The Culture: Making Something Cooler Than What's Published For RIFTS

Speaking of "Cool Idea Selling Product", let's talk about Palladium's house organ: The Rifter. Issue 19--out of print; it's used or PDF--had something to work with: the Demon Hunter. #RiftsBros, this is for you.

The TLDR is that the Demon Hunter was a knockoff of Buffy et. al. from Buffy the Vampire Slayer..

The reason this is something to work with is that the Slayer concept is, for all intents and purposes, a Hellmouth appropriation and inversion of the Japanese Magical Girl concept, which is itself a variation of the original Captain Marvel hero concept.

From my hometown to Tokyo and back to LA.

And if you get to Magical Girls, then you also get to Japan's own superhero tradition of masked heroes: Tokukatsu. Be it Super Sentai (where Power Rangers gets their raw material from), Masked Rider (the edgy solo bikers), and characters like these guys.

All of them work off the same template, in terms of how their powers function.

Their powers are bestowed. They come from an external source, and that connection persists invisbily; it can be interdicted or severed, either by the bestowing party or (depending on specifics) by others. (This is how you can lump the three aforementioned above together.)

That Rifter article works much like Buffy's Slayer bestowal does: Always On, but severable. In addition, the Demon Hunter is corruptable by third parties. (See the article for details.)

What I'm pointing out is that you have the framework in the rules to (a) clean up a metric fuckload of needless duplication in terms of Occupations and (b) put in Cool And Exciting Ideas that prospective players would recognize and want to run with.

And RIFTS is all about that because if Uncle Kevin can get away with shameless "inspiration", you can too.

(And man, not having literal Magical Girls, Super Sentai, etc. in RIFTS Japan was a mistake.)