As long as people have imagination they will be wanting to play games that cause them to really think and have fun at the same time. However, not all thinking games are for every person. Example: Last night I played out two major fleet battles against two different people that involved me coming up with strategy and tactics needed to reach victory even though it looked quite hopeless at the start of one of them. I had to think on my feet and use a few little tricks in order to win both engagements. But I refuse to play any game that involves creating words out of random letters (like Scrabble or Boggle) because my mind just doesn't work that way. Role Playing Games are very much like that. Not every person can play every game because their minds don't quite work that way.

When Palladium Books created Rifts, it was an entirely new type of game, unlike any ever put on the market up until that time. In most cases, the players had to adjust themselves from the Fantasy settings that they were familiar with into a high tech world where the characters were often part of an army. Thousands of players took to this new way of gaming quite easy, but just as many wanted to remain the independent characters that didn't answer to any higher authority than hunger and personal desires. Rifts was able to accommodate those players as well, but there was also those players who still had to be different. They didn't want to play the regular, run of the mill characters or they just didn't want to abandon the character from whatever other game system that they had been working so hard on all this time. Palladium Books answered this desire with the release of the Rifts Conversion Book.

The first thing that you will find in this book is a few more details about the modern weapons that are used in the Rifts games. These notes on the various items help to clarify many of the questions that were raised by the players during the first five years of the game. Then there are some explanations on the combat system that is used. This explains the way a combat takes place with modern weapons and clears up the problems that developed by robots having the ability to withstand different amounts of damage depending on what area it was hit in (generally a limb can be blown away faster than the main body).

At last we come to the meat of this volume. There is a large section of the book devoted to converting characters from each of the different games systems (remember, at that time only the combat and experience rules were the same in all the games) into the Rifts games. The rules are simple enough to use and should someone want to take a Rifts character to one of the other games, all they have to do is reverse the process. This area explains how the different skills and attributes convert from one game to another. The rub is that you can only translate to or from Rifts, so if the player wants to take a character from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game to Palladium Fantasy he first has to go through a Rifts conversion.

The last half of the book is a listing of all the creatures and beings from the various game systems of the Palladium Books company that have all been changed over into Rifts format so that the Game Master can use them for encounters. This is a very cool thing, and with the release of the 2nd Edition formats of nearly every game in the Palladium system, all of these creatures can be used in any of the games that now have the exact system of rules as Rifts.

If you already have this volume in your collection of RPG books, you might want to flip through it to see what I am talking about. If you don't have it, then don't bother getting it unless you want the additional creatures listed in the second half for your own games. Even then, try to get it from a second hand book store instead of paying the full price because most of this has been reprinted in other formats as the games evolved to 2nd Edition over the past two or three years. As a collector, this is a nice addition to my shelf, but I seldom find a reason to use it anymore.


Recommended: No