|
quote:If you have the manga edition, you do not NEED the new edition of the Robotech® The Masters Saga™ sourcebook. But you might want it. Most of the book’s content is the same. Changes are mostly minor errata, larger artwork which looks great, some additional art that never made it into the first edition, and some small additions like the four shot grenade launcher attachment for the Tr-LLR Mk.1 rifle, the camouflage system for the Bioroid Terminator, the Masters’ Anti-Pain Serum and their Hover Platforms. Our thanks to Colonel Wolfe and Rabid Southern Cross Fan, among others, for bringing these and other things to our attention. EDIT: quote:UPDATE: Savage Rifts® for Savage Worlds
|
#
?
Jul 9, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 13:34 |
|
|
Will have further questions, but: Ley lines screw up Dog Boys?  Does this have something to do with their psyker scent?These character creation (?) random tables. Are they like Traveller? (I like that crazy system). Can you give an example?
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2016 01:04
|
|
|
Kevin just learned about invisible dog fences and wanted to write it into the game.
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2016 02:03
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Will have further questions, but: To be fair, it always has. In the original game, they basically lost their psychic scent around a ley line (due to it being overloaded). In Lone Star, they added that dog boys are afraid of ley lines and are more likely to be struck by magical lightning... because? And finally, The Tomorrow Legion Players Guide upgrades that further to not only have them lose their psychic scent, but they get headaches and disorientation that causes a level of fatigue that won't go away until they leave the ley line's vicinity. Helical Nightmares posted:These character creation (?) random tables. Are they like Traveller? (I like that crazy system). Can you give an example? When you make a character, you select an "Iconic Framework", like Glitter Boy or Mind Melter, which gives you a bunch of fixed abilities, and each get a fixed number of rolls on the "Hero's Journey" tables. These always give you stuff, and there are eleven different tables. Let's say I was playing a Juicer, that means I get 1d20 rolls on each of the Body Armor, Close Combat Weapons, Ranged Weapons, Training, and Underworld & Black Ops tables. So:
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2016 04:55
|
|
|
I see your point that it is less 'Hero's Journey" and more perks/bonuses/maluses random tables.
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2016 05:20
|
|
|
Yeah, I don't know why they call it "Hero's Journey", it's not really so much a journey as a grab bag. But hey, if you don't like it, you can exchange in two random rolls for one specific selection! That's what somebody wrote in a game released in 2016.
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2016 23:19
|
|
|
Yeah, I'd probably just have people pick whatever off of those tables if I were running it. Maybe hack it into some kind of flowchart life path thing.
|
|
#
?
Jul 11, 2016 22:26
|
|
|
Well, the Savage Rifts Gamemaster Handbook dropped earlier today, along with some maps for the game. It's mostly a book that gives broad strokes on the US / Canada side of things and the power players in it, some GM advice (a lot more than any of the core Rifts books have had in the past), actual details on the Tomorrow Legion, random adventure / NPC / rifts generators, and details on adventure rewards. Overall, it's pretty solid, though still mostly working on a broad-strokes level, so it's not going to replace Palladium books for those looking for more  on various subjects. I don't know that I'd ever necessarily use a random adventure creator, but I suppose it beats having a sample adventure. The tendency to name the chapters after songs seems like a non sequitur - I'm not sure I think of James Brown, Big Country, or Genesis when it comes to Rifts, but it certainly tells me what decade the authors grew up in.
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2016 08:25
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:The tendency to name the chapters after songs seems like a non sequitur - I'm not sure I think of James Brown, Big Country, or Genesis when it comes to Rifts, but it certainly tells me what decade the authors grew up in. Wat.  This is new to me. Generally I found Rift's adventure random tables to be decent to good for adventure seeds. Specifically I'm thinking of the 101 Adventures set in Ruins published in Rift's Thundercloud Galaxy. I'm sure part of the table is taken from other Rift's sources, and some are clearly riffs on recognizable movie/novel plots but it's still pretty good. Did they have any details on the West Coast specifically California that are new? Tomorrow Legion? What's that.
