Heros Unlimited as Superheroic Fantasy

"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.

So, I want to be a dragon-man paladin in a fantasy world, have natural body armor, fire breath, a light blast power, extraordinary strength, fire and heat resistance, and karmic power to lead a "blessed by the gods" life where my natural resistances (and those around me) are heightened. He goes around, saves villages from skeleton armies, defeats demons, and battles the dark necromancer and other nefarious villains.

That paragraph in the Heroes Unlimited GM's Guide gets me thinking...

It would take me 10 minutes to create that exact character in Heros Unlimited, swapping out skill packages for the ones in Palladium Fantasy. Still, I can get there using a template for a mutant-animal superhero. My dragon-man will be unlike any other, and I could do another using an ice-dragon template and another character class inspiration, and get exactly what I want right from the start.

There is no buying $80 crowdfunded books for expanding the game.

There is no waiting for a book to see if the game designers will give this to me.

There is no praying; a class gives me the powers I want, and I am waiting for the power to unlock, forced to go on weeks of pretentious adventures to finally unlock something weak, and I can only use it once or twice per adventure.

There is no begrudgingly accepting weak powers because "they have to be balanced," and there is no being forced to agree to lame things like your flame breath only working once a day. Sorry, Sir Scalelord the Holy can blast holy light and breathe fire all day, blessing everyone around him at will without a short rest, thank you for nothing, Seattle game designers.

And my warlock black dragon-man can breathe pure darkness, summon demons, teleport, have a shadow form, and control minds. My elf can be a trained swordfighting expert. My gnome can be a tinker gnome with a set of steampunk fantasy armor. My dark elf can be a magic-infused rogue who can disappear at will, phase shift through solid walls, and throw huge fans of blades as an area attack. My bard has a sonic attack blast, mental charms, and can strum their lute to bring up a temporary force shield.

Whatever I want, I can have. It is such a simple concept. Why don't more people play fantasy as a superhero game? This is where it all ends up anyway, and you get what you want right from the start.

Why?

Why, why, why?

This is what D&D 4E promised us, fantasy superheroes, and what 5E pulled way back on, bringing back old-school class roles and making the game boring again. I want the superheroes! I want the instant gratification! I like having it all when I start, and being the uber-character who kicks down the dungeon door and snarls, asking, "Who wants some?"

That is why we loved D&D 4E, not for the rules, which were horribly broken, but for the design theory that says, "You start as a fantasy superhero, and it only gets better."

In D&D 5E, you start off as a mid-level OSR character, you get superpowers around 7th-10th level, and then the rules break, you can't die, and you get bored with the campaign. Anticipating having extraordinary powers is more fun than actually having them.

With a superhero game as the base, I get my fantasy world, and since every superhero is different, all the characters are unique, and your dragon-man won't be replaced by a paladin with the same exact powers. Guess what? My paladin dragon-man is the only one like him in the world. And I didn't need to spend thousands of dollars buying subclass options to expand the choice pool so I could have a semi-unique character.

No, he starts off unique, the only one of his kind, and that is fine by me.

In fact, this is what D&D promises, but it keeps delivering the same cookie-cutter characters, copies of each other. Heroes Unlimited has random super-hero character generation, and if I translate that into a fantasy setting, who knows what I will end up being? I just need a few drops of imagination to translate the powers and origin into a fantastic setting, and there I go.

Heroes Unlimited gives me what D&D 4E promised me.

How To Create Palladium Character Sheets with LibreOffice

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download-libreoffice/

All right, let's create some Palladium character sheets by hand, for free. While this tutorial is for Palladium Games, specifically Ninjas and Superspies, nothing is stopping you from doing this for D&D 5E, Pathfinder 2, GURPS, or any other game you can imagine. All we need are some free tools, like LibreOffice; grab it from the link above, or if you are on Linux, you probably already have it installed.

Why LibreOffice? Why Linux?

