The Culture: RIFTS! The Gonzo Future World Of Adventure

Before we continue with Alexandros, allow me to continue on the thread of just how full of danger--and thus adventure--RIFTS Earth alone has.

This is not counting what's going on just in Earth's orbit, or the rest of the Solar System, or across the Three Galaxies (and more)- just on (and under) the surface. It's also not going to be complete because I don't have the Russia books, the China books, the South America books, Japan, Australia and thus will miss details from those books because it's been a while since I read them.

Consider this a top-level campaign map, and you'll see why I think that--despite Palladium's flaws--this is a setting ripe for some hardcore fantastic adventure wargame campaigning.

This too will be long, but no stat-talk.

The Lord of the Deep

The biggest threat on Earth is The Lord of the Deep (RIFTS Underseas). This is a massive Alien Intelligence. Its Kraken-style tentacles, and there are eight of them, are massive enough to reach across the entirety of Earth's oceans. It is at the bottom of the Marianas Trench; its tentacles can reach across the planet to attack Atlantis.

It can directly consume the souls of those it seizes, or forcibly transform them into its monstrous minions- and that includes fusing two or more victims together into a single minion. Two or more. This thing can, if it wants to, fuse a pile of victims together into a literal Kaiju and dispatch that to attack whom or whatever- including surface targets beyond the reach of its tentacles. This is your Pacific Rim scenario by way of H.P. Lovecraft.

Being a Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, it also inspires cult-like devotion which it rewards with power and commands to expand its power and influence in the manner of Cthulhu and is high priest Dagon.

It it weren't kept in check by the combined might of several seaborne or focused Factions, the seas--including deep internal seas like the Black Sea and the Great Lakes--would already be lost to its malign power. Those with little or no naval presence are said to be ignorant of this threat; as it sits on a Ley-Line, this can't be said of the magical factions no matter where they are as they cannot avoid noticing its presence.

The Four Horseman

In addition to the Phoenix Empire and the Necromancer threat, there are the Horseman running around Africa. (RIFTS Africa) They start off on their own, but only get more powerful if left alone as they seek each other out and synergize when together to become more powerful. Once united, a literal godlike opposition will be necessary to put them down; each on their own are comparable to Superman.

As the name implies, they have considerable environmental effects about them that marks their presence; this is above and beyond their actual supernatural prowess and active powers. They tend to attract hangers-on like Necromancers who exploit the chaos they create to further their own power, making things worse in the process. If left unchecked, it would take one of the other Cosmic Horrors on the planet at the minimum to put them down.

The Mechanoids/The Xiticix

Uncle Kevin brought back his Dalek knockoffs early in the history of the game, but this is not a bad knockoff; this is a "Done Right" knockoff, which means that they can be quite terrifying.

The others are a bugman race of supernaturally-active humanoids, and they've proven both passively and actively hostile to indigenous life.

I'm grouping them together because they present the same threat: they are Zerg. They are aggressive, expansionist, and--with varying triggers--genocidal. Mechanoids are more likely to engage in temporary alliances (because Knockoff Daleks) while the Xiticix are truly buglike in their psychology and thus act accordingly (as they are Knockoff Invid with Xenomorph aesthetics).

They are major threats to everyone because what they are compels what they do, and what they do is "Conquer, Control, Consume, Carry On" . Mechanoid invasions end with them boring a hole into a planet's core and sucking it dry before carving up the rest to consume and process into raw materials for new Mechanoids; Xiticix invasions are purely consumptive, locust-like, with all that implies.

It is implied that, if caught early, they can be contained and destroyed. IF. There's a lot of threats competing for attention, and a slow-burning one may slip beneath notice until it's too late.

Nxla The Harvester

Deep in the Federation of Magic is Yet Another Cosmic Horror. This is Nxla The Devourer (Psyscape), and it resembles the Vampire Intelligences in that it too seeks to consume the living and use their souless husks to expand its power and control. It is different in that it's a Psionic threat first and foremost, so the Psychics of Psyscape are the ones leading the fight against it.

Unlike the Vampires, this threat's chief minions are more like (Palladium) Witches than anything else; they are yet living themselves, and Nxla makes them his minions in return for them (a) feeding him power and (b) summoning him to their world- at which point he consumes all life and returns whence he came taking his minions and the husks with him.

He too is a slow-burning threat, and as-written is getting close to being able to be summoned into RIFTS Earth.

The Vampires

Put all the Hammer Horror cliches together, but with some influence from Night of the Demons and similar not-quite-zombie flicks made before 1990 and you have the Palladium Vampire. Now attach him to Yet Another Cosmic Horror and you have Vampire Intelligences and their hive-mind style of vampire; for your ravenous hordes, you have Wild Vampires (see that Bloodlust clip from the previous post; spot-on depiction of how Palladium Wild Vampires work- yes including crosses being proof against them, so God Is Real in the Megaverse).

Which means that, as with Nxla, this is both a swarm threat (ala Mechanoids and Xiticix) and a zombie threat (enemies are routinely either consumed whole or turned into more of them) but because their method of Spreading The Love doesn't involve a highly complex ritual murder the Vampire threat can and does spread far further and faster. As written, they already control Mexico and parts of Central America. If not for their problems with moving water they'd already be swarming across the rest of the Americas.

Mind control, shapeshifting, very anti-tech invulnerabilities, and they get more dangerous the closer you get to the Intelligence.

(Remember, Super Soakers are anti-Vampire weapons because that's moving water but nukes are do nothing- they can be at Ground Zero and just be rendered naked.)

