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.
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