Because we are not supporting the AI ecosystem and are staying away from paid character hosting sites, software packages, and learning to be self-sufficient without spending money or having Microsoft feed our documents into AI models. My characters are my IP and thus mine. Also, I am not feeding into this RAM crisis. I choose not to use AI.

Also, my hand-crafted character sheets come out far better than these pretentious ones you get in the OSR and other games with dungeon maps and far too much clip art tossed all over them. They are simple, to the point, save paper and toner, and I can create custom sections to my liking if a game needs special information.

Download LibreOffice and install it. Then, go to Format->Page Style...

Set your margins to a half-inch, and give yourself a half-inch gutter. This way, we can three-hole punch our character sheets to store them in a binder with dividers. You may not want to know it now, but if you plan to run many characters or track one as they level, you will thank me later.

If you run an adventure, three-hole punch that too, and put the old character sheet in with it when you print a new one. This way, you will have a record of the adventure and the characters who went on it, and how they were at the time. Since you have hard drive space and these are small files, save a new file every time you level, just to watch the progression.

Next, go to Format->Columns and set this to two, and leave all the default values, including autowidth. This will use our paper better. Three columns are sometimes too hard to manage, and I end up with a lot of overflow onto the following line.

Part of me wonders if people need a tutorial like this, but another part of me knows that many just don't know. This is how we used to hack together character sheets in the 1990s, using word processors and dot-matrix printers, doing our own layouts and working magic with the features of the programs we had.

If you want an actual throwback, 1990s experience, doing your character sheets this way (or by hand) is the way to go. This is how we did them, and they always came out so clean, with plenty of room for notes and other scribbles. Did a value change? Cross it out, pencil in the new number, fix it later, and print a new sheet when you level up.

Remember to shred and recycle! But, seriously, doing my character sheets this way wastes a lot less paper than printing out a 16-page monstrosity with Hero Lab. One double-sided sheet can hold a lot of information when done this way. Of course, one sheet done by hand is the most waste-reducing way to make a character sheet, since you can use it until the holes wear through the paper. These sheets can do the same, as long as you pencil in new SDC and other changing values. I could do empty tables for "fill in by hand" parts, like for gear and open skill slots, and that is probably a smart improvement I can make to enhance reusability.

But it is my choice to make them! In many sheets and programs, you get no choice. This way, I get exactly what I want, and I can engineer re-use into the sheets if I feel I am wasting paper. I could go the whole way and make the entire sheet rigged for re-use, with a fill-in-the-blank box for everything.

For Ninjas and Superspies, I laid my first page out like above. The stats have tab stops, so I can create "columns" for the value and then the modifier. If a character has more than one martial art, copy and paste the Primary Form section for a new one. I made one since that is enough for now.

Skills and secondary skills will expand! Leave a lot of room at the bottom of a column for these expanding lists. In general, open lists will appear at the bottom of your page. Also, use the Insert -> More Breaks -> Insert Column Break command to stick a section at the top of a column, as I did for the weapon proficiencies. This way, they won't keep backing up into the skill lists.

Palladium has a lot of weapon modifiers that can add up for different weapons, so I split out the "to strike" modifiers for different weapon categories and include any bonuses from PP.

My second sheet has gear and, on the right, a list of the characteristics of different attacks. I have equipment back here, cyber implants, and a section for the training programs I selected during character generation, including the colleges the character attended and the time spent there. Cover is not on the official character sheet, but it improves as you level, so it needs its own section. Background is another fun section that covers family and other personal details. Remember to total your equipment weight!

If you need to set tab stops, you can do that by putting the cursor at the first spot in the document, choosing Format->Paragraph, and choosing the Tabs tab. Type in 0.5, press New, and then add them like that. I did mine every half inch.

If you want to get fancy, you can insert tables, too, and be very organized! I do everything with tab stops, but to each their own. If you like tables, go for it, and your sheets will begin to look very fancy. For games like Pathfinder 2, this may be a lifesaver feature. I will need to adjust column widths, and that is just a matter of dragging them over. Doing it this way gives me higher reusability, as previously discussed.

