&D character has a STR of 8 and an athletic skill training that did nothing to increase it. What do they do at track and field? Run around and deliver water for the athletes? Do they just wear the tracksuit and sneakers for fashion?

Palladium Fantasy got skills and stats right nearly 30 years ago.

Some of the classes are better for NPCs than most players, so make sure to read them and pay attention! Summoners take a long time to make their circles, and these typically need more time than a combat will last! They have been playtested and are beloved by the designers and original players, but they are very different than the "fast cast" classes that you may be used to in D&D. Magic in this game is fantastic, different for each class, and special.

People rave about the magic in Dungeon Crawl Classics, but they need to experience this.

A few of the classes have powers that cast on different time scales, so read them before choosing to play one! The designers intended these classes to work this way, since they wanted different casters to play differently, and reward players who plan ahead and use their magic in imaginative ways. You have been warned, but there is some brave design work here for all play styles.

Some call these "trap classes" since people pick them and discover that all their spells take forever to cast, but this is an intentional design choice. Not everything has to be designed for turn-by-turn action, and if the fiction says a circle needs a half-hour of work to complete? Guess what? It does, and the power level is likely higher than a fast-cast spell, and it can do so much more.

I swear the fast-food-ification of magic in role-playing games, turning it all into single-turn cast spells, everything done the same way, makes magic boring.

What I love about Palladium Fantasy is that the game feels very Tolkien-esque, without cutting too closely to the source material, and doing its own unique thing. The game is inspired by comics, Tolkien, fantasy novels, multiversal science-fantasy, alien intelligences, ancient gods, classical religions, and pulp fantasy novels you would find on dime-store spinning racks.

PFRPG is like Rifts without Rifts, but all the best parts of a world gone mad, and the forces of good and evil battling for the world.

The game is arguably more gonzo than the excellent Dungeon Crawl Classics, just in the different mish-mash of magic systems, faith magic, and even psionics. Where in DCC you suffer corruption, in PFRPG, you have no idea what magic you are facing or what it does. And everything isn't the same old "spells" as they are in D&D, like how psionic powers are just "another way of casting spells from a spell list." Psionics are excellent here, with players walking around like "fantasy Jedi knights" who can summon glowing psi-swords. This is some seriously cool stuff that has never been done in D&D.

Palladium Fantasy is a game where the books get dog-eared and bent up over years of play and love, and each book begins to take on its own character as the pages yellow, and it shows more and more signs of love and use. The fact that all the books I see on YouTube are so worn and well-used means the games were played a lot, and this is a sign of a tabletop game beloved and flipped through thousands of times at the game table.

Those worn and yellowed books tell you everything you need to know about a game.

That wear and tear is the love of an incredible system you are seeing.

This is also a game some feel ashamed to admit they play, but they know the times they had in it were far more exciting than the time spent in D&D. Many think that they should abandon the game and just play "what everyone else is playing."

None of that is true.

Palladium is a great game, and players who stick with it become legendary, both as players and referees.

And Palladium will be around far longer than any one version of D&D. These books last forever, and the rules don't change every few years. Like a Tolkien book or a classic fantasy novel, the book remains the same and continues to inspire future generations to answer the call of adventure.

People just give up and play OSR games, as if there were no other options. The OSR is bigger than just BX clones and D&D, and different choices can teleport you back to that time and place just as easily. Rolemaster, GURPS, Palladium Fantasy, Runequest, and a few others are sitting out here and waiting to be loved and played. Don't listen to the OSR crowd on YouTube that just wants to keep selling you BX clones endlessly, book after book, seeking some strange ideological purity of "how the game was supposed to be played" like you are trying to invent a time travel machine through finding some alchemical formula.

The "D&D model" is not the entire hobby! Watching D&D and OSR YouTube, that is all you think you are allowed to play. Give me a break. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we had better choices than just BX, BECMI, and AD&D. Most people walked away from AD&D to play GURPS in the late 1980s, and it was hard to find an AD&D group. Rolemaster and Runequest were strong games. Palladium Fantasy was huge, with many service members playing the game.

Get your history right, OSR YouTube. I was there.

