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.

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.

Off the Shelf: Palladium Fantasy RPG

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.

Off the Shelf: Palladium Fantasy

If you are going to go as far as RuneQuest or Rolemaster, then Palladium Fantasy is another classic. This is still a good game, but it's older than the OSR, and it's another game we played back in the day.

The love and nostalgia for this system are real.

This is without Rifts or any other Palladium game. Just fantasy.

Every character class is a mini-game. Every system of magic works differently. It feels on the level of a Pathfinder 2, where a player plays one character class and becomes the expert in that class for the group. It uses a d20 for combat (roll high) and percentage rolls (roll under) for skills. That does not bother me and feels natural. The characters take a while to craft, since there are many choices.

The level of depth and customizations to each character class blows 5E away.

Some classes are wildly more combat-capable than others, but it does not matter since advancement is based more on story and choices than killing and treasure. You can be a clever and resourceful "peasant farmer OCC" and out-think and out-play Conan and rocket up the levels faster.

The XP system rewards defeating enemies and avoiding violence equally. Ideas and plans of action get you XP far faster than killing rooms full of enemies. Putting yourself in danger and self-sacrifice gains you XP. Skill use and daring actions give you XP. Helping others gets you XP.

Finding a thousand gold in a dungeon and donating it to the local down-on-its-luck town so they can rebuild their aqueduct will probably gain you more XP than the adventure itself. Sure, you could keep it for yourselves and be rich, but the love and adoration of the entire community are worth so much more.

The game rewards action, daring, ideas, clever play, helping others, playing in character, saving lives, avoiding violence, and roleplaying. Combined with the radically different alignments, this creates a different play dynamic where character motivations and actions come first, and treasure and killing are far behind.

Print out that XP chart and keep it handy.

This is playable with just the core book, and the only other books I recommend getting after this are the Monsters & Animals book as a bestiary. If you want "dark elves, " start with an elf, change their skin color to anything you want (ebony, white, blue, violet, gray, etc.), and give them an evil alignment.

Another handy book is Adventures on the High Seas, which is perfect if you want to include bards and other entertainers in your game. The core game does not have "magical music," it keeps the traditional magical traditions as pillars of the world's magic system. I like that, as it keeps magic from being too much like high-fructose corn syrup, and in every character class imaginable.

If you wanted a "magical bard," that would be a Mind Mage (core book) with a few performance skills. Looking this over, it would be a much more enjoyable (and powerful) bard than the ones they have in most games, including 5E.

Again, power is not everything. Even if you have extraordinary powers, that does not make you invincible. The entire game is built on the idea of asymmetric power, but puts advancement on gameplay and creativity, not power and loot.

This is still a worthy, fun, fantastic game that challenges you to think outside the box, create detailed characters, do something different, and enjoy a game that isn't D&D.

Or one that retains the same old D&D loot and power sensibilities and focuses more on character actions and creative gameplay.

The SDC Cinematic Universe: Rifts & Other Supplimental Books

I am trying to keep my Palladium SDC worlds from being sucked into the Rifts universe. While I love Rifts, and I was a huge collector back in the day, it always overshadowed a ton of cool settings and places that I felt deserved a little bit more time in the sun.

Would I love to play a pure Palladium Fantasy game? Yes! Sure!

Rock around as a hero or villain in Heroes Unlimited? Wow! Never did that!

See what Beyond the Supernatural does differently than games like Call of Cthulhu? Wow! Yes!

See what the alternate universe of the 1990s would have been like if Nightbane had been popular instead of Vampire: The Masquerade? Of course!

Play in an alternate universe had we chosen Ninjas & Superspies instead of Top Secret? Yes!

Relive some of my TNMT fun with After the Bomb? Wow!

And check out the newer Dead Reign and see the different take on the zombie genre? Yes!

I know, this sounds like a Palladium advertisement already. But the fact is I collected the base books from all these worlds and used them as Rifts sourcebooks back in the day. I knew about the worlds and loved them, but never got to play in them to see what they were like pre-Rifts. They were always my Rifts sourcebooks and never fun games on their own.

Rifts is a juggernaut. It will steamroll playtime and attention for any game linked to it. It is a great universe and game, but I feel the base games deserve a non-Rifts universe of their own.

For now.