I like these hand-made character sheets a lot. They are more work, but this is a small trade-off for a sheet that grows as you fill it in, and you can create custom sections for whatever you want on the character. I can also copy & paste out of my PDFs into these, saving me a little work typing. If I need an entire spell description, I can create a sheet for it and paste that right onto the character's grimoire. If a character has an animal companion, I can make a place for their stats on the sheet.

If I want an adventure log, I can create a spot on the next sheet and list the adventure, the location, people involved, a summary of what happened, the XP gained, and other information.

Also, given the way you create characters in Palladium Games, you are copying and pasting a list of skills and modifiers into the sheet, making a few choices, and moving on to the next training package. For my character, I just added all the skills first with their modifiers, sorted the list, and removed the lowest-modified duplicates. Select a bunch of rows of text, and use Tools->Sort to sort that list so you can keep your skill and ability lists alphabetized for easier reference during play.

Would I love a Palladium software package and character designer? Yes, I would, and I know about the spreadsheet designers and have those for fantasy. But even those can't be as fine-tuned as this style of sheet, which is very personalized, and I can optimize the numbers I need and put them all in easy-to-read sections. The availability and quality of the character sheets I can find for the game do not limit the amount of fun I can have with it.

And my DIY sheets, while taking a little longer to set up, are fully customizable and quick to use during play. Are they fancy? No. Are they retro, and look like something we would do back in the 1990s with a 486 and a dot-matrix tractor-feed printer? Oh, yes! We did this for Spacemaster (with WordPerfect), and those sheets worked very well. All the same skills were used, including columns, bolded titles, and tab stops.

Now I don't need character creation software; I can do this myself on Linux. I am not feeding into the AI nightmare, and as a gamer, I can make the conscious choice not to feed into the AI bubble madness. I have the freedom to make that choice as a consumer.

Also, this throwback, 1990s-style word-processor sheet makes me happy.

Palladium System: Two Attacks for Living?

Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, page 50

So I was looking through the pregenerated characters in the Palladium Fantasy Gamemaster's Pack, and I saw a 4th-level ranger with ...five melee attacks? And a rate of fire of five with his longbow?

Then a sense of panic hit me. Five? Five! Where are they getting five?!

Am I getting all the attacks I should be getting?

This is critical in any Palladium game, and this is one thing D&D 3.0 stole from the system: the notion of your attacks per turn going up, and your damage naturally increasing as you level. Granted, in Palladium, attacks can be traded for defense, so there is a balance to the mechanic, where in D&D 3.x, they are just attacks. Wizards did a lousy job at implementing the concept they borrowed, again.

So, where do these attacks come from? Let's look at Palladium Fantasy.

The first two are easy: Hand-to-Hand Combat Expert starts with two attacks per round.

The next one is also easy. Since this character is 4th level, we look up the chart, record the bonuses, and see that at 4th level we get "one additional attack per melee round."

That is three of the five accounted for. Where do these two other attacks come from? We have an explanation on the forums:

https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=170392

Later revisions of the rules and game introduced the rule "2 attacks for living," which means that without any melee combat skills, you get two attacks, and these will stack on top of the HTH combat styles in the game. This was present even in some of the older books in the Palladium fantasy line, especially in NPCs and pregenerated characters.

The Palladium Fantasy RPG book needs updating, as do many of the other books in the line.

So this is our five melee attacks, and where they come from:

• 2 attacks for living
• +2 attacks for HTH Expert
• +1 Attack for HTH Expert at level 4

For ranged, this is where they come from:

• 2 attacks for WP Archery
• +2 attacks for archery RoF
• +1 at level 2
• +1 at level 4
• +1 attack for HTH Expert at level 4

That HTH Expert extra attack at level 4 DOES apply to missile weapon fire! This may seem surprising, but multiple sources confirm it, and it aligns with the pregens.

