The Culture: The Gatekeeper Boss Is Gaming's Ed Wood

When Palladium Books published RIFTS in 1990, it became the company's flagship product line.

Intentional as part of the design is that every other Palladium product line is tied to RIFTS by way of the eponymous phenonemon. These tears in the fabric of space-time breech barriers of dimension, can act as wyrmholes connecting distant locations, and have breeched temporal barriers at least once in print. (See RIFTS Lone Star).

And, as Jeffro notes, there was supposed to be a wilderness exploration component to playing RIFTS.

That's not all he noticed that got lost.

And Uncle Kevin, in his nice-but-half-assed manner, tried to throw prospective users a bone back in the day.

Regardless of what he put into that original rulebook, and the implicit promise in its presentations of character and setting, what this was about in practice was to solve a business problem: how to get more people to buy more product.

The idea, as seen elsewhere in the original rulebook and repeated in several early supplements, is that the oversaturation of supernatural power on RIFTS Earth allowed for a certain instability represented by non-trivial odds of a rift forming- and an equally non-trivial chance of someone or something coming through it.

If anything could come here, or if players could go anywhere, then having Yards O' Books on hand to answer the question of "What is it?" when a rift shows up turned a business problem of a sizable product catalog into a (not-so-)microtransaction scheme where all those other products are sellable solutions to a gameplay problem.

Jeffro and JD using Robotech and Heroes Unlimited/After The Bomb/TMNT & Other Strangeness in their RIFTS sessions is proof that to this day it works.

But now we have a question: "What is RIFTS about if it drifted from any stated themes?"

For that, we bring back Comics Logic and start applying that to how RIFTS developed as a product line- and why this same logic is also the cause of its original design intention failures.

Never Let The Clown Run A War

The original vibe of RIFTS was After The Bomb + Magic. The Coalition States are an upgunned and upgraded Empire of Humanity, with their imperial seat relocated from the East Coast of the United States to the Midwest, and are one of a handful of civilized and industrialized locations that are known to exist in North America. Most of the planet is a monster-infested wilderness or wasteland, with the danger increasing with the distance from such locations.

Players are going to deal with superhuman and supernatural threats on a regular basis, in the manner of a Western action drama, as they trek slowly through an ill-defined and ill-explored wilderness. Furthermore, the occurance of rifts means that local environments can be disrupted or upended making recent mapping or similar reports obsolete.

All of this requires far more rules and gameplay procedural support than Uncle Kevin has ever been comfortable in designing. As he is also the publisher, he has no one he has to heed to tell him that he's fucking up and to unfuck his design errors.

Instead, he got wrapped up in that Comics Logic paradigm when he or someone else in the office had some ideas that struck him as particularly interesting or exciting and that is what showed up in print once the supplementary train got rolling. This would lead to him having Big Events (e.g. Siege On Tolkeen) and advancing the timeline (negating player agency and causing needless problems in the business) once Events got resolved and a new Status Quo settled.

By his deeds, Siembieda has shown since the 1970s that he does not comprehend this hobby medium, falling back on Comics Logic time and again in his design and publishing decisions- including his editorial ones. Things happen Because Comics Logic, and not for reasons that have any other reasonable explanation; logistics don't matter, economics don't matter, diplomacy (and therefore politics) don't mater, his own rules don't matter.

As he is firmly rooted in a medium of dramatic storytelling instead of fantastic wargaming he cannot conceive of why it's his responsibility to handle things that matter in wargaming, but not storytelling. This is the result of a man being unfit for the purpose at hand; he claims to sell you a game of Agency, and instead hands you Yet Another Bad Comics Simulator, much like how Ed Wood wanted sell cimeatic masterpieces and instead produced moronic movie monstrosities.

• How long does it take to repair that Cyborg? Irrelevant to storytelling; he's repaired When Plot Says So.
• What does it take to erect a Leyline Railroad? Irrelevant; that's a Plot Device and not for PCs to bother with.
• How long does it take to execute the ritual? Irrelevant; you'll always get there in time to, maybe, disrupt it.
• How far can a Valkyrie in Fighter Mode go in one attack? Irrelevant; you're just going to be in a defacto fistfight anyway, so speed, range, cover, etc. are meaningless details.
• How do you go about hiring a mercenary force? Irrelevant; you get help when the Referee says so, using Comics Logic.

You don't ask people who only known the conventions of drama about warfighting concerns; it's a category error, and this lack of comprehension shows on the page (and his real life, unfortunately).

Ask yourself this question: "If all that snazzy artwork were instead like the comics (e.g. the intro pages in Triax & The NGR), would you put it on a Pull List at the Comic Shop?" If so, then you get the issue at hand here- we have wargame products designed and published by a man who knows sweet fuck-all about wargaming and what goes into making a good one.

What Needs To Be Done To Unfuck It

This may shock some readers, but the primary audience for this medium are Doers Not Readers; they want to Do The Thing, not watch someone else do it like they're cuckholds watching someone else be intimate with their wives. That's what Player Agency is all about, and Palladium's products--at best--try not to get in the way, and mostly fail at doing so.

Those Yards Of Product, in the best light, is a half-assed way to carve up the game's setting into more managable chunks; in reality, due to rifts being able to take anyone to or from anywhere/when to anywhere/when else, what you get instead is the cultivation of a Completionist Complex with a Cargo Cult of fake-gaming

And, much like why BattleTech remains on top due to a lack of competent competition, Palladium endures because sweet fuck-all competent competition exists for what it offers to the prospective user.

What is needed? Pretty much the AD&D1e DMG, which is what Siembieda--whether he admits or not--relied, and relies, upon to fill the gaps in his own products.

• How To Run A Campaign (this includes all the stuff the #BROSR recovered from the Memory Hole)
• How To Run Wilderness Exploration and Encounters
• How To Run Dungeon Exploration and Encounters
• How To Run Combat (from man-to-man to massive fleet actions)
• How To Award Experience Points & Handling PC Progression
• How To Handle Economics, Logistics, Diplomacy, & Politics
• How To Hire/Manage Underlings
• How To Award Treasure
• How To Create Items/Spells (can be extrapolated to other powers)
• How To Handle High-Tech (Boot Hill/Gamma World conversion notes)

That last part, by the way, is why I say that you can get what you want out of RIFTS with AD&D1e.

That's the challenge now: Unfuck RIFTS by making it into a proper fantastic adventure wargame, then market and sell it to the long-frustrated audience that has had to make do with bodging together a Frankengame from Official Product and Outside Material for over 30 years.

Make this into a real and proper game, not something where Things Happen Because Comics Logic, and stick the landing. You'll sink the company within five years and be ready to take on the Seattle Sorcerers.

As for what that looks like? Tomorrow.