The 90s

Well, the question of "why play Palladium" came up when I started looking into these games again, and this all came up as a part of me reliving the AD&D 2e experience with For Gold & Glory, still a great AD&D 2e retro-clone. This was the 1990s, and I was collecting Rifts books. My brother and I moved our AD&D games into the 2nd edition, and we were having new adventures there in the (never touched by the novels) Forgotten Realms of our imaginations.

And I did have the Palladium Fantasy RPG book, and I always wanted to play that but we never had time. Never be that person who says, "We never had time." What happens is "we" becomes "I" and the regret sets in. So I want to make up for that a little and experience these games as they were meant to be played.

So I created an SDC Cinematic Universe (SDC-CU) of my own, and I am currently not playing Rifts.

While I like the entire idea of replaying AD&D 2e, my feelings on this are somewhat mixed. For one, doing this in Castles & Crusades feels like a more faithful and modern approach to the experience, while having a lot of new stuff to add to my game. I am still feeling this out and doing a lot of thinking, but Palladium is a game I really want to try regardless, and this just may well change my plans entirely.

Splicers?

Wait, where does the game Splicers fit into all this? MDC game as I read! Nope! Sounds fun but get over there with Rifts and Rifts: Chaos Earth. And I swear Rifts: Chaos Earth is how they are going to get me back into Rifts. But I am putting that aside! I am against introducing MDC class weapons and magic into the SDC-CU since I want everything to be on the same power level and scale.

The Splicers game probably deserves a look on its own, even as something apart from Rifts.

Inter SDC-CU Travel?

No idea yet if I will do crossovers between these universes without the MDC world of the Rifts. I have enough here to last me decades, but if it comes up it will happen through the rules in place for inter-dimensional activity. I am sure the PFRPG fantasy world and the superhero one may drive this, but it may happen.

There are superpowers, mutant powers, magic, Nightbane powers, and ley lines and rifts all over these worlds, so in theory, the groundwork is laid for "non-Rifts rifts" but we shall see.

Rifts Books?

Okay, now that we established the ground rules, what Rifts books are allowable? There is an easy one as my first choice, and that is Rifts Conversion Book Two: Pantheons of the Megaverse. Why? More gods for the Palladium FRPG fantasy world, and we get some good ones here like the Greeks, Romans, and Norse. We also have SDC stats, so these fit right in perfectly (once you get rid of all of their power armor and high-tech gear). These can be dropped right in and if you want more gods, this is an easy choice.

Rifts Conversion Book One is more for the rules updates than any really great SDC content or additions. There are rules for higher ability scores, pain modifiers, and dodging modern weapons that are worth having. The monster, spell, and conversion lists have SDC values, but they are mostly useful for going into Rifts (or as a summary list). There is a third Dark Conversions book that summarizes monsters from other games, so to me, it is not as useful since I am going to be playing and collecting the games covered here and will have those already.

If you want more demons for the fantasy world, two good pickup books are Rifts Dimension Books 10 & 11 for Hades and Dyval. Like Pantheons of the Megaverse, you can strip out the high-tech items, SDC values are provided, and these all drop into the Palladium FRPG seamlessly.

I am sure there are a few more Rifts books I could borrow from, like the Vampires, but a lot of these I would like to stay in Rifts as a part of that lore and world. The gods and demons are cross-world, so they are technically "from" the fantasy world so those should be a part of the PFRPG world.

Other Books?

Another notable book (not Rifts) is the 90's era Compendium of Contemporary Weapons, and this should be useful for my 80s and 90s based games.

The generic Weapons & Armor and Weapons & Castles books are good references, and also provide a lot of context and detail should you want to dive into what a certain piece of armor is called, get information on castles, and also have names and styles of exotic and historical weapons.

These are my top seven books, with the Pantheons book being my top pick for Fantasy, followed by the Hades/Dyval guides. For weapons, the Contemporary Weapons Compendium is nice to have for any of the modern games. The Weapons/Armor/Castles books come in behind those, followed by the Rifts compendiums one and three.

Palladium Fantasy RPG: Interactive Character Sheet

If your eyes are not what they used to be, and you find the printable Palladium Fantasy character sheets that you can download pretty much well unusable, this is a great product. You are going to spend a little time learning how this works, but it is a lot less time than you would spend working up your own sheet (or struggling with the official ones). The printouts are way more readable than what I can fill in on those sheets that force you to write 6-point type in pencil.

