To give a little background, I was a HUGE fan of RIFTs when I was around ten or eleven. They'd had a ton of advertisements for it in a lot of Marvel Comics, and it was around the time I was starting to get enough disposable cash and wherewithal to get big into the RPG hobby. I bought the limited edition black hardcover copy, and I was blown away. Here was this huge dystopian future with extradimensional aliens, magic, super-tech and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I just ate it up. Loved the concept, still do. Likewise, at the time, D&D was still Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and the system for Palladium's Megaversal (TM, yaddy yaddy) games seemed not only really comprehensive and detailed, but flexible since it could be used with their other game lines too (TMNT, Robotech, Beyond the Supernatural, etc.) I bought a ton of the Worldbooks, Dimension Books and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on.
About five years after that, I started leaning more towards White Wolf's V:TM and other game lines. They were just about as comprehensive and gritty, but they were set in the modern day, which, let's face it, I had a better frame of reference for, and the system was a lot smoother (combats, per example, didn't take a half hour to run, and you could make a character sheet in ten minutes once you really knew the system). Even then, Palladium/RIFTs was starting to look a little clunky, but it was like an old buddy, maybe you didn't talk as much as you used to because you were both doing different things, but they were still really fun to hang out with.
Fast forward ten more years. I was in my mid 20's, and I'd rediscovered my love of D&D with 3.x after having gone relatively light on tabletop roleplaying (I was mostly into X-Men play by emails/play by posts at that point, which is where I met my wife, but that's another story). I figured since I was getting really back into tabletop, which I'd introduced to my then-girlfriend, I'd stop in and see how RIFTs was doing. It'd been, after all, quite a while. So I went to the hobby shop and perused the RIFTs Ultimate Edition book, which was supposed to be a new-and-improved rulebook.
Problem was? Other than some rules additions, nothing was changed. It was the exact same system I'd been playing for fifteen years, and it was now not only clunky, but ridiculously so in contrast to just about any other company's system. Still, I figured I'd give it a shot, so I bought two of the Siege on Tolkien books. When I got home and read them, I was kind of disturbed, because despite constant author assertions that "war isn't just black and white", that's kind of what they made it out to be. The whole storyline centers around the Coalition Army (pro-human, anti-alien and magic to the point of being genocidal, bristling with Old World and cutting edge tech) fighting an enemy they know the least about (the forces of Tolkeen, a magical kingdom) when they had about four other enemies breathing down their necks (enraged Juicers, Xiticix aliens, their rogue state of Free Quebec and more). Not only that, but they go on to talk about how the Coalition basically has concentration camps set up, is saturation bombing thousands of helpless civilians, and then they go on to GIVE SUGGESTIONS ABOUT HOW TO PLAY COALITION HEROES! Right, because whenever I play an RPG, I usually think, "Gee, I wanna play a fucking future-Nazi, maybe get a nice lampshade made out of an alien's skin."
Already, my taste for Palladium's offerings had soured. The final straw was the "Crisis of Treachery"; to give you the nuts and bolts of it, basically, someone in the company stole a fuck-ton of money. Now, instead of saying, "Oh shit, we're tight on cash, let's cut the price of some of our books so more people will buy them," what is Palladium's solution? 50$ prints from Kevin Siembieda, with a signature on them. Whaaat? You could easily gut one of the hundreds of back-stock books you have, for free, scan it, for free, and sell it to me as a PDF for five fucking dollars, something I'd buy, but instead, you want me to pay fifty fucking dollars for a shitty drawing? The worst part was I put up with the bad system that took two to three hours to make a character for and made little sense (you mean someone can run a football field while shooting a gun in fifteen seconds? really?), constant release date pushbacks, the recycled artwork, and the lack of any proper indexing in the books. I've seen you put out your 'great video game' on the Nokia N-Gage and heard you talk for over a decade about the movie Jerry Bruckheimer's "just clamoring to make" and yet has never manifested. And now you want me to buy a fifty fucking dollar drawing? Or multiple copies? Suck my cock, Kevin Siembieda. For the record, about three years after the fact, Palladium did start selling PDFs. They retail for about 5 dollars less or so than their softcover books.
Just recently, for the sake of nostalgia, I decided to check their website. What did I find?
This ungodly piece of shit idea. Not that I would anyway, but now you want me to buy three copies, one of which costs you nothing to produce, of the SAME FUCKING BOOK? The book, I might mention, that's been "coming soon!" for the last decade? The one that still uses the system it had when I was ten? How about instead of micromanaging your fucking company, using a wax press to hand-assemble your books, investing in bad ventures and blaming it on everyone but yourself, maybe someone at Palladium Books should wake up and tell their fucking boss that he's running a business, not a charity, and that if he's going to do what he wants to do and fuck all the players that'd like to see the company do otherwise, well, maybe they deserve to fail. My prediction? When Kevin Siembieda dies, one of two things will happen: the company dies with him, or they might actually start improving it and I'll consider going back to them.
Woo. That feels better. I'm gonna go read some Pathfinder books now.
