Remember what I said about Kevin Siembieda’s writing being like a fountain of mad ideas hitting paper? Rifts is that writ large.

Around 1990, an idea emerged in the games industry. It may have been born out of the sheer number of games on the market, or it may have come from the success GURPS enjoyed. That idea was a multi-genre, single setting, role playing game.

There were two main proponents of this approach. There was West End Games’ TORG, which I never played, but always wanted to. And then there was Palladium’s post-TMNT hit, Rifts.

Rifts is pretty much Siembieda’s previous games (Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural and Robotech) thrown into a blender. You’ve got wizards, super powered aliens, Lovecraftian horrors and giant robots all inhabiting the same world.

Unsurprisingly, this means the game is horribly unbalanced. At least in the early editions. I have heard that the modern iteration of the game is more solid in its design. But back in the day you were dealing with a game system that got so out of control in terms of rules, character classes and settings that they ended up selling a separate index to the game.

That ran to two books.

They also produced a Rifts Colouring Book.

This situation was kind of the endemic of the games market as a whole in the nineties, as games began to choke on their own settings. While bad decisions like Dragon Dice were more the downfall of TSR, the sheer number of setting and settings in those settings didn’t help. Likewise, the World of Darkness line choked on White Wolf’s attempt to maintain some sort of in game continuity.

So you went from a market in the 80s that was distinguished by masses of games which led to the multi-genre games, to a market that was now distinguished by masses of sourcebooks for existing games. Either way you had lots of people buying lots of game books that they never used.

Your typical Rifts book would be full of poorly laid out background material for a geographical location that seemed to only exist to add a ton more character classes, magic and equipment options into an already stuffed to bursting game. Oh, and some new monsters to kill. Or play as Racial Character Classes.

Not all these classes were balanced either in terms of power or material supplied, and you were best not mix and matching between books or you might find yourself playing a wizard or dragon surrounded by ninjas jacked to the gills on cybernetics who spent every session fine tuning their equipment lists.

Despite that imbalance and rules/setting bloat, the fact that there is just so much utter madness slung together makes it a fun game. I had a great time playing a Time Wizard, blowing up evil pyramids in Glastonbury by sending bombs into the future.

Like Mutant Chronicles, Rifts was one of those 90s games that had ambitions of becoming a multimedia franchise. It did eventually make it to videogames. Unfortunately the Nokia N-Gage was the platform.

One last note, back when I first got on the internet at university, there was this DarkWorld RPG that was mentioned on rec.arts.anime. It was basically an anime flavoured rip-off of Rifts, that started off hiding its influence in a thinly veiled fashion like Mayfair’s unlicensed D&D accessories, before giving up with this file that just went ahead and listed Palladium stats for The Dirty Pair, Lum and The Sailor Scouts.

It’s not that surprising that it existed given Palladium’s history with Robotech and Macross II games, but the amount of effort that had gone into it still leaves me gobsmacked today. I’m a lazy gamer and do as little prep as possible, preferring to improvise, so this sort of exercise in cataloguing a world and stats is alien to me.

I’m presuming that the Tony Figueroa who wrote it is the same Tony Figueroa who is now the chair of the Fanime convention. Can anyone confirm that?

Back in June, when I last touched this strand of the site, I hinted that I was going to cover RIFTS next. Well it turned out that I’d forgotten to cover what was actually my first encounter with Palladium Books – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

Based on Eastman and Laird’s classic anthropomorphic Frank Miller & Chris Claremont parody, TMNT the rpg tapped into the same upswell in popularity that TMNT the comic had. It was a massively popular game, only suffering a down turn when the cartoon came along and the TMNT started to be seen as a kid’s thing rather than indie comic cool.