The only downside is now I want one for the other Palladium games (Ninjas and Superspies, Dead Reign, Heroes Unlimited, etc) besides Palladium Fantasy and Rifts. There is a little room for custom skills and classes in here so you can customize this sheet for specific characters.

It gives you three printable sheets for the character sheet (double-sided), magic (double), and combat (single). The sheet auto-calculates everything, so you don't need to do much math, and you need to follow along with the OCC selections and skill picks with the books - the sheet does not do everything. This is more like a worksheet that holds your hand and does all the math; while the choices and the character design steps you need to do yourself.

The nice part about these sheets is you can save on the cloud and have your characters wherever you go. Make a fresh copy of the sheet for each character!

Also, you can save a dollar buying from the Palladium store since DTRPG takes a cut.

Very highly recommended. Also, it requires Microsoft Excel.

DriveThru RPG ($4):

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275327/Palladium-Fantasy-RPGR-Interactive-Character-Sheet

Palladium Store ($3):

https://palladium-store.com/1001/product/dig-pf-interactive-char-sheet.html

Palladium Fantasy RPG: Combat

So I sat down this weekend to run through a few sample combats using the NPCs from the Palladium Fantasy Game Masters' Kit, and of course, I was sitting there with my "expert bias" and saying, "I know how this is going to go. I have been playing these games long enough to know how this plays, and I won't be surprised."

Well, I was surprised.

So on one side was the pre-gen character Haloric, a 3rd level thief with two daggers and soft leather armor. On the other side, we have Tramon Dess, a 3rd level assassin with many weapons (military fork, sword, daggers) and studded leader armor. The assassin has the advantage here in a few ways; first off, HTH combat assassin versus the thief's basic. The assassin has far better weapons and armor, along with a +4 bonus to strike with most weapons.

This is going to be so one-sided.

I doubt that thief is going to get one hit in.

Now, I house-ruled in a fumble on a roll of a 1, and the assassin kept dropping his weapons. He had to spend an action to pick them up (or change to a new one), so the thief had a little breathing room. But wow, the tension and drama of this fight kept me engaged all the way to the end. The thief actually knocked 30 hit points of SDC and hp from the assassin (with a 1d6 dagger), and the fight was close. Even at times when I thought, "at this point, it is over," the thief's staying power and damage - with a basic HTH skill - surprised me.

At the end of the battle, the thief was reduced to 1 hp, and I had him surrender, so he did lose, but it did not go the way I expected it to. And the parries, dodges, and back and forth with the action economy surprised me.

My Assumptions Were Wrong

I did not remember much about the flow of combat, and the game humbled me, which is good stuff and makes me a fan again. I forgot how cool this system was and why we played it back in the day. It does call back to older systems where combat was more back-and-forth and detailed, and the system was a reaction to D&D combat feeling too basic for many.

A lot of us back in the day "wanted more" from a combat system, and that is why we played this. I forgot totally and fell back on what I read online about how others felt, so I should feel that way. 

Well, yeah, I liked it back in the day, but it is a bit clunky, as many have pointed out...

Not exactly. This is one of the more elegant and easy combat systems that still retains defensive reactions to attacks. The fact we have a defensive step adds to the complexity over a B/X, but how the system handles all this is about the fastest and most straightforward system I have seen in a fantasy game.

I think because I got drawn in by Rifts I missed a lot of the SDC melee fun that makes a fantasy game like this so great. You can get so distracted by giant particle cannons and missile launchers that when you remove that and go back to basics, you rediscover why the original system was such a genius creation and got the attention it did.

Now I am going from "liking the system despite flaws" to "super-fan."

Versus B/X and D&D

It is hard to go back to the D&D style of melee after this. What I like is the combat is not so one-sided after that to-hit roll is made. I hit, I do damage, done, move on! Not really. Yes, I know in D&D, the to-hit versus AC roll simulated parries, dodges, and a lot of "action" hidden in that dice roll, but at times it can feel like a videogame where "I roll, I do damage, next!"

And it feels flat and boring.

Just get this fight done!

Whiff, whiff, hit, 1 hp damage, whiff, whiff, hit 3 hp damage, whiff...come on!

At least if I play a caster, I can do different things.