And I have sources on the Palladium forums:

https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=79257#:~:text=Do%20the%20attacks%20from%20HTH,a%20bonus%20to%20ranged%20combat.&text=Question:Within%20the%20new%20rules,tiny%20+2%20bonus%20from%20aiming?

This is a question that Google's AI gave me both answers for; it insisted the wrong answer was correct, said I was dead wrong, and after I found the official clarifications, it went back on its original answer and admitted I was right. AI can be dead wrong and insist it is 100% right, trying to provide facts and proof, when it is clearly NOT.

AI is a very persuasive liar when it is dead wrong.

This is why we need a human soul in any decision-making process.

And why we need skeptics and those who challenge us.

Be very, very, very careful and never trust AI! It is a known liar in some cases, will lie to prove itself correct, and bases its claims on incorrect sources, trying to use this as justification for the truth. Good luck playing with an AI DM, everybody over there in D&D land. Your character will die because the AI DM goes stupid on you and tries to use someone's incorrect rule interpretation on some forum somewhere as the official rule.

Also, they put a lot of work into making these AI systems sound super confident, which also helps sell the lie and justifies the billions of dollars they are pouring into it all.

In Rifts Ultimate Edition, which is the master rules update for all Palladium games from 2017 onward, the HTH tables were updated to the correct "4 attacks per melee round" value, and the unwritten "2 attacks for living" rule was done away with.

Also, the language for the level 4 bonus in HTH Combat Expert was changed in Rifts Ultimate. In Palladium Fantasy, it is:

• Level 4: One additional attack per melee.

In Rifts Ultimate, it is:

• Level 4: +1 additional attack/action per melee round.

This makes it clear that it is an "attack/action" per melee round, which DOES include missile weapon fire. Missile weapons fire as many times as the character has melee attacks, but some skills do have their own rate of fire rules that these HTH attack bonuses do modify.

So, by Rifts Ultimate, our melee attacks are:

• 4 attacks for HTH Expert
• +1 Attack for HTH Expert at level 4

And for our ranged attacks, by Rifts Ultimate, this is unchanged:

• 2 attacks for WP Archery
• +2 attacks for archery RoF
• +1 at level 2
• +1 at level 4
• +1 attack for HTH Expert at level 4

As far as I am concerned, Rifts Ultimate is the master Palladium rules update, and it should be used with all Palladium games, including Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, Palladium Fantasy, and every other game.

Palladium: MDC is Conflict, not a Mechanic

We have MDC in this world today. Once you are talking 120mm APFSDSDU rounds fired from M-1 tanks, you are in the realm of 2025 MDC weapons, and the effects blow turrets straight off enemy tanks, sending them hundreds of feet into the air. We see these things every day in videos from the war.

Getting rid of MDC is running back into the safety of the game designer's arms, begging for them to balance the game for you, and protect your character from one-shot kills for "fairness."

We are talking highly speculative science fiction here in a world gone mad. Parts of this world are already here, especially when you are talking about modern weaponry that can vaporize an entire ship or building in one hit. We see this almost every day on the news, and yet, we still pray for peace.

You can't remove the MDC in Rifts without also causing another problem. You will break the fundamental conflict in the game. MDC is not just a game mechanic; it is a part of the core conflict in the setting. Remove MDC, and you are removing the best part of the game.

Take the Coalition, the mostly bad guy, but also possibly good guy, favorite punching bags of the setting. In my campaign, the coalition's cities are strictly SDC settings, and even the police are rolling around in SDC armor, carrying SDC guns, with an "inside the megolpolis" vibe that's more like the pre-ruin world and how it used to be.

MDC quick reaction forces are always on the ready and can be called in at any time; all the Coalition Police need to do is make a call, and the flying suits and skelebots start rushing in. The Coalition is one of the largest users of MDC arms and armor, but there is a deeper philosophical issue at play here.

If the goal of the Coalition is to retake Earth and make things "like they were," then the citizenry should be able to live in a world "like it all was." The police use regular SDC guns and armor because, well, they could be stolen, but the reality they wish to create is one of normalcy, not of the MDC overlords coming in, acting like gods, and demanding fealty and servitude.