While it suffered a little from the Palladium’s somewhat perfunctory typesetting and layouts, it did benefit from being written by the late, great Erick Wujcik. While both Kevin Siembieda and Erick Wujcik’s books used the same rule system at heart, Wujcik’s are a joy to read, and feel like a complete product whose parts gel together. His own interest in martial arts really comes through and it feels like there’s a clear vision to his books. Siembieda’s on the other hand, often seem the work of someone trying to get every mad idea out of his head onto paper and not caring how they tie together. But more on that when we get to Rifts. Hoo boy.

I mainly played this during my teenage years, before selling it during the peak of the general Turtles craze in the UK. I picked another copy up later in ‘96 when it seemed that 50% of Travelling Man’s second hand game stock were copies of this game. I think I’ve played a few sessions of the non-licensed follow up After The Bomb – anthropomorphic animals in a post apocalypse, but they were too brief to get a grip on what that was about.

A short one this, as it was a blink and you’d miss it game for me. And for a change I’ll focus more on my own experiences playing it rather than the game itself.

Talislanta is kind of the anti-D&D in that it turns its back on the Tolkien-esque fantasy for some all together more alien. Think more along the lines the “Dreamworld” stories of HP Lovecraft. To get this point over it used to advertise itself with the slogan “No Elves”.

This is all well and good, except this was the time our most reliable Gamesmaster decided to get experimental for once in his life…

He decided he’d hide the game from us. No character sheets, no dice rolling, no concept of how the game worked. However he made the one BIG mistake you can make in a no character sheet game – he made our characters into idiots who had no idea of their limits.

Basically we had no idea what our characters considered themselves good at, and so we did very little. Rather than promoting roleplaying it made us all into cowards. It’s one thing to not be able to calculate your chance of doing Task A. It’s quite another to not know whether you’d be any good at Task A whatsoever. The campaign didn’t last long, and I think we were soon back to AD&D or possibly the next game I’ll write about…

A little out of sequence, but I’ve not done one of these in ages and this particular game has some relation to the bulk of what I’ve spent 2009 writing about on here.

You see, in everything but name, Teenagers From Outer Space is “Urusei Yatsura: The Role-playing Game”. I first picked it up around the time I was getting into anime, and I think I knew where its influences lay back then. Not that you’d have known it from the 2nd edition I found in a second hand book bin in Hull. That was printed in 1988 and had a cover that was more reminiscent of Galaxy High (coincidentally a show Japanese studio Telecom had worked on). I now see that the very first edition had had a more obviously anime inspired cover, so maybe it’s failure to set the world of fire led to this more traditional approach (interior art edges perhaps closer to Archie Comics house style than US Takahashi-clone).

But the actual contents were clearly inspired by Urusei Yatsura. The rules allowed you to play either humans or varying degrees of alien. Aliens had super powers such as flight, shooting electricity (Lum!), breathing fire (Ten!) and the like. Humans also had more powers like being incredibly endurable (Ataru), filthy rich (Mendou) or super strength (Shinobu).

Where the influence really shown through though was in the 20 mini-adventures, some of which you can see direct parallels with specific UY episodes, and in the some of the “goodies” (equipment) which included duplicating guns, mind swapping earmuffs and boy/girl guns.

In 1997, R Talsorian Games didn’t hide their anime influences under a bushel, and had released the Bubblegum Crisis, DBZ and Votoms games at this point. So they put Mekton Zeta and a re-release of TFOS under their ANimechaniX banner (inexplicable capitlisation RTG’s own).

This time the game had a firmly anime/manga aesthetic, drafting in US furry artists (that US furry/anime fandom connection raising it’s head again!) & Stratelibri (Italian gaming company) bods for the art (as well as a few left over bits of Scott Ruggles art from the 2nd edition). And it expressly mentioned anime in the actual text of the rulebook. Combined with extra material dealing with specifically Japanese bits and pieces, it finally felt like the product it always should have been.

