You can't talk 90s fantasy roleplaying games without talking Palladium Fantasy. I can hear my brother talking to me, "If you are considering playing an AD&D 2nd Edition retro-clone, then you need to talk about Palladium Fantasy."
Balance, cohesion, organization? Fancy things like indexes?
Nah, who needs any of that!
The game, even in its second edition, reads like a random collection of magazine articles, and that is okay. The rules are not all that hard, 5+ on a d20 is a hit, and if your target is wearing any armor, roll higher than the AR value of the armor takes the blow and damage. The only rule not included in the 2nd Edition of the Palladium rules is what the target number for a parry or dodge roll is! I could not find it and had to go back to 1st Edition to find the parry and dodge target numbers, hint:
To parry or dodge roll higher than the attacker's roll.
There are a few other rules on parries and dodges, but those are in the 2nd edition book. This is one of those things where the parry rules are the same in every Palladium game and I bet the editor had a brain fog hit and that little bit of information got omitted, or it is in a part of the book I just cannot find (yet).
Balanced Like Superheroes
So the game has a class that is a farmer. Very little power, frankly impossible to survive. And then it has classes that are incredibly overpowered. We have simple classes that take a half-page, and complex ones with pages with complex rules and detail. Good choices and bad?
None of it matters. The game is balanced like a group of superheroes where an ancient god stands alongside the normal human bow guy. Not every class operates on the same power level. What matters is you have fun.
And the super complicated classes? There if you want to learn them. Not everything needs to be on the same complexity level, and if you can make sense of the class, put in the time, and play it well - more power to you. System mastery, but optional.
Oh, and a small badger can completely kill a party of adventurers.
Balance. It goes both ways.
How Did this get Popular?
Honestly, I picked this up in the 90s because of Rifts. These days, I like this world stand-alone enough to play it straight. The system lives in this strange reality distortion field where many people talk bad about the game and says it is the most complicated set of rules ever, but the basic combat mechanics only take up a page in the book.
And secretly a lot of people like this game. Even those who don't like the game just don't know they like it yet. Again, the Palladium reality distortion field is a powerful thing.
I hear it is centered somewhere in Michigan.
Character creation I would say is on-par with D&D 2e. With D&D you are writing down tons of modifiers based on ability scores and picking proficiencies. In Palladium you are noting the special rules inside of skills and occasionally noting a modifier here or there.
Rules complexity this is nothing more than a system that uses a d20 for combat and percentile dice for skills, sort of like B/X. And if you can read and understand AD&D 1e, this is not that hard. The classes are varied and fun, with lots of cool details and asymmetric power systems. If you want to play an in-depth class it is there. If you want to play simple it is there too.
The solo play seems a lot more fun because there is so much freedom and customization to the characters. The characters have a ton of depth and the skills get better as you level.
If you want to pull in a Hong Kong martial artist and kung-fu your way through dungeons, buy another book and drop the character in - have fun. This universe has Rifts in it so you got a lot of leeway with transplant character classes that are 100% compatible between the Palladium games.
And the whole "stamina" mechanic a lot of newer games use where you have a "lightly wounded" hit point pool (that heals easily with rest) before your "critical hit points" (that require medical attention to heal) begin to drop? The SDC and hit point system, done decades before the other games were even bytes to files.
And the alignment system is one of the best ever designed. No neutrality just shades good and evil, with clear lists on what the character will and won't do.
Have Fun First, Go for Feeling, Make Sense Later
I think that statement sums up Palladium Fantasy.
The game doesn't really go to too much sense to make sense. It all feels like 1001 cool ideas in a school notebook thrown together and put into a fantasy game. Then this dark gritty feeling sneaks in the door and you are hooked, and what you thought was Rifts madness turns dramatic and deadly. Things matter. The game can be played completely seriously and it makes logical sense when it all clicks, this is fantasy so we often fall into these "fantasy tropes" taken from books and movies and expect everything to be like Tolkien.
I feel that gonzo Tunnels and Trolls feeling (in a way, but without the bad puns and silly characters), but with a more crunchy set of rules based around a simple base mechanic. The world books are excellent. It just has a feeling that is hard to explain, but like when you are exposed to a new genre of fantasy and you can't explain it, it is different from everything you saw before, but it feels right.
Is the game any good?
If you enjoy it, then yes.
It takes an open mind and being able to dismiss a lot of what D&D and other games taught us. That reflexive reaction we get when something is "not D&D" or the style of fantasy we grew up with is a powerful thing, and I am glad to have grown up with Palladium enough to feel right at home with the concepts and rules.
The fans are incredible, hardcore, and devoted like no other fanbase I have ever seen.
Not everything has to be unified in mechanics, facing page organization, boiled down to as few words as possible, overly balanced, and the latest to-date in mechanics and excellent execution. While all those things are nice, they don't make a game fun. Palladium is page after page of a fun idea after fun idea, and book after book of fun ideas.
If you are having fun, then it is working.
And it doesn't really matter much how you get there.
...vs. AD&D 2e?
I can hear some out there, how can this possibly be considered as an AD&D 2e alternative? Well, PFRP was a strong alternative in the 1990s, and frankly, if you are going to go through all of the complexity and "extra bookkeeping" that an AD&D 2e forces you to do, then going a little extra distance and having a much more interesting system to fiddle with does not seem like all that big of an ask.
Also, where AD&D 2e forces you to walk a path of good, Palladium gives you a full range of alignments and stories. You could play an evil game and watch in horror as your character is forced to betray friends and allies because hey, my character is evil and my alignment is cool with it.
Freedom.
No assumptions on behavior or manner of play.
Dark and gritty with completely asymmetric class balance.
Play good or play evil. Or anywhere in between.
There are times when playing a game by exploring a system of rules is a huge part of the enjoyment of the game. Here, you have lots of things to experience and learn, and they are outside of the typical AD&D experience and bring a lot of fun and variety to a fantasy storytelling experience.
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