This is especially true when superheroes, fantasy monsters, and aliens can walk into this world and be instantly converted to MDC overlords, get drunk with power, and fall to madness. The MDC of the rifts is like booze, and you could imagine a group of "good guy" superheroes coming into the world of Rifts, getting drunk with power, and all of them turning into MDC demons.

Just because they were good guys in their world does not mean they will remain so in Rifts.

The alignment system and the ability to make alignment changes are core to the experience of playing any Palladium game. This is how the "good knight" falls to evil and dons the black plate mail.

Imagine the X-Men beginning to go mad with power, growing demonic horns, wings, and hooves, their skin slowly turning red, and the wickedness they begin to embrace as the raw power of MDC, magic, and super psionics corrupts their souls, and actual demons show up to smile and offer them more. Some of them realize what is happening and try to turn the tide and warn others, but it is already too late. They are sacrificed so the demons can further corrupt the rest.

Remove MDC, and you are taking the forbidden fruit away.

This is a story that can only be told in Rifts. It is an old-school game; if I want to instantly drop a character modification on a character, like a pair of demon wings, I can. In 5E? Forget it, you are centrally planned all the way to level 20, and that would break the game. People would want it to take a feat slot and limit the wings' flight. Don't laugh, I have seen this in so many race supplements for 5E, it is not funny. Flight breaks 5E in most cases. In Rifts, I can go there and do that without worrying about what game designers will think of me.

The story of the corrupted superheroes is a great tale to tell.

This is the core conflict in Rifts.

Power corrupts.

The MDC conversion puts a massive strain on the human soul, and it is still alien and abnormal to the world. MDC technology lacks a soul; it is merely a tool. But a Coalition that recognizes that "MDC everywhere" is a danger to what it needs to keep existing, families, a semblance of everyday life, children being born and growing up in safe environments, and soldiers fighting for their precious SDC enclave where they can feel normal, that is what "saving humanity" is all about.

How can an ex-soldier raise a family if they have to worry about punks with MDC laser pistols shooting up neighborhoods, or MDC police forces fighting back, and those stray shots flying through the walls of dozens of houses? If the world they fight for is supposed to be normal, then the interiors of these cities will be kept as normal as possible. It highlights the "fake nature" of reality, since everyone knows better. Still, this group depends on millions of people going about a typical day in schools, factories, service jobs, healthcare, and other professions.

Again, if an MDC user of magic teleports in, the MDC quick reaction forces are on a hair trigger, but the life this group needs to create is one of normalcy. And yes, being in the Coalition Police and only having SDC armor and weapons is a terrible job when an MDC something shows up, but that is life. It isn't always a perfect job in this world, and you need to duck and call for reinforcements since your partner was just vaporized.

Remove MDC, and there is little reason to play Rifts other than as "just another science fiction IP," which it is not.

The MDC versus SDC mechanic is a core conflict in the game, highlighting the struggle between outsiders finding a home here and those who want to preserve the way things were. And that, my friends, is a very topical and current conflict to explore.

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.

Palladium SDC Games and Sandbox Play

Strangely, the concept of dungeon crawling took over the hobby. It is suitable for follow-on sales, but it feels strangely fake as the core of the hobby. Many games in the 1990s walked away from the dungeon concept, and a lot of creativity and imagination came into the hobby. We had the Palladium games, which were never really dungeon-crawling games, Vampire, GURPS, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and a few others that did not put "the dungeon" as the peak of adventure gaming. By the 1990s, the dungeon had been done, and even AD&D 2nd Edition shifted more towards story-gaming and modules based on novels.

Which is why my Palladium SDC games are sticking around. They come from the post-D&D era and tried to do something new. We are in that post-D&D era again, where the "dungeon as adventure" has been done to death, and we are ready for more story-based adventures. Once you build your character in a Palladium game, that is your "playing piece" that you take through various situations and scenarios. That sounds precisely like D&D, but it differs from the 90s RPGs.

