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Oh my god. I'm going to have to see if that Subway article is in that big PDF bundle TSR put out around issue 250. One thing that might be worth noting is a fair lot of conspiracy and magic-is-real stories posit that highways and railways follow things like ley lines, or can be repurposed into continent-spanning glyphs of power. RIFTS-as-written, ley-line eruptions would probably have left something like the Subway as a series of curiously deep ravines... but we all know what the answer to RIFTS-as-written is. Maybe entire sections survived. Perhaps, realizing that things were not restabilizing, some tried to use them as shelters. Maybe their descendants are still down there in some sections, changed by magical radiation, microscopic invaders from nigh-invisible rifts, or the privations of living in a hideously constrained environment. Other sections could have been colonized via subterranean rift. Just maybe, there might be functional maintenance vehicles to take from one to another. You could go all Starlost or Metamorphosis Alpha with this poo poo. But, um, anyway. RIFTS. I was introduced to Palladium in 1989. It was grade 9, I had just got the AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, and a friend and I were chatting about it on the bus, as young geeks do. A third party, who in retrospect I strongly suspect is a sociopath, introduced himself and his ludicrously powerful D&D game. We got involved together gaming, and soon discovered our shared love of Robotech... the RPG books for which this fellow happened to have. We rolled characters using that flimsy book and a horrifying exploding sixes house rule for stats. I ended up with a Veritech pilot with an IQ and Physical Prowess of 30, the latter which absolutely counted for his modern/onboard weapon rolls. He was the Beef Baron, named for a local strip joint, and he's technically survived roughly a quarter century of gaming now. I remember getting hooked on RIFTS. I was flipping through the book and... yeah. Saw the Glitter Boy. Saw that shiny SOB was three times as tough as a Veritech and doled out ridiculous amounts of damage, and that was that. I didn't look back until Coalition War Campaign, which disgusted me so much that I quit buying the books cold-turkey. To me, the best books were the ones CJ Carella put out: It was like playing a Saturday morning cartoon, with huge laserblasts going everywhere, and big, chunky robots with silly designs taking 'em on the chin and coming back for more. I'm no more a military strategist than Siembieda is, but I knew that CWC was an enormous pile of bullshit. My one friend would still get the books he was interested in at the used bookstore, which always had a suspiciously good supply of recently-printed ones. I remember being on the mailing list for a while, but got booted because my inbox filled up while I was on a week's vacation. I remember it mostly for some guy named Vargas, who everyone seemed to hate, and Maryann's occasional pronouncements... like forbidding people from going under the hood of the recently released (and amazingly awful) RIFTS Character Whatever They Called It. That character generator was awful. I've seen some lovely homebrew chargen software, but they were asking thirty bucks for this. There was absolutely no support for integrating house rules, or new official OCCs and equipment, and it followed the rules slavishly: 3d6, top to bottom, and if you rolled major psionics you could kiss a whole passel of your secondary skills goodbye in the name of 'balance'. Most of it was a bad Windows 3.1 UI sitting on some cheapass database software, which turned skills and gear into a mess of pulldowns and scroll bars, and made it easier to delete items from the database than from the character sheet. And of course, once it was gone from the DB, it was gone for good. The friend I still played with then, and still do now, paid over thirty bucks with currency conversion and shipping, waited months (because it was ridiculously behind schedule, of course)... and finally received a Palladium-branded turd in his mailbox. It was a turd that he and everyone else was explicitly forbidden from tweaking, tearing apart, or actually making useful in any way. I quit, years ago. Between the horrible core rules, the Byzantine house rules he put on top, and his almost fetishistic love of numbers, game sessions were mainly a series of consultations with the Random Missile Barrage table. I came back to one a couple of years ago, because it was basically the only way I'd be able to see him and his wife. He let me play a Cosmo Knight, since they were based out of Phase World at that point (I like PW. I think it's one of the best things to happen to RIFTS). From the word 'go', the Cosmo Knight was severely undergunned. I eventually convinced him to put that game on indefinite hold, because the asshat who had convinced him it would be 'quick' and 'easy' to run one again, moved out of the city. I'm afraid that we'll come back to those terrible house rules, and those characters with ten and eleven attacks per melee... because while I know he loves his wife, and the son who's on the brink of toddlerhood... I'm afraid he loves those fistfuls of d20s, d6x10s, and ten-page character sheets even more.