So how does it play? Very well, if you like rules light, fast, silly games. Same basic mechanics as the bulk of RTG’s games (stat+skill+die roll vs. difficulty), but stripped down for speed. And unlike Cybergeneration (which I’ll get to later) I actually got my monies worth out of this game. The play style it lends itself to definitely fits more into my improv-tinged gaming ethos. The third edition may even be in my top ten favourite RPGs. We’ll see, if I ever get round to finishing this series of posts!

Possible bonus US RPG Scene/Anime Scene collision later tonight!

Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu is the best RPG ever. FACT.

I’d heard of it through White Dwarf, back when Games Workshop acted as distributor for Chaosium in the UK, but I didn’t get to play it until 1992-93 when I joined a new gaming group and they had just begun the epic Masks of Nyarlothotep campaign (which annoyingly we never finished, as someone joined the group who’d already played it).

The game was developed by Sandy Petersen, now probably more well known for his involvement in Doom and Quake (did he lose his computer game review spot in Dragon due to his shameless hyping of iD games?). Lynn Willis took charge of development from the 5th edition onwards, which is where I came in.

Using Gregg Stafford and Willis’ Basic Role-Playing ruleset as its basis, CoC is a roleplaying game set in HP Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos”. The original game was set in 1920’s America, but by the 5th edition included alternate rules for 1890’s Britain (Cthulhu by Gaslight) and modern day (Cthulhu Now). The difference in the games with regards game mechanics lies in the skills players have access to and what the skills cover.

The main edition to the Basic Role-Playing ruleset that CoC provides and is pivotal to the game and it’s position in game design history is the concept of SANITY POINTS. It is a mechanic designed to simulate the erosion of sanity faced by Lovecraft characters when faced with mind bending cosmic horror. Characters lose sanity points as they see and learn THINGS MAN WAS NOT MEANT TO KNOW, lose too many too quickly and you face temporary or permanent mental problems. Lose them all, and your character is no longer playable, their mind eroded to such a extent that they are a gibbering wreck or an amoral sociopath.

Of course you may die before you get that far. The other thing CoC is known for is the frail nature of the characters in the face of creatures made of extra dimensional matter. Oh and bullets’ll do a number on you too.

Getting a true horror experience is hard, of the adventures I’ve run, only Pagan Publishing’s “Devil’s Children” really freaked my players out to the extent they had nightmares. However as a supernatural investigation game it can’t be beat. Or as a weird science game. Or as black comedy. It’s simplicity lends it to being pretty damn flexible.

In the 90’s Pagan brough out Delta Green, a X-Files-esque take on the material. It’s not that far a reach, Lovecraft’s Whisperer In The Darkness is remarkably prescient of the UFO-Government conspiracy paranoia that abounded in the 90s, and the core plot of the campaign builds from that story. It’s a great sourcebook, and it’s follow-up Countdown is arguably even better.

Good grief it’s been April since I did one of these, so hopefully you’ve all forgotten that I said I was going to do one post apiece for the 2nd Edition AD&D Gameworlds I’d played. Because I’m not.

Spelljammer

My all time favourite gameworld, all my life. Whizzing around on flying boats in space, the setting could be used to tie the various AD&D gameworlds together or as its own sci-fi tinged fantasy setting. I think it worked better as the latter as it offered a change from the norm in that creatures that would be deadly enemies in other settings could end up as uneasy allies in space. And the excuse of new alien worlds allowed it to amplify the AD&D goofiness tenfold. Hippo-men, space orcs called “Scro”, Space Penguins, Aliens that hatch from eggs that look like gold pieces, Elven Guyver Units and of course, Giant Space Hamsters!

Ravenloft

A fantasy horror setting that span off from the first edition “module” of the same name, the idea of this setting was characters from other gameworlds would find themselves drawn to the world via mystic mists, and then struggle to find their way home as the world itself tried to corrupt them.

Unlike Spelljammer, whose supplements and adventures stood alone, this was one of those settings where the majority of the adventures were IMPORTANT~! to the gameworld, and by the time the first run of adventures were finished, the world was changed and so they could sell the gameworld to you again! As disgustingly mercenary as that was, that campaign did have some great adventures in it, and the final two were suitably epic. And most importantly they were written to make your characters feel like they were important.