If all you want to play is Palladium Fantasy, and you willingly choose to ignore Rifts, then just do that! I have a whole shelf devoted to Palladium SDC books, with not a Rifts book in sight. The SDC games stand on their own, all of them amazing, and every one I see on YouTube equally well-loved and dog-eared.

The game is not all about combat and collecting treasure. The alignment system is still way ahead of its time, long after D&D abandoned its system. You get XP for roleplay, clever play, skill rolls, playing in character, planning, and sacrificing yourself to help others. The XP system is still far ahead of its time.

And the game lets you escape from the overly MMO-inspired modern games that are more about becoming a superhero in a fantasy world, living "outside it" yet dancing through the world and solving everyone's problems like you were some pre-ordained hero in a video game. Palladium Fantasy immerses you in the world, making you a part of it, giving you the skills to navigate the challenges in it, and making every character class unique and interesting. This is not a "lifestyle game" putting identity ahead of heroism. This is a game about telling an epic tale of heroes who find their way through the world on grand quests and forging a story that will last the ages.

Palladium Fantasy is fantastic, and far more compelling in many ways than modern D&D will ever be.

Video: Common People - a modern world building casualty

A great video today on how we are "losing our way" and how the ordinary person is becoming extinct in our games. Everyone is in a race to create the most unique, special, extraordinary outsiders who exist only to pursue their own plots and narratives. Please watch the video all the way through, like, and subscribe! Thoughtful, engaging content needs support!

Ordinary people do not exist anymore.

Especially in adventuring.

This is why DCC still holds a lot of power, with everyone explicitly starting as a zero-level commoner with straight 3d6-down-the-line stats, it keeps the genre's feet on the ground. If you begin fantastically, then nothing is fantastic. DCC keeps the heart of the game beating and strong.

I would skip the D&D-style of game today and grab a superhero game for fantasy. This is the ultimate end of where this is all going. Forget classes and races, just grab a character, say whatever race you are, and what that does, and load yourself up with superpowers. Even the concepts of "class" and "race" are meaningless if "everyone is special and unique."

Why use 5E? Just use a superhero game for fantasy.

You can be something even more unique and interesting.

Your powers will never be limited by a class.

And you can be anything you can imagine.

No one else will be like you.

Second Edition was Player Empowerment

The moment we realized that the XP for GP system was thrown out for AD&D 2nd Edition, it changed the entire game for us. We became fans again. The "natural assumption" that experience means reward and story progression, rather than "cheating by finding a 50,000gp emerald" and rocketing up the level chart, made us reevaluate the game's core assumptions, and the system became fun again for us. Here is an example of why.

Let's use Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy for this one, and assume we are the referee laying out a sandbox world. Now, this is how I would never lay out a sandbox world, so this is just for our example. Let's say our party consisted of your typical fighter, mage, thief, and cleric foursome. We decide what the maximum level of the players will be in this sandbox, say, level seven, and then go to the XP charts. 

We see that 80,000 gold pieces per character are needed to get everyone to level 7, which is level 8 for the thief, but it is close enough. Multiply that by four, and then we have 320,000 gold pieces of loot we need to spread through the world to get them there, and we can assume they will miss a lot of loot so we can be a little on the generous side, or "place unfound loot" in their path if they miss out on the 10,000 gp they walked by in the last dungeon.

We get minimal XP for monsters, so it is better to steal the loot rather than kick down the door and fight. This encourages creative thinking, which is a benefit. Wandering monsters give us minimal XP, too, so the fewer we meet, the better off we are. Wilderness encounters are the same, just a waste of time.

We are living in a BX, BECMI, 0E, and 1E world here. Gold and loot are experience. Rob, cheat, lie, and steal your way to fame and glory. Avoid fights. If it isn't bolted down, take it and sell it; every gold piece helps. Rusty weapons? Take those too, if we have the weight allowance. Also, for the most part, ACKS follows this model too, though it has the advantage of needing all that money in the domain game.

And, as a referee, I would stop handing out treasure; progression would all but stop. I can stop a campaign's progression dead in its tracks with a GP equals XP game. I just get stingy with the loot.

The key takeaways here are that the referee has strict control over progression through loot distribution and that fights are best avoided. Wandering monsters and random encounters are terrible things.