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2016 08:46
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Tomorrow Legion? What's that. It's the Good Guy™ organization that Savage Rifts assumes all players belong to. Wandering heroes that do hero things.
|
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2016 12:50
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Wat. Well, the Gamemaster's Guide has its opening sections titled "Danger Zone", "Living in America", "In a Big Country", "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", "Land of Confusion", and "It's the End of the World as We Know It." Thankfully, that's where that stops.  Helical Nightmares posted:Did they have any details on the West Coast specifically California that are new? Ha ha, no. It doesn't really do the regional breakdown, it's more focused on factions and the few key locations (like the Coalition and Lazlo) that are settled. There's no real new information if you're up to date with the metaplot as presented in Rifts Aftermath, aside from the Tomorrow Legion. Helical Nightmares posted:Tomorrow Legion? What's that. JohnnyCanuck posted:It's the Good Guy™ organization that Savage Rifts assumes all players belong to. Wandering heroes that do hero things. Pretty much, it's a faction formed by Erin Tarn, Lord Coake (head of the Cyber-Knights), and Dhara Hammerheart (a new dwarven hero) in Arkansas. They're pretty much like the Minutemen from Fallout 4, they're dedicated to helping out other nearby communities, encouraging them to band together with the Tomorrow Legion for mutual protection and trade with the aim of building a larger confederation not run by megalomaniacs, as well as trying to keep a wide eye for potential threats and disasters. It's pretty much assumed the PCs are part of a freewheeling special exploratory unit whose job is to explore locales, find resources, and investigate various situations at the Legion's request. The Legion has other groups the PCs could be a part of but that's their suggested one. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Jul 15, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jul 15, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
I started reacquainting myself with the Savage Worlds rules, then went back to the Tomorrow Legion Player's Guide, and now looking at the numbers, it really has the issue that a lot of games do when they convert damage over from a generic hit point system to a damage resistance system that things get a lot more lethal when there's a strong difference in scale; i.e. robot vehicles are now going to paste the gently caress out of grunts in body armor. And that's fine, Savage Worlds is supposed to have combat that runs much faster, and it's nice not to see 30' robot vehicles be the paper tigers they usually are in the original game. Where this gets kind of hosed is with power armor in particular, since a number of them are given weapons you'd usually expect to see on robot vehicles... but by no means can most power armor hold up against that kind of firepower. The result is that power armor fights often can be rocket tag fights where the first to hit drastically wounds or kills the other. The epitome is with the Glitter Boy, where its rail gun does 4d12+6 (average 32) damage and ignores 25 points of armor, and the Glitter Boy has 18 points of armor itself. Now, power armor ignores 4 points of AP from projectile weaponry, but rail guns explicitly ignore that for... some goddamn reason. So despite having "... the highest M.D.C. rating of any armor known, even among robot armor vehicles." according to the book, its armor provides it less than zero protection from its own gun. Since it takes 16 points of overage on damage to take out a Wild Card (aka PCs and named NPCs) in one hit and most pilots aren't going to have more than 8 points in Toughness (which reduces damage but isn't subject to AP), the grand majority of the time Glitter Boy v Glitter Boy fights are going to boil down to whoever can land the first hit. So, yes, the Glitter Boy can't even remotely take a hit from its own gun. And no, nothing in the game so far even has close to 25 points of armor. What the hell, Pinnacle?
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 15:32
|
|
|
This sounds like they caught the spirit of Rifts perfectly in that they don't understand their own rules too well. I'm not sure if it's better that their poorly-playtested combat rules lead to rocket tag rather than the endless, dull slogs of Rifts proper. I think I'd prefer it, though.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 16:58
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I started reacquainting myself with the Savage Worlds rules, then went back to the Tomorrow Legion Player's Guide, and now looking at the numbers, it really has the issue that a lot of games do when they convert damage over from a generic hit point system to a damage resistance system that things get a lot more lethal when there's a strong difference in scale; i.e. robot vehicles are now going to paste the gently caress out of grunts in body armor. And that's fine, Savage Worlds is supposed to have combat that runs much faster, and it's nice not to see 30' robot vehicles be the paper tigers they usually are in the original game. When it comes to Rifts, remember: it's not a bug, it's a feature.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 18:28
|
|
|
EverettLO posted:This sounds like they caught the spirit of Rifts perfectly in that they don't understand their own rules too well. Hahahaha. It's so true.
|
|
#
?