The first goal is to "assemble your team of experts," and characters in Palladium's games need each other since they are all specialists in certain areas, and below average in areas unrelated to their specialties. In Palladium games, if you pick the archer, you will be the best archer ever. If you choose the ninja, you will be the best ninja ever. You will excel in your area of specialization, but you need the healer, warrior, wizard, and all others in your group.

You are trying to solve a series of situations with your characters, where you will all have a chance to shine. A dungeon is not a dry grid of room descriptions; more than it is a list of situations you will all need to resolve, circumvent, or work your way through to achieve your objective.

The "SB" in SBRPG stands for situation-based. This is what our game was about.

The gameplay in situation-based gaming is dynamic and incompatible with set-in-stone keyed room descriptions. It is almost sandbox-based play, with factions in the world working "live" to achieve their own goals, and you running around trying to stop them. In a Keep on the Borderlands-style adventure, the Caves of Chaos would not be the focus. The area map would be better filled with hamlets and villages around the keep, interesting locations, a wizard's tower, a soaring ancient bridge, small farms, outposts, trading camps, and other spots. Then, the tribes would enter the map, set up camps, and begin to take down civilization as marauders.

Each group's force numbers and memorable NPCs would be tracked and killed, and the situation would evolve organically. Your group may choose to root out the goblins stealing food from farms and burning them down first, and that may slow down the other forces when they begin to suffer food shortages. You may choose to break the orc siege of a southern town first, and that would free up men to reinforce the outposts.

The concept works on a master "situation" and breaks down into lower levels of "sub-situations" each faction pursues to achieve a goal. Your goal, as heroes, is to be the monkey wrench thrown into the scene. The master situation will not end well. Left unchecked, these bands of humanoids will surround the keep, lay siege, kill everyone inside, and take over the fort as an evil, demon-worshipping humanoid stronghold and blight upon every surrounding kingdom as more evil flows in from the broken lands.

This is how we played these 90s games; they were never dungeon crawls but live, active, dynamic, and engaging meshes of cause-and-effect, live situations that required multiple play sessions to work out and play through. There are no 'passive skills' that play the game for you, so you can stay on your phone. The Palladium games are perfect for this 'live action' play since your "team of experts" is there to tackle these problems with the tools you have and in the best way you see fit.

Do you have a stealthy ranger and ninja pair that can wreak havoc on goblin warbands?

Are you more a heavy metal group with tanks and healers, meant to bloody the nose of an orc assault?

Do you work more with magic that manipulates the mind and can turn the humanoid factions against each other? Or are you a more arcane sorcerer who can summon elemental forces or twist the land to stop the invaders?

Are you more in tune with nature and turn the land and animals against the invaders, washing out roads, tangling vines to slow them down, and calling on woodland spirits to fight alongside you? Are there nature factions to align with for this character type?

In Palladium games, other characters need you, and you need them.

The story modules for D&D in the 1990s were all about railroads. They were a series of combat encounters strung together by a story. Again, the live sandbox style of play ends up being the same series of combat encounters, but again, there is a vast difference here. There was typically zero freedom in how you pursued your goals in the 1990s TSR story modules.

The structure of the D&D adventuring party did not change, and it felt like a poor fit for those scenarios. Even today, D&D struggles with skills, and characters don't feel like "they have the tools for the job."

Palladium?

I have the skills for many jobs, thank you.

D&D rarely does "big magic," and 90% of the powers in the game are meant to be used in a small room. In the old days, you had "big spells" mixed into the list, like 'illusionary terrain' spell, and the 'pass without trace' spell. By the time we got to D&D 4, the game's scope had shrunk to become an MMO with small powers, and 5E continues in that direction.

