The second issue of The Rifter hit the presses exactly on schedule (how weird is that?) dispite the eye surgery that delayed many other titles. The good news is that Kevin is fine and back at the job full time. The better news is that many projects that were placed on hold while he had the laser surgery done are back on the move towards being completed. The bad news is that, as seems to be the case with most of Palladium's releases, very little of it got completed on time and certain titles still haven't hit the market to this day (over 3 years later).
But none of that really matters. This is the first of the series that had a theme behind all the new material. To tell the truth, this theme idea worked out so well that nearly every Rifter released since that time has had a theme. About the only thing that can go wrong with the theme idea is when it happens to be a "high tech" theme, like computers for this issue. Most of the time, the low tech games such as the Fantasy game get ignored when such a thing happens.
In this case, Palladium Books just couldn't afford to make their readers angry, so they tossed in a small section of stuff for the Fantasy game. After all, one of the main reasons that The Rifter even got off the ground was to give the Fantasy game players more information faster in order to keep the interest alive. With only six books released in over 10 years and most of the Fantasy world setting incomplete, something had to be done.
This issue once again has some of the words of wisdom for the master Game Master, Erick Wujick, on how to go about creating a truly epic adventure series. He calls it "Thinking Big" and he is dead on the money in this. The way he sees creating a game, the bigger you have the story, the more you have to work with. On the other hand, if you only make a small adventure setting (such as a single house or small neighborhood) you will run into problems when the players want to go elsewhere. Erick's solution to that is to make it so huge (the bigger the better) that no matter what happens the game will go on.
Then Kevin gets on his soapbox to explain how it is that the various game systems in the Palladium Megaverse are able to all tie together with the Rifts game as a center. Many of the games take place on Earth, after all. Rifts is a future Earth (about 300 years from now), Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles is the Earth of today (sort of) as is Heros Unlimited and Nightbane. Then you have RECON (set in the war years of 1950 to 1970) and Palladium Fantasy and Mechanoids that are on entirely diffferent worlds! Yett all of these games are interchangable with each other in such a way that a character could actually travel from one game world to the next (through space and time) using the Rifts..
After that is the section for the fantasy game. The focus is pirates and there are lots of cool ideas to look over here. There are some quick stats for regular crewmen as well as detailed info about a couple of famous pirate captains. But the best part is that there are perhaps 20 adventure ideas listed as well. These are just Hook, Line & Sinkers and have to be fleshed out by the GM, but the basics are there.
At last, we get to the meat of the issue with highly detailed accounts of how computers are used (or abused) in the game systems that have that level of technology. In this area a reader will find both new classes and monsters for most of the games systems that Palladium publishes. There is also an extensive listing of tech items that are all new for the Rifts game Techno Wizard class. Many of these things are very cool and useful for the game.
Rounding out the issue is the second installments of the two stories that were started in the first issue. The Siege Against Tolkeen gets another four chapters printed (it ended around issue 10 or 11) and The Hammer of the Forge (still going strong in the current issue #14). I'll be glad when that one finishes up so I can read it all in one sitting.
Basicly, this is a very good issue to pick up. Lots of Rifts stuff to use in your games, some very valuable advice from the creaters of the game itself and a little something for almost every game in the company. Personally, I would have liked to see more stuff for the Fantasy game, but that's just my favorite of all the games. This issue should have something for almost any player.
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