Jul 18, 2016 21:16
|
|
|
Yeah, I was wondering if I was getting something wrong, if Heavy Armor wasn't subject to the same AP rules... but looking on the Savage Worlds forum, nope, seeing very similar complaints. As it is, you're safer in a jeep (normal, mega-damage, it doesn't matter) than a Glitter Boy, since damage that punches through a jeep's armor almost always just takes out the jeep, while damage that punches through a Glitter Boy... almost always takes you out. I expected there to be some mess in the conversion but this is looking like more and more of a headache the more I look at the actual math and rules involved.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 01:05
|
|
|
Some Palladium bits from GenCon. No big releases; the newest books they had were The Coalition States: Heroes of Humanity, which is the first of two books dealing with the Coalition side of the Minion War metaplot (and yes, that title is unironic, because Rifts) and a no-art preview version of Secrets of the Atlanteans, which didn't seem to be moving much. I get the impression Palladium may have overestimated the impatience of their fans in that regard, but who knows? Given they're bound like a regular Palladium book, they don't look cheap to print out, if not expensive. There's going to be an upcoming Kickstarter for a semi-cooperative Rifts board game in the style of Descent or Doom. Carmen Bellaire (a frequent freelancer from Palladium) is founding his own new company to do this and says he plans to make sure the art, minis, and rules are all complete before launching. Most players take up the role of an adventurer (they had 3D models for a glitter boy, juicer, grackle-tooth soldier, cyborg, and others to show off), while one player takes up the Coalition and runs troops and dog boys against them. It also had a space-marine style Coalition soldier with a jump pack as well, though I was told they plan to add stuff like SAMAS armor later on. Also, there's supposedly a Lazlo book coming out; they said the rough manuscript should be done at this point. Savage Rifts had some demos put together at the last minute but I didn't have the time to see them. The book wasn't out, but I believe Pinnacle was taking orders for people who wanted to have it shipped later. You really had to seek it out to know it existed at all. I inquired about the Glitter Boy rules above and they'd said they'd beefed up some of the monsters based on feedback due to that, but I haven't had the time to double-check. The actual Glitter Boy values haven't changed that I'm aware of, so it's mostly just a band-aid on my concerns about that. That's all I got from just my brief time at some booths, but there you have it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 20:54
|
|
|
Minion war metaplot?
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 21:21
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Minion war metaplot? It's the RIFTS version of the Blood War. Daemons and Deevils are fighting for control of PURE EVIL, and a few of the Palladium gamelines got books about it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 21:25
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Minion war metaplot? Something to do with two biblical-styled Hells being at war, like in D&D. I think this metaplot has been ongoing for like a decade. In real life, I mean.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 21:27
|
|
|
Yeah, t's a long-running metaplot ("long-running" on account of only getting a plot-relevant book each year or every other year or so for the past decade) where apparently demons and devils- I'm sorry, deevils- go to war using various other worlds as battlegrounds. It ends with them fighting over Rifts Earth and the various factions essentially having to unite to keep either side from taking over. It seems more open-ended than Coalition War, but I can only assume they're going to have to give it some canon conclusion if they're going to reference it at all going forward. It's wrapped up now but that won't stop them from squeezing out two books of Coalition nonsense on account of it! It's mostly the product of freelancer Carl Gleba rather than Siembieda himself, though Heroes of Humanity is Siembieda-penned.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 21:37
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, t's a long-running metaplot ("long-running" on account of only getting a plot-relevant book each year or every other year or so for the past decade) where apparently demons and devils- I'm sorry, deevils- go to war using various other worlds as battlegrounds. It ends with them fighting over Rifts Earth and the various factions essentially having to unite to keep either side from taking over. It seems more open-ended than Coalition War, but I can only assume they're going to have to give it some canon conclusion if they're going to reference it at all going forward. It's wrapped up now but that won't stop them from squeezing out two books of Coalition nonsense on account of it! Possibly "Siembieda-penned".