In Palladium FRPG? Your defenses matter. You can build a defensive build. You can focus on offense. You can do unarmed. You can do a mix. You can do shields. You can mix a little ranged in there. You can do speed versus slow. You manage a pile of attacks and use them for special attacks and defenses. Your armor deteriorates, and you can "take a hit" or roll with a punch to reduce damage (at the cost of an action).

The "fighter game" in Palladium FRPG is incredible and worth the price of admission.

And another thing I love is the game isn't so selfishly one-sided on the attacker's side, like how I feel D&D can be at times. I hit I do damage; you have no chance to mitigate or stop! Come on! Stop slowing the game down! What rule gives you the right to defend or say no? I am guaranteed my damage roll!

Well, no, a defender's skill matters. Combat isn't just an "attack bonus." You get a skilled swordfighter on the other side, and they are parrying blow after blow with ease, and you are sitting there frustrated why your five hits didn't do 5d8 damage to the other side by now. They didn't land. The other side's skill contributes to defense. There isn't a good way to factor in defensive skill in D&D to AC since if you raised AC, the combat would get more whiff and less satisfying.

Thief Fight!

Let's have a battle between a first-level thief (3hp, +0 attack, AC 7[12]) and a sixth (15hp, +2 attack, AC 7[12]) in B/X, given normal weapons and armor (each with a dagger, d4 damage). The higher level thief has a better chance to hit, so overall higher DPS by 10%. The only real deciding factor in this battle will be wearing down hit points, and that hit bonus. There is no skill difference factor in AC (DEX may modify AC, but that would be the same for both given similar abilities and is not skill).

In Palladium, the higher-level thief will have defensive skills that will likely prevent a lot of damage from happening, or deal with the lower-level thief in different ways, like entangling, disarming, or other less-stabby methods. But as I noted in my sample combat, being less skilled does not make this one-sided, and smart play really matters.

Smart play matters. The choices you make in a combat round matter.

That is what I want in a game.

Longer Combats, More Interesting

Downsides? The combats are longer but way more interesting. You have to be careful designing adventures like your typical D&D dungeon crawl, where you can stick 12 orcs in a room and expect the party to clean them up in a turn or two. D&D always had this feeling of playing like a videogame where you could cleave through crowds of enemies quickly, and while that is satisfying on one level, it leaves me feeling I want more if I feel enemies should be treated with a little respect.

One-on-one battles are interesting here. I could see a fight with two orcs holding a bridge behind a tipped-over cart and two giving fire support from the opposite riverbank with bows as a cool climactic battle for a party. Throw a caster in there for some extra spice. The battle will take a little longer, but this will be a detailed and complex challenge for a party to pick apart and defeat.

Solo Play

Better yet? This game feels great to solo in. Since the characters are more detailed, you could just play one and have this great, detailed, and gritty adventure as the story of one hero against the odds. Leveling up means something, and you get varied and different bonuses as you gain power. I tried soloing in B/X and it felt flat, the whiff game came up and I just wasn't interested. I couldn't do enough, there weren't great character build options, and I needed a little more expressiveness and detail in combat.

Here, there is a second level to resource tracking as armor SDC needs to be tracked and repaired. You need to rest up and recover SDC, but losing hp is serious and takes downtime to heal. The build options create choices in combat, and I get this epic Street Fighter feeling when a battle begins. I can build an offensive, damage-forward berserker. I can build a shield fighter. I can build a nimble, parry rogue. I can build a gladiator with varied weapons. I can build an unarmed specialist.

Rules Light with Moderate Builds

I feel a tendency to put rules-light games on such a high pedestal that we lose sight of why we like a little more detail and crunch to our games. The options here are fantastic, and solo play feels really attractive just because of the options and unpredictability of combat. And for solo play, I want characters I can customize, build, and have a moderate level of complexity to the character build system.

The combat rules here are still rules-light, but the characters are of moderate design complexity. Compared to a B/X game where it is light in rules and light with builds, the extra complexity in characters combined with a combat system that leverages build choices creates a fascinating level of depth that I can't pull myself away from.

Palladium FRPG: Monster & Animals

This is a great book.

And why play Palladium? The fans are some of the most die-hard and best around. People that don't like it, don't play it (but they complain about it a lot). Those that are left are there for the game. I ran with the Aftermath system as our house rules for nearly 10 years for sci-fi, fantasy, and modern games. Palladium and Rifts feel like throwback B/X games in comparison, and plus I played TNMT and Rifts back in the day and loved them.