Forgotten Realms

Unlike the opening trilogy of adventures that launched the revised Forgotten Realms for 2nd Edition, which often felt you were sitting around while you listened to your mate read out some crappy fantasy. These were full of IMPORTANT~! things happening involving IMPORTANT~! characters, and you occasionally rolled dice, but you often found youself on sidelines while fucking Elminster or some other crappy Ed Greenwood character did something IMPORTANT~!

Anyway, not a big fan of this bogstandard fantasy setting, even in its Baldur’s Gater & Neverwinter Nights computer game forms. However it did have a couple of spin-offs that I enjoyed more…

Al Qadim & Maztica

These were ostensibly set in the Forgotten Realms world, but were Arabian Nights and Mayan/Aztec/Incan themed settings respectively. My love of pirates and sea-faring adventure made Al Qadim fun and Maztica was designed by two of my favourite games designers John Nephew and Jonathan Tweet.

Dark Sun

Well this was an odd one. It’s sort of post-apocalyptic fantasy, with characters far more powerful than normal AD&D ones. And buckets full of psionics. The game line had a very distinct look provided mainly from the awesome Brom. So, psychics in bondage gear fighting on a dying desert planet.

The main problem I found is the psionic rules and the sheer abundance of psychics really bogged the thing down. AD&D 2nd edition was never the smoothest flowing rule system, but adding another rule system on top that was deliberately designed to run against the grain of similar powers already in the game, added to the pain.

Mystara

This was an attempt to bring the old D&D gameworld to AD&D as an introductory way into the game. It also tried to use CDs to bring extra atmosphere to the game… This was around beginning of TSR’s death spiral that led to Wizards of the Coast purchasing them, and gimmicky releases abounded. It’s probably more famous now as the setting for the Warriors of The Eternal Sun game on the Megadrive and the D&D arcade games from Capcom.

Red Steel

This was another setting that took place on the Mystara gameworld, but had an usual game mechanic addition that made it a world of its own. Essentially it’s the Gold Rush as a fantasy setting. It took place on the Savage Coast, a land permeated with a magical mineral that as well as making the eponymous Red Steel infused every living thing with superpowers.

Yes, superpowers. It was Dark Sun’s problem all over again. If I remember correctly you’d have to roll up a superpower for everything inhabiting the land, be it cat, horse or tortle (a type of turtle man). It’s a great idea in theory, a whole load of paperwork in practice.

Others

In addition to these TSR created settings, there were various settings from other publishers. I definitely played in a campaign that took place in the City State of the Invincible Overlord setting and there was another that I think started from the Thieves World setting (based on Robert Asprin’s shared universe books).

So after a session of MERP, this new gaming group introduced me to the most popular RPG on the planet – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

AD&D was such a sprawling game, that I’m going split this up as during the time I was playing AD&D, I played and ran such a wide variety of campaign systems that they deserve some comment of their own. Today, just some comments on the game itself.

AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, I didn’t start playing until 1993, but that 1989 date is pertinent. Effectively the second edition is a document of TSR’s needless contrition to the 80’s witchhunt from Christian groups and spurious psychological claims that dogged them throughout that decade. The 2nd edition purged all references to devils and demons, and significantly toned down the artwork to try and placate criticism.

Backing down like this never works out well for the person backing down. The right move would have been to ride the storm of controversy and fight the criticism. There was an opportunity to become an anti-establishment subculture here and use the furor to sell more games. Instead, like the US comics industry in the 50’s, they kowtowed to their critics and cemented themselves as pawns to the establishment. Three years later a merger in the small press gaming world, would create a true anti-establishment gaming company. But we’ll get to them later.

