Wait, is this a Rifts book?
That cover looks a lot like a Rifts cover to me...
In a way yes, in a way, it is for every Palladium game. This one feels like a crossover book with a lot of Rifts information and dual-statted dragons, gods, monsters, and demons of the Palladium universe. If you are strictly playing a Palladium FRPG game, this book is as close as Rifts as you can get.
Every god, demon, and dragon in this book know about the Rifts universe, but they are just a little quiet about it. In my PFRPG universe, everybody knows what happens when they open the door to Rifts.
The guy who writes these articles is spending a lot of money on books.
And he has forbidden that.
For now.
Yeah, they listen to me because I buy the shelves around here. If I say I am just playing and collecting JUST the fantasy game, all these aliens, gods, and super powerful dragons stay quiet.
Everything We Didn't Have Room For...
...in the core book. Except for the bards. Later, bards. Why did you leave the dragons out of the core rulebook of a fantasy game? Same reason I bet they left demons and devils out of the Old School Essentials books. You will need to start cutting a lot of good stuff out, and you run the risk of shorting the content you really want to slow down and spend a lot of quality time on. You have to ask yourself, is it really worth leaving them out of the core book if they are an integral part of the rules?
It is frustrating, but if you cut it out of the core book and do it later well, then that is cool.
With dragons, this is a really close call, I feel. You can argue in Old School Essentials that you can play the game without demons and devils, pull them in from Labyrinth Lord if you want, and be just fine. They are promised in a later book, and given the quality of what we got already, I am looking forward to this addition to the game.
Back to Palladium FRPG. Dragons? Really? Out of the core book? And the gods? Okay, they better be really, really good to warrant a second purchase just to have what many people consider core elements of a fantasy game. The bar here is a little higher set than the OSE and demon situation because what is a fantasy game without dragons and gods?
We shall see...
Dragons First!
I get why this book came separately. Dragons are powerful things. This is like the "high-level companion" for the Palladium FRPG, a mixture of the old Deities and Demigods book for AD&D and a Monster Manual II focusing on high-level foes. We have a few dragon-like lower-level creatures to add to the mix, but dragons are not something you want to be fighting unless you are from...
...a place we are not talking about yet.
Hey, you can play a dragon hatchling as a player character? What? Okay, that is cool. You will level as slow as molasses, but you will be an OP character alongside a low-level party. Balance that with running around and acting like a mostly invincible kid, curious about everything, doing random things, getting underfoot, setting the tavern on fire, and generally half of the time being a nuisance and danger to your friends, and that should balance things pretty well. And yeah, dragon hunters, mages looking for dragon blood, mercenaries hired to take the dragon, dragon slayers looking to slay the dragon, and all of the outside trouble this gets you into.
But hey, you wanted a baby dragon to come along with the party! So cute!
This is Palladium FRPG. If you like it, keep it in. If not, exclude it. It isn't balanced or even recommended, but damn, is it fun to do once or twice. Another trick for the Keeper of Lore to pull out when someone compares their game to AD&D and, "Why aren't you playing that?"
The dragons here break the D&D mold a little, with dedicated fire and ice dragons, and I am sure you could make other elemental variants if you wanted to. We are not doing the "box of crayon" color dragons here, and that is a cool difference. They are supposed to be unique and have differing breeds, and that helps them stand apart from each other some more.
So far, so good, and I can give this book a pass for having the dragons here since time was taken to make them special and unique parts of the world and lore.
Elementals
Oops, there is something else we needed in the main rulebook. They are certainly different than the elementals you are used to, and some of them are dragon power-level enemies. Like an air elemental the size of a tornado. Or a 40-foot tall fire elemental, like a forest fire coming at you, and you pick up a sword and say, "I got this."
They do have minor elementals, so there are some "monster" level creatures here to use in lower power games, so it is nice to see the balance. Many of them are epic-level creatures, and I can see why these waited for the next book. Sometimes if you put an enemy this powerful in the main book, it will blow everything else away.
Alien Intelligences
Sometimes giant Cthulhus visit this world the size of houses with incredibly massive psionic and magic powers visit this world and fry everyone's brains for miles or break off shards of themselves to do the same but in a weaker form. I feel the Palladium Fantasy FRPG world is like Rifts without power armor and MDC energy weapons, and I would be right. Life is hard here.
These are also of "Dragon Ball Z" power level, so again, they fit the theme of this book.
I suppose these are better for the controlling power force for evil cults and the evil tribes of remote islands, so these fit in as scenario and story supporting elements. You don't really have too much like this in the normal D&D style of worlds, so it fits. It also gives me this strange feeling that the Palladium FRPG world is really, really different than what we are used to with your normal D&D style of world construction.