Does it matter that characters in Palladium games are complex and take a while to create? No. Character creation is 90% of the game, where the focus of the rules should be. The rest of any Palladium game is so simple it puts rules-light games to shame. Combat is simple. Turn actions are simple. Skill rolls are simple. The action economy is simple. Damage and healing are simple. Armor is simple. Resources burn down, requiring rest and breaks, so you need to be able to plan for downtime and replenishment.

Palladium still captures the classic resource management elements of the classic role-playing games.

With d20 games like D&D, the story is the same as in the 1990s. D&D's characters are too simple and lack the tools to deal with dynamic situations. Your powers are room-based and don't do anything big and cool. While characters are specialized, they are specialists. The overlap of spells and abilities makes some character types obsolete. Every class is set up to tackle dungeons and not live situations. With frequent rests restoring most resources, the game feels like an MMO where your powers are full in every encounter.

Yes, there is always the Rifts game, but I am not focused on Rifts right now. I do not want MDC. I want a lower-level game where hit points and SDC matter. That part of the Palladium system is excellent, and focusing on the SDC games in an SDC universe is a joy. MDC weapons and powers are a distraction and trivialize the combat math into all-or-nothing, alpha-attacks, and going first. Playing with weapons that can destroy city blocks is fun, but my heart lies in the lower-level, smaller-focused, personal games.

The Rifts game is another discussion entirely. It is a lot like Robotech at heart; that is where you need to begin understanding it all. For me, the SDC games capture the Palladium charm the best.

I like the SDC games. I wish they made more of them. I would love to have a Weird West game or a 'hard science fiction' game combining horror and psychic powers from them. These books would also be great to combine with Rifts, adding cowboys, shamans, astronauts, and space marines. I would love a gangster game, pulp adventure, or a take on the Cthulhu mythos. I can make all these myself with any of their modern-day games (Dead Reign, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, or Beyond the Supernatural). Still, they have a way of making a single-book game compelling and exciting.

The Joy of the SDC Palladium Games

c. 1983, 1996

So many have fond memories of any of the SDC-based Palladium games. Palladium FRP, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas and Superspies, TNMT/AtB, Dead Reign, and many more. I am avoiding Rifts in this conversation as that is the obvious one to focus on, but my interest lies in the games without MDC, and the Palladium system working to its fullest on the low end. I am just looking at the SDC-games, with no mega damage, and the damage systems and character stats are still meaningful and working in the base rules.

c. 1984, 1998

Anyone who has given them a chance generally loves them. They reward creativity and inspire passion. Part of this lies in the high degree of character customization in the rules; even the Fantasy game lets you pick and choose so much, and Heroes Unlimited is still one of the best superhero games ever made.

Once you understand character creation, the game is a B/X level of simplicity and fast play. The characters take time to design because you are doing "game design" for the role you will play in the game. It is well worth it, and rules-light games fail to fill the investment you get after you finish Palladium character design.

Remember, do all physical skills FIRST! These often change your attributes. After that, weapon skills to figure out combat bonuses, and then everything else. Print out the physical skills page or find or make a summary. Do this, and your speed at character creation is faster and more straightforward.

The games utilize asymmetrical balance, with classes not on equal power levels, but the specialists excel in their area of expertise. This makes a game that naturally needs a group, where you get this "team of specialized experts" who are not each good at everything, but the individual members can shine at what they do best.

c. 1984

You have a system that builds a group like facets of a diamond. Everyone specializes and is the absolute best at what they love to do. They all have weaknesses and must rely on others. Because you are the best at what you do, you feel fantastic when you finally get to shine. Then, you step back and rely on others for everything else.

Games that design-in everyone's powers into everyone else are boring and anti-group. Why do I need anyone else if every class has self-healing, damage, stealth, magic, defense, social abilities, and so on? You aren't playing D&D with a group; you are playing with a group, alone.