The attack roll and the defender having a chance to react are very cool, cinematic, and tense rules for combat. Do they drag out combat? Yes. Are they worth it? Even more so! Very few games can you outclass an opponent in so many ways that make a difference, and a good defense is a viable combat option.

Back to the book.

Let's take a step back from our journey through Palladium FRPG, let's open the monster book and check things out. Over 160 pages of illustrated monsters, followed by a further 80 pages of illustrated animals?

Not to mention the dozens of additional possible player races presented here. Since orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, ogres, troglodytes, kobolds, and trolls are main-book player races (yes, amazingly true) we get even more fae and humanoids in this book including brownies, fairies, leprechauns, mermaids, nymphs, satyrs, sprites, fae, pixies, evil toads, treant-like will-o-the-wisps, and more as possible player races.

Palladium FRPG was one of the first "play as a monster" fantasy games (outside of Tunnels and Trolls), and they continued to support and kept adding options every time they added creatures to the game. A lot of fantasy games feel stingy when it comes to player race options, or include these "product identity" options that force you into a piece of copyrighted content as your player identity (and of course, they control it and you lose that part of your character should you ever want to publish a book about them).

Also, remember that demons, elementals, dragons, and undead are mostly covered in other books. Humanoids are the main book characters, so if you need an orc or goblin, spin one up with a class. PFRPG does not do the typical "orc entry in the Monster Manual" thing. For one, it diminishes the entire race as a 1 HD monster. And another, PFRPG is built off the assumption that every monster in the game is created and played using the same system, has levels if there is a class, and plays and fights as hard as the heroes - using the same rules.

More? We Got More!

Do you want more options for player races? Get the After the Bomb game and create unlimited types of mutated animals as player characters. Play a parakeet paladin. Play a cattle thief (an actual cow, as a thief). A noble chicken. A diabolist goat. Remember in the After the Bomb game you have these sliding scales of size, mutations, and how human they are. That parakeet could be a 12-foot tall brute. You can give them animal-specific powers too, like tunneling, flight, swimming, or other special abilities.

Get Heroes Unlimited and design a "whatever you want" sort of character. A lost android. An alien. An intelligent tree. An intelligent energy cloud. Or really any other idea you could take from a comic book.

The options of player races and forms in the Palladium FRPG are endless, and things get even crazier if you assume that random Rifts pull in aliens, humans, creatures, and others from across time and the universe into this fantasy world - just no Rifts stuff or MDC weapons, please. The idea of a "reverse Rifts" fantasy world with Palladium FRPG as the base world and the rest of the "normal PF universe" as those rifted into this reality seems very cool to me and would feel like a lower power-level version of the Rifts game but based in fantasy.

But Fewer Monsters is More

Not in the quantity of them in the book, but this is one thing I noticed reading your typical B/X adventure versus a Palladium FRPG one. In B/X, you will often get these 40x40 rooms with the entry, "And 30 kobolds in the room." Blam, fireball target, I know. Because B/X runs numerically simple, you can throw a Gauntlet videogame number of creatures in a room and still be able to fight them all in a night's setting.

We did a number of conversions of B/X modules to Aftermath back in the day, and we hated these rooms. First off, in a combat system with some meat and bones on it, and that gritty one-on-one feeling, you do not need 30 kobolds to challenge a group of players. Six is a huge group, and I suspect in Palladium FRPG this is also true. Reduce the monsters in number since they will be tougher than the typical d4 hp, +0 AT, and AC 7 [12] "all you need to know" of the typical B/X kobold.

Kobolds in PFRPG will have parries, SDC, hp, attacks, and all sorts of other meaningful play stats. Give a few special weapons, dispositions, and tactics. Maybe one will charge while a few others hold back and take cover with short-bows. Maybe one fights with a shield and short spear. Maybe another hurls insults and only attacks those who get near.

If you have fewer, varied, and more interesting foes that use the terrain of the area the entire fight is better for it. Whenever you convert an adventure up to a more gritty and detailed combat system, reduce the number of enemies and individualize them. B/X is so simple it can get away with these cut-and-paste enemies with a few meaningful stats. With more detailed and grittier combat systems that emphasize blow-by-blow fights, you need fewer foes - but with more detail and variety.

