This one is a must-have.
The obvious? Ships, waterborne travel, and ship combat. Mariner, pirate, and sailor character classes. Sea trade rules for running cargo. You get to be a pirate. And if you have the Ninjas & Superspies book you can have ninjas and pirates fight each other. Great stuff.
The not-so-obvious? Bards and entertainers of every type. Jesters and acrobats. Necromancers. Shamans. Gladiators. Rules for changing classes. The elves' night-vision ability was left out of the main rulebook, and a few rules clarifications. You can have a dwarven bagpiper. A juggler that throws knives. A stage magician. An actor and the picture of this class is of a dwarf, so we have a Game of Thrones reference decades ahead of its time.
Bards alone make this a must-have, and you have clowns in here as well.
Ninjas, pirates, and clowns? That sounds like my first adventuring party. You could build a dungeon adventuring circus out of the classes in this book. Or a circus of evil.
And then over 100 pages of islands, maps, descriptions, and adventures on them to have. And you get a catalog of ships in the world, rules for weather and sea travel, and then ship-to-ship combat. If book two was "the archetypical first setting," then book three is the "sea adventures" book plus a lot more.
We will get to book one, Dragons & Gods, soon.
Expanding Out
I like how these world books are slowly expanding out. One of the first three gives you a setting. Another covers dragons and gods. The next lets you hop on a boat and explore the world. It feels almost as if these books were written as the author's original campaign expanded out and needed more and more information, and they were published as they built and created the world.
Hey, we need to leave this first kingdom! We need boat rules! And some island adventures to keep people busy with while we work on that next major world location book! And you know what, let's keep the original campaign fresh with some more character options! What haven't we got yet? Bards. Everybody loves bards. Balance them with a cool combat class, like the gladiator. Some new evil NPC classes as well. Great book! A total crowd pleaser!
We have some rules updates too, can we get them in?
Again, Palladium FRPG is a game written like a stream of consciousness. It is an endless series of articles that look like they were pulled from fan magazines and newsletters. Like Rifts, it begins with the first book and extends off into infinity.
And one of the important things to remember is that old-school design. You have the basic character creation, combat, and task resolution mechanics that apply to all games. And everything else is malleable and optional. You are not trying to play a perfect, by-the-book game of Palladium FRPG. What the game teaches you to do is build that unique best-in-the-neighborhood game master. The mythical Keeper of Lore possesses this cool collection of books, articles, sources, magazines, and even materials from other games to pull into a World of Awesome.
And this is what made the strange kid with the collection of Palladium books so awesome compared to everyone else who played AD&D.
Over at Dan's house, I am playing a pirate. Tommy is playing a ninja. Vass is playing a longbowman. Billy is playing a necromancer.
A what? Aren't those, like fighters and thieves? And like, a magic-user?
Nah, AD&D lost its cool when it went to the second edition, they took out all the fun stuff and sold out. If my parents are cool with me playing it I don't want to play it. Plus in this game, you can summon demons if you want and be evil. Or a psionic assassin. Or a...
Aww cool!
I exaggerate a little, but this is how it was in our neighborhood. There was this oddball "Losers Club" and if you played something cool they were in. And they were the kids to hang with and be friends with. And they collected the books you did. And even if something was "not what everyone else did" that made the Losers Club special and cool. Palladium, for us, was that game.
This was before Nintendo, before home computers, before cell phones, before the public Internet, and before a lot of stuff. Saturday afternoons were boring. We had television, but no cable TV. You rode bikes or stayed indoors and played roleplaying games.
With B/X Out There, Why...?
This is what I ask myself as I read these books. B/X these days is incredible and full of choices. Basic Fantasy and Old School Essentials are great. If I want an AD&D 2nd Edition experience I have For Gold & Glory, or better yet, the streamlined and well-supported Castles & Crusades.
Sometimes I have had enough of D&D.
There are times I feel that everyone has a retro-clone and I have dozens of them. I have the best ones out there, and I have played them all. I have settled on the few I like. I have gotten to a point where if I want a specific edition of the game I know exactly what game to reach for to have the best feeling experience as I remember it.
For B/X, Old School Essentials, and I can pull in a lot of cool stuff from Labyrinth Lord.
For AD&D 2nd Edition, Castles & Crusades. I do have some nice PoD Forgotten Realms guides to get nostalgic with and ban these GMNPCs from my game, just like we remembered it.
If I want AD&D 1st Edition I hear OSRIC is wonderful. I am a little more partial to AD&D 2nd Edition though, just because of when we were really hot on the game during the 90s.
For AD&D 3rd Edition, um, I do have a lot of Pathfinder 1e books. They broke one of my shelves once.
You may prefer other editions and that is cool. These are the ones I like and have settled on lately.
But what if I want something else? Not a B/X or AD&D retro-clone? Well, there is Forgotten Lands. Dungeon Fantasy is out there. Runequest and Rolemaster. Conan. And a lot of other fantasy games too, there are many.
But what about one I have a history with? Those games are a narrow few. We had Rolemaster but liked Spacemaster better. It has to be fantasy. And preferably from the 90s and not AD&D 2nd Edition.
This is a personal choice since we did have a huge Rifts game and a very cool TNMT game too. There were crossover characters in our epic decades-long game from the Palladium FRPG world. This was always a book I flipped through and wished we had enough time to play together, but we never really got the chance.
It was too hard to break out of our established D&D characters and worlds. That Forgotten Realms campaign was one of our main games for years.
So you know what they say about tomorrow, don't regret something you could have done today.
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