This "playing with others, alone" design mentality has killed interaction in MMOs for years and is the death of many games. Nobody needs a group; everyone is a solo-er, and few play together. We live in an age of "me, not us," and we put influencers on pedestals, and everyone wants to be one. As a result, our games become "what I do" each turn instead of "what we do."

c. 1988, 2005

Palladium is an entirely different design rooted in classic party dynamics. In this model, everyone has a well-defined strength and a collection of weaknesses they must rely on others to fill. What happens in this model? There will always be a moment for every player where they "save the day by being the most awesome." The party cohesion will be powerful. The moments you were allowed to use your class's OP powers will be remembered for the rest of the player's days.

c. 2008

Unlike B/X or most D&D-style games, you aren't a wimp when you begin. 5E tried to up the starting power level to about 3rd level, but you are still weak, and you don't really shine in your role versus everyone else. Nobody needs your abilities in most situations; everyone can do almost everything. D&D also has this terrible thing where casters have all the powers of rogues, and they eventually do everything better than them.

c. 1995

The core seven SDC games, the ones Rifts pulls from for dimensional beings, are all amazing and stand up independently. You can make a "non-Rifts mega-verse" just out of these games, say "Rifts never happened," and have an amazing, multi-versal, cross-dimensional game with many options and diverse character types.

c. 1985, 2001

And they are worth playing on their own. The TNMT-inspired After the Bomb game can be a post-apocalyptic or gritty street-level heroes game. The TNMT RPG is also being reprinted this year, and you can still get a pre-order in. This is still the best "fighting humanoid animals" game ever designed, and it is the king of this niche, no matter how many animal-cracker "all the same" shapes D&D 5.5E wants to say it has. In AtB, you have it if you can dig, tunnel, use sonar, claws, tusks, hooves, fly, glide, or any other remarkable ability! It isn't just, "oh, a plus to a few ability scores and pick some feat" or some other weak-sauce, water-it-down, make-it-pedestrian, nobody-gets-anything-special mass-market game design D&D is so good at.

I can be a badger-man in AtB with digging claws, poison resistance, brute strength, extra mental and physical endurance, and night vision. I can get tunneling if I want. I can pick a few weaknesses, like musk glands, to balance my points. In D&D, if they had a badger race, I would allocate ability score points like everyone else and look like a badger, but do nothing like a badger. It would be pure cosplay, vapid and meaningless, with no powers given.

We live in this false age of pretend, where Wall Street companies tell us they are giving us something, peer pressure us into saying X is Y, and they deliver nothing. Palladium games are more complicated, but you always get the real thing.

And this badger would work in any of these seven worlds just fine. He could fight alongside superheroes, survive zombies, exist in a fantasy realm, fight ninja clans, be a suave super-spy, investigate mysteries, or have any other adventure you could imagine. The powers, tunneling, claws, and every other power would still work in any other sister-world.

You can do this in GURPS, too. But in Palladium, a lot of the work and base idea-crafting has been done for you, at least for character archetypes, and you are not starting from scratch. Palladium games have been played so much that the designers hone in on the best character options that provide the most fun and significant party synergies, and ship those with the game as the default options.

If people malign Palladium games, it is usually third-hand or later knowledge. People talk trash about these games to pretend they are an influencer with a popular opinion. Many who have played them still stand by them to this day. I find a deep sense of loyalty and love for these books that transcends even decades of being away from them, like they were a part of someone's life, and they still hold that close.

Even those who have moved on to other games remember these games fondly.

Yes, they are dated, but some of the best music ever made is dated, too. We just don't know what we had when it first came out, and the fact that we can still play these brings me back to a better time. The fact that they have not changed keeps them rooted in those better days, like an original recording of a song you love.

For many of these games, you can build a soundtrack for the year they were released, including a two or three-year period before. I put that soundtrack on, pick up the game, and am instantly taken back like a time machine.

Today's games don't do that for me. They play like highly processed "food in a box"—too slick, commercial, and full of salt and preservatives (anger and platform lock-in). They aren't "real food" to me. Are Palladium games perfect? No. The songs I love from those days are not perfect creations either.

With Palladium games, I have 40 years of time machines on my shelf.

I can go back.

I only have to open a book.