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Aug 8, 2013 01:15
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I was never on the boards, but the bit about 'not being sued' reminded me that a bit of fan-stuff posted on the even older mailing list actually made it into print. The one bit I recall was for Nightbane, a 'clans of the moon' werewolf add-on that I'm stunned KS okayed because it howled Werewolf: the Apocalypse look-and-feel right down to the not-tribes. Fortunately the other project that I remember being constantly updated, didn't. It was a mod to the melee combat rules... a complete rebuild, to be precise, and it not only included hit locations, but used them as striking surfaces, with different degrees of damage and resistance based on angles and... it was like Toribash in 1995, on paper. I'm not sure if he ever tried to use it himself, or if the pages of theory and convoluted instructions with ASCII stick figure examples he sent to the list every week or so was a cry for help.
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Aug 25, 2013 21:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That runs on the dicey assumption that Kevin Siembieda is rather familiar with Werewolf, or any other RPG of the 1990s or 2000s, really. Sure I know that now, but back then I figured that between the assorted legal issues they had, and the popularity of the WoD, someone would have spotted the similarities. Then again, if Johnny Canuck's recollection is correct, that could go some distance to explaining why things went to squirrely there. Or it could just be the everyday fucker-uppery down at the Palladium ranch. 
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Aug 26, 2013 06:49
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CroatianAlzheimers posted:Use your imagination. Random, unexplained mutation caused by dimensional rift.
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Aug 30, 2013 21:37
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The same way you gently caress up any kickstarter: mismanagement. If you can't get money you need for something out of whoever's holding the cash box, or various teams aren't communicating effectively, you're really kind of boned. 
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Jan 10, 2014 07:39
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I don't know whether to laugh, or to laugh harder.
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Aug 9, 2014 08:14
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Good god. I saw seventy-some new posts and thought something spectacularly awful had happened to the Robotech miniatures game, or KS had finally completed his metamorphosis into an alien intelligence.
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Sep 28, 2014 14:42
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A friend who bought into the kickstarter is pretty disillusioned at this point. I think they bought in mainly for the minis, so I'm hoping they at least end up in a state that's worth painting.
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Sep 29, 2014 18:19
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A friend in the Atlanta area has his, and he said a local hobby shop had at least one as well.
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Dec 8, 2014 05:24
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They produced a wodge of legalese for people to stuff into their pages back in the mid Nineties, but I think Geocities dying and a lot of ISPs canceling their free hosting packages has killed most of them off. Heck, the first Rifter I picked up had half of an article on the 'Tribes of the Moon', which was an obvious W:tA rip someone on the old mailing list had written many years before.
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Jun 12, 2015 18:20
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Yeah. That's about all I can muster.
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Aug 15, 2015 04:27
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Apparently the latest Tactics update is a litany of blame-shifting and guilt-tripping... aimed at all of the backers who are getting tired of Kevin and his antics this time, instead of people who could plausibly have had any effect on the proceedings.
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Sep 7, 2015 01:43
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I agree with ManMythLegend. I'm not likely to play it, but I'd love to see a coherent and playable adaptation of that big ol' achy-breaky thing. But yeah, given Kevin's habit of shoving both hands into the heart of matters, we're more likely to see a cringeworthy post-mortem than anything honestly good. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Sep 7, 2015 |
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Sep 7, 2015 02:39
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I remember people telling me the same thing about the Robotech minis kickstarter. I also remember laughing at them, but politely resisting an 'I told you so' when KS simply couldn't sit on his hands any longer. Pinnacle may have a better contract, especially given what happened to Soda Pop and the last Palladium Kickstarter, but there is still no drat way KS will be able to resist the urge to shove his hands in and micromanage things to death.
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Apr 12, 2016 19:09
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I really want to see this book, and I want to see Pinnacle do well by it. A RIFTS adaptation that isn't just a lot of scribbling on the walls of a Geocities neighborhood would be like seeing a unicorn. I know Siembieda can ignore the voices in his head that scream about IP theft, because that N-Gage game actually came out, and they have licensed baffling RIFTS crossover books in the past, but the Robotech Minis clusterfuck is still tumbling along. It may be different this time, since both Pinnacle and Palladium are experienced RPG developers and players in the industry, but I still wouldn't risk money on the Kickstarter. Palladium's internal crowdfunding may have been successful, but their history dealing with third parties is pretty spotty.
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Apr 12, 2016 20:07
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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.
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Sep 26, 2016 02:23
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Preparing for a move, and I found a couple of old Palladium catalogues. By old, this one I scanned is turning twenty sometime this year. I figured it was worth a giggle to share it. https://imgur.com/a/qru61
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Mar 30, 2017 01:45
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