Back to the Second Edition, and I refuse to play the POD reprints as I fully support the community games. I recently watched a YouTube video by a noted OSR creator who said there is "no need" for retro-clones these days, now that you can buy the originals from Wizards. He is 100% and utterly wrong for saying that, as retro-clones are needed to protect against "future shenanigans" by Wizards, and also, there is NO WAY you can legally publish an adventure and say "this is for AD&D" or anything other than the current, supported version of 5E these days.

The community relies on retro-clones to publish new material for these rule systems. Do I want to publish and sell an AD&D 1E adventure? Use OSRIC. BX? Use OSE. Second Edition? Use FG&G.

You can't go on the Dungeon Master's Guild and write AD&D and BX adventures. They must be for 5E only. Until Wizards releases the previous editions of the rules to Creative Commons, supporting retro-clones and holding them up as "the definitive edition we should be playing" is the best way to go. Also, the POD reprints have errors that have not been fixed.

I take it a step further and play the retro-clones, and choose to talk about and only support them. This is how we immunize the community from a future OGL Crisis, and this is the only sane position to take in these "corporate times" of greed. To just say "buy them from Wizards" does a massive disservice to the entire community of creators, third-party adventure and expansion creators, and the entire market as a whole.

I can publish an adventure for OSRIC and sell it.

I can't publish an AD&D adventure at all; there is no way.

I am not sorry for calling this out, nor pushing the clones over the originals. We got into the OGL Crisis because of this laziness, and it will happen again the day DM's Guild goes away. This is gaming: every service and site gets cancelled someday, and all your digital content is lost, so you will need to repurchase it somewhere else.

When that day happens, all the people playing the POD reprints will flood YouTube to complain and be milked for outrage clicks, and I will be over here happily still playing and creating for my retro clones. I will get so much time back in my day, never need to watch the hundreds of hours of anger, and be happy with what I have.

All because of making the right choice today.

While I may use AD&D 2E PDFs in my games, For Gold & Glory is my Second Edition core ruleset. OSRIC is my 1E, forever, even with the sacred words of Gygax in print. I do not care, and I am making the right choices. If enough people do this, it creates the change we want to see.

Do you want to create change?

Or do you want the world to continue down the path it is on?

Be the change you want to see.

Back to the subject. The XP we get for a hill giant in BX and OSE is about 650 XP for defeating them, divided among party members, so about 150 XP. When your next level is over 20,000 XP away, that is a drop in the bucket, and given this is BX, and we could be 15,000 XP away from the next level, this would mean defeating 100 of them (with no treasure), just to reach the next level. Monster XP is near-worthless in BX games. There is no way a party could even fight 100 hill giants, even one at a time, without taking losses, not to mention that it would take forever.

Hence, treasure is the XP equalizer.

How about First Edition? In OSRIC, we are better off with the hill giant at 1,800 XP. Now we are getting somewhere. With 450 XP per party member, we are still talking about needing 33 of them (minus treasure) to clear that 15,000 XP. That is still a steep hill to climb without finding treasure, so even in OSRIC, it is better to avoid fights and just grab the loot.

Second Edition and For Gold & Glory are the moments when everything changes, and they did for us. Even though they stripped out half-orcs, demons, and assassins from the game, this was still the best edition of AD&D we ever played, and it got us in the game for a full 10 years. We skipped 2.5E and just used the core rules, which are beautifully preserved by FG&G. We could still back-port in the missing elements from 1E, and when Planescape 2E came about, the demons were back under new names and management.

What about the Second Edition?

No XP for treasure. None. It is an option in the DMG, but discouraged, and it is not mentioned in FG&G. You do get "Story XP," which should be equal to the XP gained for overcoming encounters while accomplishing that goal, and the degree of challenge. The language is essential here! Overcoming encounters also means surrender, fooling them, helping them, turning them into allies, or any other way an "encounter" can be "overcome."

So the hill giant in FG&G is worth 6,000 XP, nearly ten times the BX experience amount. Double that if you defeated the hill giant in a quest where the beast was attacking a village, and you were helping people or doing something heroic. If you convinced the hill giant the town wasn't so bad, and got the townspeople to back off, and they all lived happily ever after? Guess what? You still got the full 12,000 XP, split among you.