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2016 21:39
|
|
|
Lightning Lord posted:Possibly "Siembieda-penned". Well he scrawled his name on the cover anyway.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2016 02:58
|
|
|
Getting whiplash from them repeatedly posting errata'd versions of the Savage Rifts books.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2016 01:03
|
|
|
Stumbling across this thread awoke so many long forgotten memories. Many, many years ago I used to love Rifts. By now I have lost or misplaced nearly every single book out of indifference. I still have the hardcover ultimate edition main book though. It's in the pile of "large old books I don't read anymore stacked underneath my monitor to increase the stand height". Doubt I'll ever play it again or that KS will ever change his ways and do some of that witchcraft innovation some people talk about. Maybe when Palladium finally folds or KS passes away of natural causes somebody will find a use for the IP and Make It Great Again [tm]. Sigh. Will probably grab Savage Rifts once it's finished just for a read through.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2016 13:22
|
|
|
I think Kevin has it in his will that when he passes on, his IP should be piled around his body in a boat and given a viking funeral.
|
|
#
?
Sep 25, 2016 22:15
|
|
|
DancingShade posted:Stumbling across this thread awoke so many long forgotten memories. Many, many years ago I used to love Rifts. By now I have lost or misplaced nearly every single book out of indifference.  Since you have forgotten the metaplot, I highly recommend looking through Shemarrian Nation. I chuckled for a good 10 minutes once I got to the reveal.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2016 00:21
|
|
|
DancingShade posted:Will probably grab Savage Rifts once it's finished just for a read through. It's essentially done save a few stretch goals in PDF, though the printed version isn't out yet. Helical Nightmares posted:
If that's the reveal I'm thinking of, that's been in the game since the first supplement, even if not much was done with it for a long time after that. Though having the adolescent-minded creation of the book be an adolescent-minded creation of an NPC could have been an amusing bit if it wasn't played completely straight.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2016 01:11
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:It's essentially done save a few stretch goals in PDF, though the printed version isn't out yet. Yes you are nailing what I'm referring to. For me, I totally forgot about the origin of the race. A good third of the book is all this information on the Shemarrian Nation and their culture, then the reveal hit me with this nostalgia and an "oh..oh yeah I remember that" of the main book. I had totally forgotten about those two nutjob comic characters and it made me laugh. Edit: vvvv Yes exactly. vvvv Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Sep 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2016 01:52
|
|
|
I think the first words out of my mouth when I heard about Shemarrian Nation were, 'Wait. What?' It's like one of those schoolyard jokes where you wait a week for the punchline, only to lose track of the teller until they pop up to finish at your university graduation.
|
|
#
?
Sep 26, 2016 02:23
|
|
|
I finally got to read the Republican material recently, which probably would have been better off as a footnote than what they're quickly becoming. I don't mind a heavy retcon if it's really exciting but they... aren't, so far.
|
|
#
?
Sep 29, 2016 23:09
|
|
|
I've been loving the RIFTS reviews in F&F but I'm confused about why Erin Tarn gets so much heat. She seems pretty inoffensive as far as author surrogates go.
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2016 16:39
|
|
|
Just got my books! Anyone played this yet? Still haven't given up my dream of using Fate Atomic Robo though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 3, 2017 03:00
|
|
|
I'm finally getting to read Coalition: Heroes of Humanity and holy poo poo did they just straight up make the nazis the good guys. I know people warned me about it but it's still a shock to see them directly portraying Prosek as a good guy with almost no reservations. I don't know what happened to Siembieda in the last 25 years but he went from treating nazis as the villains to portraying them as well as any propagandist ever could. It's also way more of a third Coalition military hardware book than I was expecting. I stopped giving a poo poo about those before the turn of the century. Actually I don't have any idea why I bother reading Rifts books anymore. Who the hell are the Republicans? Are they an offshoot from Chaos Earth or something? The sad fact is that there is a lot of gameplay elements that could be good mixed in this book. Playing wetwork go betweens with Coalition units and undercover Atlantis suppliers is an interesting hook, particularly if your people don't want to work for either. It's a pretty military direction for a campaign, but Rifts usually ends up that way. Being a pseudo-CIA cell trying to work an endless number of evil organizations toward the greater good is interesting to me. The problem is they pretty obviously want you to join the Coalition with Prosek's amnesty to sympathizer humans.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2017 23:04