This fantasy world is more like a strange shard of reality that pulls in all sorts of strange and quite strange alien, psionic, and magical life. It is almost like a Rifts without all the OP Rifts technology, if you get what I mean by that. This is actually what I wanted from a game in this universe since there are times I felt the high-tech stuff in Rifts overshadowed the interpersonal, story, and dramatic elements.
You could play this game completely like Rifts and drag in all sorts of characters, creatures, and themes from all over the universe and toss them together in a fantasy world if you wanted, give them factions, and have them fight it out. What's better is no military technology or MDC, just swords & magic. Create crossovers with the non-Rifts worlds?
That really sounds cool to me.
Spirits of Light
We get angels next, and these are cool. A lot of divine power guides feature angels or servants of light, and this feels par for the course. The power level is again high, and I am sensing a theme here. I would have liked an angel-style RCC as a character option, though.
Gods
We get a strange mix of Egyptian mythos, renamed Norse gods, unique ones, and gods from everywhere else. It seems like anybody can drop into the Palladium FRPG world and say they are a god, even picking a name similar to another major god and having people worship them.
They even say you can use the Rifts book Pantheons of the Megaverse and use gods from this book too, so there is potentially a Locknar (god of mischief and deceit of the Northern Gods) and a Loki (Norse god of mischief, Norse pantheon) running around in this world at the same time. Maybe it is the same god but called a different name in a few places.
But you can't take technology, motorcycles, and power armor into Palladium FRPG, Rifts gods, so behave over here. And don't complain! I am only buying a "few" Rifts books, just a few, I promise!
Still, it is cool these gods are presented as options since we had some clear favorites from our Rifts game and it would be cool to see them come back and set up shop in the Palladium FRPG world. You get all the heavy hitters here like the Norse and Olympians, and even some that will fit into the world lore nicely like the Aztecs.
You can also play as a Godling or Demigod class in this book if the GM allows it, so you can literally play a Hercules-type character if you wanted. It isn't recommended, but hey, this is a game where you tape it all together and if it is an option and you want it, you have it. There are a few other classes in here like Valkyries and Asgardian High Elves that may interest a few, so that is cool too.
No wonder this book has a Rifts cover.
Deevils and Demons
We get a strange mix of demons and "deevils" because dey-evil, I guess. These are all gods instead of demons on a character level, so they are suitable for lore mostly. There are a few demon books with more "monster" level states for these creatures, and those books are for...you guessed it...Rifts (but they include the non-MDC stats, more on those soon).
Dragon Gods
We have dragon gods to finish up the divine powers. We have a few interesting ones here, and they cover the bases of good, war, knowledge, and death. The dragons even have an ancient church and following scattered about the world that is good lore and background material. More good dragon-related stuff here, and this really adds to the world.
Magic & Holy Weapons
The book ends with a short section of magic and dragon-slaying weapons. I wanted more here, so this feels like it could be expanded in the future. To be honest, To be honest, I would have rather had this in a magic items and weapons book.
To Wrap...
I really feel Palladium FRPG deserves a second look. It frequently gets labeled with the "but a lousy rule system" label I think is unfair. You get into a D&D-style game, and the rules are really inflexible. In three books, I saw Palladium drop-in character classes on a whim, create entire new magic systems, create new optional rules subsystems, and continuously change how the game can be played.
It is also not easy to drop in superheroes, modern characters, ninjas, mutant animals, or any other character type into a game as quickly as this - outside of GURPS or Savage Worlds. The more books you have, the easier it gets for anyone to drop into your game, want to play something off the wall, and you can make it happen.
Modern weapons and vehicles all work the same too, in case you cross things over. And if you keep everything to SDC worlds and say "no Rifts" you are not dealing with out-of-control power scaling.
If a D&D type game, that is not always easy since you are forcing someone to choose between a set of standard classes and races, and then they need to fit their idea into that bucket. And you get a lot of themed options here, so it is not as open as a GURPS or Champions, where you start with a blank slate. Your starting points here are easy but flexible: mutant animal, superhero, survivor, typical fantasy class, or something different.
You could play Palladium Fantasy with superhero-style heroes out of Heroes Unlimited and just say the world is like an MCU-type world but all fantasy trappings and technology. You get complete control over character design while avoiding the modern world and the superhero hangups. Archer Man in a superhero world is precisely like Felthwin the Ranger in a super-fantasy world.
Monsters, powers, magic, combat, the world, and everything seamlessly work the same. This is not easy with B/X without doing a lot of glue work and conversion. Here, you buy a new book, and it is all usable instantly like plugging in a video-game cartridge and adding to your library.
Few games can do that while remaining this modular.
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