Rifts® Game Master Guide
Review by Malcolm Knight (April 2002)
Mega-Sourcebook?
Well, when I spotted that a new sourcebook had been released for that god amongst mortals, the Rifts RPG, I was excited. And who wouldn’t be? After all, Palladium product line in general, and Rifts in particular, has been going from strength to strength recently. So when I noticed that the new sourcebook was actually a "Mega-Sourcebook", I thought "how could I go wrong?"
The mega, it turns out, is for disappointment.
At 352 pages the book weighs in as a hefty chunk of a forest, and it pretty much gives you exactly what it says on the back of the book. The statistics for all the weapons, vehicles, power armour, psionics, etc, etc, within the Rifts game system. What it fails to deliver on, is the "designers’ notes" and "rules clarifications". Everyone knows, even the die hard fans of Rifts (myself included), that the Rifts rules system is very shabby, to say the least. So when a book comes out hinting that this will change, you're interested. When you start to read a monologue from Kevin Siembieda himself, telling you how even though the original Rifts system is "very realistic", it wasn’t quite suitable for an RPG, you start to think that maybe the light of reason has finally started to shine down the dark tunnel that is the Palladium core system.
No such luck.
The changes suggested, amongst other things, actually make it practically impossible to dodge Mega Damage Capacity based attacks, whilst still allowing characters to dodge Structural Damage Capacity based attacks. The reasoning behind this? Because energy weapons are fast-as-light, thus you can’t see where the attack is heading, but bullets can be dodged because you can see where the weapon is pointing? This seems an odd line of reasoning.
The other explanations and clarifications are much in the same vain, and most annoyingly, this book seems to have slipped back into the bad old habit of being edited by someone without much sleep. The sentence structure is dodgy, with paragraphs of text seeming to contradict the last sentence, and the use of examples is shaky to non-existent. Since Kevin Siembieda is one of his own editors on this tome of knowledge, the expectation is for this kind of shenanigans to have finished for good. Strangely though, he does mention that C. J. Carella over powered the South America books. You would have thought that this was the editor’s job, to point out those particular books were too powerful for the rest of the environment at the time of publishing.
The book is however, exactly what it claims to be, a compiled encyclopaedia of Rifts statistics. Unfortunately, it isn’t anything more than that. The system changes suggested are poorly thought out, and the games mastering material included appears to be a rework of the Rifts Conversion Book articles. The book does contain rules clarifications, like resolving just how many hand-to-hand attacks someone gets, but this information is all freely available at the Palladium web site.
Overall: Only Rifts fans in search of a reference need look at this book. Without the context of the background, the statistics are dry, and the need to keep the size of the book down limits the number of pictures within it. The result is that it is impossible to get a good feel for items listed in there, unless you already know what they look like (it certainly had me reaching for my copy of the Coalition War Machine).