The rules themselves were fine at the time. In retrospect, they are full of logical contradictions, albeit ones that long time D&D players were intensely fond of. Mainly they fondly remember the combat rules that revolved around the classic acronym THACO (To Hit Armor Class Zero).

The rule books were fairly horribly laid out, but fairly typical of American publishing – I remember seeing US console magazines in 90-91 and being bewildered by the poor typesetting they’d have, particularly compared with UK and Japanese magazines, they felt more alien to us as British readers than the magazines that read back to front in a language we couldn’t read, such is the power of layout.

However they way they replaced their “Monster Manual” from the first edition was a masterstroke of layout and design. The Monstrous Compedium was a ring binder containing sheets of monsters, normally one monster to a page. You could find the information with ease, and didn’t need to take a whole book with you to wherever you were playing the game. Of course later on they’d go back the old style monster manual in the sort of double dipping that must have played some part in TSR’s financial downfall.

Artwise it was the usual clash of styles that characterised TSR material at this time. It often felt like uncommissioned fantasy art that they’d purchased, rather than work created specifically for books. I’ll be coming back to TSR’s terrible handling of art in a later installment.

I’m probably being over-critical due to disillusionment created by TSR’s handling of the product line, and 3rd Edition that Wizards of The Coast released (yup, I’ll be getting to this too, very later). At release, and through the early years, this edition was very successful. And you can still have fun times with the rules, and definitely fun times with some of the material published for it, which I’ll start to get at next.

I think I’ve covered all the games my first gaming group played. If I recall any others I’ll have to come back to them. And so onto the first game I played when I joined my second group – MERP or Middle Earth Role Playing as it was known in its unacronymed form.

MERP was created by US company Iron Crown Enterprises, using a simplified version of their Rolemaster system to create an RPG for the lucrative Tolkien licence. I’ll go into Rolemaster (and it’s sci-fi cousin Spacemaster) later, let’s just say the cut down version of the rules was a good move. ICE’s fortunes were pretty much tied to this game, when the license was withdrawn in ‘99 the company only lasted another year.

Due to my lack of interest in Tolkien, I suspect some of the appeal was lost on me. However that also meant I wasn’t ever going to argue “THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKED IN THE BOOKS!”. The first session I played involved a bunch of hobbits goofing around in some wizard’s tower. We didn’t play it that often, the GM for the game moved onto AD&D soon after I joined in.

This was a funky little 2-4 player card/board game from Games Workshop. Of course it turned out it’s funkiness was due to it’s inspiration from the more established German boardgame Ogallala, and so it disappeared from the shelves when this was pointed out.

The aim of the game is to build three battle lines of your orcish army and accumulate more Victory Points that your opponents. The battle lines are assembled from cards representing different orcish army units that you draw from shared deck. You could also use any completed lines to attack your rivals.

The game design, wherever it came from, is really solid and for my small first gaming group this was a fun, quick, game to play. One other big appeal to this was, like a lot of Games Workshop’s board games at the time, unified consistent artwork. This had John Blanche at his slimiest providing a variety of mould encrusted cartoony orcs on the cards. Nothing’s worse than a boardgame where the artwork is done by many hands with styles that don’t gel. OK, maybe there are plenty of things worse, but you get my drift. This issue will raise it’s head again later in this series, when I get to a true abomination of games design.

Right let’s get back on this horse, as I want to get to the entry on AD&D sooner rather than later.

This German boardgame, published in the UK by Games Workshop, was something of Talisman’s poorer relation for my first gaming group. And rightly so, as it’s even more random that Talisman, with little to recommend it in terms of tactical gameplay. You pick a character and then try and work your way to a dragon’s lair by picking random dungeon tiles that you lay on the board. I remember it being a fairly unforgiving game, as you’d frequently die before getting to the middle, and even more frequently run out of turns before getting back out the dungeon again. I think the add-on Heroes of Dungeonquest made it little more forgiving, and much more variable. While I’ve continued to play Talisman, I’ve not played this since probably 1990.