Surprise! It's Rifts!

"Remember Glitter Boys? Well, they're back... in OSR form!"

Two years ago I tried to ‘convert Rifts’ to Old School Essentials by literally going through the books, O.C.C. by O.C.C. But this way lies madness, for although Palladium’s various RPGs — unfairly maligned by 5E/Pathfinder pussies, pretentious game theorists, and weakling Vampire players — are actually very fun to play, all the criticisms about their inconsistency, disorganization, and missing or contradictory entries are actually understated.

Comes now Night Owl Workshop with their variety of awesome OSR adaptations for superheroes, sword & planet, westerns, and military science fiction. I picked up Guardians, the superhero game, about two weeks ago and was blown away by it. In quick succession I also purchased Colonial Troopers, Warriors of the Red Planet, Raiders of the Lost Artifacts, and Gunslinger just to see what was possible. And I soon realized that by combining all of these together, Rifts was possible. A painless, elegant kind of Rifts that didn’t take a couple of hours of flipping back and forth between different books to create a character and character classes from 30 years ago weren’t lame compared to classes created 20 years ago. A Rifts without Mega Damage!

I know that there’s a Savage World edition of Rifts, but I don’t want it. I have plenty of Savage World games; I’ve got no problem with the rules. But I am not interested in paying the hefty price tag for their hardcovers when I already have over two dozen Rifts books with more information, better art, and Altaran Warrior Women without pants and pasties, the way Lord Splynncryth intended.

Anyway, I decided to roll up several characters from these books and sneak them in as pre-gens for my players who had gotten used to playing OSE dungeon crawls. I rolled up a power armored Colonial Trooper (lvl 2), a 5th level winged Fighting Man from Warriors of the Red Planet, a 2nd level cyberpunk mutant dogman Superagent from Guardians, and adapted the Wilderness Scout (using Graphite Prime’s suggestions) and Line Walker from Rifts itself. I then added a short paragraph, roughly outlining how each character got from their original world into their present predicament, and left each player the option of selecting one of the pre-gens in addition to rolling up an OSE character. The catch was that the selection had to be made blind and there was no trading. Each player then got to buy equipment from the book appropriate for their character in addition to the standard list.

This last step took by far the longest time, particularly since I didn’t have enough books to go around for six players. If you want to try this yourself, I recommend filling out most of their equipment list ahead of time.

The world (or pocket-universe) they were stuck in was more of a traditional fantasy world, albeit one that had early blackpowder weapons and left over bits and pieces of industrialized technology (e.g. coal-burning cast iron stoves) that suggested most of the inhabitants were marooned from Earth. Various threats were alluded to, including a mix of cultists and Fey creatures from the standard bestiary, along with some more iconic ones, like the Simvan monster riders, straight out of Rifts. I also asked each player to pick one other player and describe how they met them and gave various opportunities for each player to describe aspects of the local environment, their motivations, and intentions, thus introducing their unique abilities and background to each other in a natural way. We had to cut the session off before they actually set off for their adventure, but they were able to reconnoiter the area and form a pretty good plan of how they were going to cover about 20 miles in bad weather overnight and spring a trap for the bad guys. Will it work out? We’ll find out next week.

Let me know if you’ve tried anything like this yourself and how it worked out for you. I’d also love to hear about your own Rifts-like homebrew content and war stories.