And this is Palladium FRPG, there are books full of strange melee weapons, so bust out those spontoons, oncin picks, runkas, meat cleavers, frying pans, cudgels, pry bars, ice picks, spades, shears, and talwars. Giving them all short swords is so B/X; part of the fun of this game is opening up your weapons book and pointing at a picture, and saying, "this."

This happened to me at a middle-school lunch once. We were recounting our Palladium adventure, and one of my players said, "and one attacked me with a quaddara, I blocked with my kukri, while the other threw a mongwanga at us!" And all the D&D kids at the other table turned and stared.

One of them stated, "There are only three types of swords."

We laughed.

Never so proud to be called nerds by them at that moment.

Monster Have Horror Factors

One of the cool things about Palladium FRPG is some of the monsters have horror factors. If you are walking along and all of a sudden a giant grizzly bear rears up on its hind legs right next to you, yeah, you are saving against a horror factor to avoid being temporarily stunned. Critically fail this and I just may rule you are affected by temporary random insanity or fail by a huge margin and you may run in flight.

Yes, the game has the Call of Cthulhu-style horror mechanics, and they even apply to a few fearsome predators, all undead, and every supernatural creature. It is great stuff, and it helps keep the monsters from becoming a "ho-hum, another beholder" style of familiarity.

Undead?

Undead in the Palladium RPG are a special case. You will find most of those in the book Land of the Damned Two: Eternal Torment. Skeletons and other animated dead raised by spells are at best temporary creatures without that undead "soul" keeping them alive. And of course, if you want Zombies, check out the Dead Reign game and go to town with hundreds of different types of zombies.

There are ghosts, specters, mummies, and entities like poltergeists in this book. Just none of the B/X standards like skeletons, zombies, ghasts, or wights. It probably would not be too hard to convert a B/X monster in since you could start at a 3d6 human attribute and SDC base, set hp to PE, and add +1d6 hp per HD. For SDC I would say HD x 10. For attack bonus, use the base PP bonus, and give them an HTH combat style and WP, count their HD as their level to calculate all of the other combat bonuses. For AR use the closest armor.

Ghouls? Main rulebook, page 318, counted as a demon - so not technically undead. It makes sense since they "eat flesh" and undead don't need to eat anything. Wraiths are also greater deevils. So there are some things that are different here than your standard B/X assumptions.

Remember, every monster should be different and you can have variations - I am still of the mind monsters should be unique and scary creations, and lists of them are less important. When in doubt, grab something from the book like what you want, change a few abilities, and play. Or generate a quick character and modify the numbers up or down based on threat, set a level, add some more hp and SDC if you need to, and play.

Undead aren't really a "primary" monster type as they are in D&D. They are more of a story monster linked to a specific area of the Palladium FRPG world. I get the same feeling with demons and deevils, and I kind of like not having every monster type roaming everywhere in a fantasy world. Of course, I am free to change that and put them wherever I want, but to stick to the game's lore, if you have undead in an area, that is a really cursed area close to the realm of the dead and there is a good reason for them being there.

D&D has this lore where undead exists everywhere, lying around, and hiding out in crypts. In the Palladium FRPG they only exist in cursed places, likely close to the realm (or a place of) great death. It is an interesting difference between games and the assumed lore of the settings, and worth noting.

Different, but Cool

I like this book. It does its own thing and sets you up thinking differently about monsters than your standard B/X bestiary. Sometimes we can repeat the same monsters so many times they become boring, and I like what they did in games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics by letting you come up with whatever monster, whatever powers, whatever attacks & defenses, and whatever stats.

Yes, this is way harder for the GM, but it is so much more fun at the table.

I am prone to do that here since this game is so close to Rifts anything could be out there and crawling around, and the players should never really have a firm grasp on what they are fighting and how it reacts. To me, the monsters given here are not as important as using their stats and coming up with my own. I can use my quick system to invent a couple, stat them out, and just let them rip. It doesn't matter much if the next ones have the same exact stats, since everything should be a little different.

So in a way, using this book as a "monster bible" is not what I see it as. This is more a baseline for the standard abilities of creatures in a couple different classes and gives me base templates to modify and create my own monstrosities from. I may use some as-is, and I may not.

This is a highly recommended book. Very nicely done and a useful resource for the game.