|
|
|
Demon_Corsair posted:Just got my books! Anyone played this yet? I'm currently running a PbP of it. EverettLO posted:I'm finally getting to read Coalition: Heroes of Humanity and holy poo poo did they just straight up make the nazis the good guys. I know people warned me about it but it's still a shock to see them directly portraying Prosek as a good guy with almost no reservations. I don't know what happened to Siembieda in the last 25 years but he went from treating nazis as the villains to portraying them as well as any propagandist ever could. I don't think this came out of nowhere. The first class we got in the first book was "Coalition Grunt", and there's been straight-up support for the idea of playing Coalition as an alternate campaign here and there. There's essentially fascist apologism as far back as Rifts Sourcebook, IIRC, suggesting that A) people aren't evil if they're too ignorant to know they're doing evil and B) humanity might not have survived at all without the Coalition's hardline militarism. Which becomes increasingly farcical as the line goes on, given the number of far more sensible human factions that pop up in later books. Heroes of Humanity takes the approach of putting them in a situation where they don't have the time to worry about enforcing their fascist nonsense and suggesting this might all undermine the party line in the long run, but it still stinks largely of apologism aimed at appeasing Coalition fans. Yeah. They're out there. And they're vocal. Ultimately, Siembieda wants the Coalition to be a morally complex dilemma but he's really, really bad at it. As long as they're the guys who cut Desmond Bradford a paycheck and built literal extermination camps, there's not much else you can say. Savage Rifts gets it right by putting them directly in the antagonists book and not even including their equipment in the player's guide. The Republicans are a leftover group of US government holdouts (mentioned in the very first book, but not expanded upon until Rifts Sourcebook Revised). They are pretty much the dull sort of faction you'd get from people who have essentially parked their rear end on a fence for 300 years. They're mostly designed as antagonists to ARCHIE and are currently singularly obsessed with reclaiming a frozen army he's kept under wraps. Also there was a retcon where they helped form the Coalition and are just kind of embarrassed as to how that turned out, and plan to find a way to put a bullet into Prosek's head... once they have that army to overthrow the Coalition with. They're really no less intolerant than the Coalition is, but they're at least more moderate about their intolerance, like the New German Republic or Free Quebec. And that's what makes them boring, IMO - there's not really anything in their platform that we haven't seen elsewhere in the setting multiple times.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 02:00
|
|
|
Remember, there's a whole genre of fiction out there that's essentially military sci-fi about Hard Men Making Hard Choice up to and including the guy who had, what was it, de-aged SS officers leading earth's glorious defense against alien invaders? What I'm saying is that Sembieda gradually trying to turn the Coalition into cool dudes for fun gametimes isn't terribly surprising. The same thing happened to Warhammer 40K over the years and that's a game whose roots go back to Thatcherite Britain and 2000AD comics making fun of fascism and now it's pretty much unrepentant Space Marines Are Good Guys stuff. People fuckin love robots with skulls on them.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 06:38
|
|
|
 bark bark bark bark bark What's that, Dog Boy? Are you saying...we're the baddies?
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 15:13
|
|
|
In retrospect there's a lot more in early Rifts writing than I recalled. I haven't read most of the books since the late 90s and I tend to forget things like making the heroes of their first, abysmal novel a Coalition patrol. It's still escalated from putting in warnings that the Coalition is evil even if your specific Deadboy is not to...well, a book called Coalition: Heroes of Humanity that's not ironic in the least. I assume it's a combination of 'they look cool, so they should be the heroes' and the same tendencies among military nerds that lead to so many wanting to play the Wehrmacht. Maybe a bit of Siembieda moving more to the right as he gets older. It still surprised me to see, though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 15:27
|
|
|
Oh, geez, I haven't picked up any of the novels... I have a copy of Tales of the Chi-Town Burbs I picked up for a song, but I haven't done much but glimpse some of Siembieda cringe-worthy prose in that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 16:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 23, 2024 13:34 |
|
|
The novels were pretty bad. The writing was mediocre, the plots were weak, the characters were hackneyed, and the spelling was atrocious. That said, Our Heroes at least learned to question their Nazi bosses, and if I recall correctly, all the survivors defected in the end. So a pretty stereotypical PC group, really.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2017 18:10
|
|