The encounter was overcome. The story goal was completed with a positive outcome.

And you didn't need to grab a single gold piece to earn those XP. You never needed to worry about treasure, and its importance was secondary. Mind you, it was still nice to have, but having the game's focus shift from acquiring gold and wealth to heroism, accomplishing quests, and story goals was huge for us. This, even though the rules were 99% the same as First Edition, was enough to make us fans of the game again.

And let's factor in random encounters now. Overcoming random encounters on the path of completing a story goal means the XP value of those encounters, already very high, is added to the story XP for the quest. So that pack of hyenas you fought on your way to the hill giant cave as a random wilderness encounter? It counts toward completing the story, and the already high XP is doubled when the story is finished. Are the cave beetles encountered as wandering monsters in the cave? They all count.

Zero gold pieces were gained here.

Note, in FG&G, magic items do give XP. This is the only exception to the XP for treasure rule, but the XP values are about on par with defeating a monster, so it is a minor adjustment, and certainly nothing you can depend upon for leveling. Still, that XP does count towards "story XP" when they are calculated.

As a referee, I do not need to place 320,000 gold pieces around my sandbox to account for leveling anymore, nor do I even control progression all that much. Most of that is in the player's hands, with the monsters they defeat and the stories they undertake, which could also be their own stories and goals.

This is another essential thing. Story XP is not just "referee quests" but can be a part of a character's personal storyline, goals, and motivations. If a character starts a self-initiated "revenge arc," it could create Story XP for the various milestones and story points along the way. Never in the First Edition did they do this, yet it is possible in the Second Edition.

If players just wanted to "wander the map" and "kill everything," well, then that playstyle opens up, too. It is a bit pointless, but it is an option. Story XP will double progression speed, but they are free to wander the map like Grand Theft Auto and cause chaos if they want.

FG&G and the Second Edition rules do have the problem of "not needing money" at the higher levels. There are no prices on magic items here, nor were there in Second Edition AD&D, which openly dismissed the idea of "magic item shops" in the DMG. Is gold not being important really a problem in Second Edition? The entire concept of wealth as advancement was removed from the game, and characters had minimal need for wealth beyond hirelings and gear.

You have to remember: Second Edition was positioned as "the game for the novels," and the novels weren't about gathering all the gold to get progression either. In the novels, the characters performed heroic deeds, learned, and grew stronger, but never really reflected the original game's "gold for XP" concept. So Second Edition simulated the NYT Bestseller novels of the 1990s pretty well, and that is what the game was built for.

If there is no dominion game, and you don't need to buy magic items worth hundreds of thousands of gold, what do you need gold for? Gold is only required to buy a few things: travel, hirelings, mounts, and pay for lodging and supplies. You could run a "low wealth" game in Second Edition and never affect progression, player power, magic item availability, or any other part of the rules.

That is a feature, not a drawback, since chests full of gold tend to weigh down a party and limit their ability to travel and adventure. In a more story-focused game like Second Edition, if we need to get to "Danger Falls" to save the princess, we hop on our horses and head out. Who cares about securing 30,000 gold pieces of treasure in a bank or stronghold? Let's just focus on the story and go!

For groups wanting a more story-based game that focuses on heroics and not wealth, the Second Edition was built for that exact purpose. This may be the game you were looking for but never knew you wanted.

There is no way for me to stop progression in a Second Edition game as a referee, nor should there be. The game goes from referee-controlled to player-driven, with a much stronger focus on story arcs, quests, plots, and goals. The world and the NPCs become much more critical, along with factions and their motivations. If Orc barbarians are burning the northern villages and sacking towns, there is some instant motivation for players, and no treasure needs to be dangled in front of their faces for the players to want to jump in.

All the players need are goals and stories to go out and be heroes.

These will be driven by the NPCs, factions, and centers of civilization in the world. This is how the referee controls interest and drives player agency.

The rewards will be in the stories the characters tell. Not in the loot locked up in dungeon rooms.

And your characters are free to go wherever adventure calls them to.