Atlantis (Lord Splynn)

Yet Another Cosmic Horror, but one focused very much on being a God-King ruling an interdimensional slaving empire catering to monsters. Of the Big Threats on Earth, this is one of the lesser ones because they view Earth as a raw material node and playground that it wants to monopolize. Because it underestimates the other powres on Earth, it holds back a lot- even when it should not.

And there are several threats (Vampires are already noted as Kill On Sight) where it should not, but due to Megaversal Politics it does.

The threat here is that of a back-burner; its slaving raids are ongoing, but constrained at this time so as to keep others' attention focused away from it. However, once those other threats are destroyed, there will be nothing holding Splynn back from swamping Earth with its reserve forces (billions of them) and formally conquering Earth for itself.

In short, right now Splynn's the Known Quantity that everyone tolerates for pragmatic reasons- and will forget that it is a threat before too long, to their cost.

The Naut'yll

This underwater race of slavers want what Splynn has, but they're squished between Splynn and the Lord of the Deep for control of the seas and all the Heroic Factions (New Navy, Tritonia, Lemuria, etc.) keep them in check when the rival threats don't. They are reduced to supporting a resistance against Splynn and occassionally participating in joint actions against the Lord of the Deep.

But, like Splynn, as soon as (at the least) the Lord of the Deep is gone they're going go hard on filling that void.

The Gene Splicers

There's undersea and landside members of this group, all of whom are big on making monstrous minions to wield as bioweapons against their enemies and rivals. If the Lord does not make Kaiju, they will. They can also be the Faction behind snatching people and turning them into defacto Zoanoids (using the Nightbane rules as a guide), assuming that another smaller threat does not; it is less likely that they'd create Guyver units (using the Splicer rules).

The Angel of Death

This looney-tunes Full Conversion Cyborg is a Mad Scientist that's adept at bionics and genetics. She's the second candidate for Kaiju, Zoanoids, and Guyver units. On her own, she's a local or regional problem and only gets greater consideration when she is allied to the Brodkil and Gargoyle Empires.

Monster Empires

The Phoenix Empire, Gargoyle Empire, and Brodkil Empire are (a) Splynn's clients and (b) imperial powers of an otherwise conventional sort run by and for a specific monster race- though the Phoenix Empire has plenty of other monster races as clients of its own serving it. If they could be bothered to cooperate and coordinate, something Splynn could do if it cared, they would be far more threatening than they are; it is only because that is against Splynn's interests that this is not the case.

The Coalition States

You thought I'd leave out the proto-Imperium?

Yes, the common Coalition Grunt is a totally illiterate and innumerate subject that would be right at home in 40K's Imperial Guard. However, the Coalition Elites are both well educated and possess a whole and intact archive of pre-Rifts information- including entertainment media.

The instant that they come across something unusual, someone is cross-refering that against their archives. It doesn't matter if what turns up is a pulp adventure magazine from 1914; if that field report dings something that's in the archives, Coalition leadership now knows that it is possible.

Someone shows up in a VF-1 series Valkyrie? So what if the only archive entry is 1982's Super-Dimensional Fortress Macross; that Coalition researcher also sees that Shoji Kawamori was trained in aerospace engineering and used that to ensure that the toys actually worked. Now Coalition Intelligence has a mission to get either a Valkryie or its tech manual. If they do, it's Reverse Engineering Time and within a few years the Coalition has Valkyries of their own.

This also applies to new D-Bees they encounter- brought back for dissection and analysis, then cross-referenced. (This is how the Coalition becomes the last candidate to come up with Guyvers and Zoanoids; they have the manga/anime as guides and now it's just the grunt work down in Lone Star- and Coalition Zoanoids would join the Vanguard in Things They Use But Disavow All Knowledge Of. Yes, given the prevalence of psychics in Coalition circles, Zoalords are also on the table.)

The threat that the Coalition presents is rapid adaptation. Its mind control is not magical or psionic, but old-fashion information and narrative control via media and literacy control; the population is kept totally illiterate deliberate for this reason primarily- the professed goal of protecting from Cognito and Infohazards is secondary.

Its elite is in a prime position to swiftly react to new information, process that into useful intelligence, turn intelligence into policy, and then put policy into practice; the rapid military expansion and modernization prior to attempting war on Tolkeen is proof of that threat in action.

And because the Coalition is a totalitarian police state, it can easily shape the population to conform to whatever it requires via Narrative Warfare with the aplomb that past masters could only envy. (Lie about yourselves, and tell the truth about your enemies; this combination proves very effective against dissidents opposing the Imperial Will.)

Only Free Quebec can rival this power, and only because it varies from Chi-Town's paradigm of power just enough to distinguish but not enough to be different in substance.

Conclusion

High-level Faction play can and should drive an entire campaign from the get-go. As I said above, I have not mentioned all of the powers on RIFTS Earth- nevermind those beyond it. Given that several races and Occupations have the ability to hop worlds, dimensions, or timelines at-will that's not something to depreciate or disdain.

If you want to run RIFTS, I suggest having a few rounds of this level first to set things in motion. Then let players decide what theater they want to play in, roll up some mans, and go at it.

And read the manual. The last thing you want to do is to get caught out of position because your man's ability to Do The Thing didn't reach as far, or hit as hard, or cost as little, as you thought it did. You get to watch your man get got because of a stupid and avoidable mistake- like getting bombarded by artillery miles away using a drone-mounted camera for a spotter when you can't get past 500 feet with your attacks.

This is Tolkeen Being Idiot-Ball Stupid Against The Coalition