Yaruki Zero Games Presents:

All That
Glitters Is
Palladium
A Short History of
Palladium Books

Ewen Cluney
All That
Glitters is
Palladium
By Ewen Cluney (©2019)

A complete new Zine

Compatible with the entire Yaruki Zero Games™ Ewenverse!™
yarukizerogames.com

1
Introduction
This zine is an attempt at a short, tongue-in-cheek overview of one of the
weirdest tabletop RPG publishers. It’s not the oldest surviving RPG publisher
(Chaosium and Flying Buffalo are still around), but it’s probably the least changed.
The founder and head of Palladium is a Polish-American man named Kevin Sim-
bieda. If you see a photo of him, he looks like someone’s gray-haired dad, someone
you’d expect to work as an accountant or linoleum salesman rather than a game
designer. Back in the day he was active in the Detroit RPG scene, where he be-
friended Erick Wujcik and did a bunch of art for Judges Guild (one of the earliest
third-party publishers of D&D material) before founding his own company in 1981.
Palladium launched with a sci-fi game called The Mechanoid Invasion that’s
now somewhat obscure. They became a major force in the industry with licensed
TMNT and Robotech games, and had a huge hit (by RPG industry standards) with
Rifts, their kitchen sink post-apocalyptic RPG. Dozens of Rifts books and nearly
three decades later, the company has lost a lot of its luster, especially after their
attempt at a Robotech miniatures game became a huge fiasco.
Palladium Books is thoroughly, excessively Kevin Siembieda’s baby. That’s
a good thing in that he brings a gonzo kitchen sink sensibility and boundless en-
thusiasm, but he seems like exactly the kind of creative person who needs to dele-
gate and to have someone else edit his work when he goes off the rails. Freelancers
(most notably Bill Coffin) have talked about him giving them clear guidelines that
they followed to the letter, and then at the last minute deciding to rewrite a bunch
of their work. That goes a long way to explain why so many of their books are so
late, and why there are kind of a lot of books with “& Kevin Siembieda” in the
byline.
While Palladium has been a significant presence in the RPG industry, their
attempts at going further have consistently failed. Jerry Bruckheimer optioned the
rights for a Rifts movie, and Siembieda didn’t realize that “option” is Hollywood
speak for “buy the rights to something and probably do nothing with them (some-
times just to keep the rights out of a rival’s hands).” Palladium’s attempts at novels,
a CCG, and miniatures just face planted. And for a long time, it was a sore spot
that the one Rifts video game ever made was for the Nokia N-Gage. To be fair
Rifts: Promise of Power actually got decent reviews at the time (2005), but (1) no
one cares about the N-Gage enough to even make an emulator and (2) Rifts Ulti-
mate Edition has an ad for the game and the Elemental Fusionist class from the
game as a glaring reminder of that whole mess.
So, let’s take a look at this charmingly bizarre living fossil of the tabletop RPG
industry.

2
The System
With a couple of obscure exceptions (Recon and Valley of the Pharaohs) every
single RPG Palladium has published uses their “Megaversal” system. (“Megaverse”
being their trademarked term for their overall product line and the worlds they
present.) The system hasn’t gone completely unchanged since the release of The
Mechanoid Invasion in 1981, but by 1985 or so they’d pretty much settled on the
major details. There are some RPGs from back then that have stood the test of
time—Call of Cthulhu comes to mind—but this isn’t one of them.
The earliest Palladium games have some differences in rules and formatting
that further reinforce the impression that the rules started as AD&D house rules,
such as listing skill percentages in tables with different values for each level, very
much in the style of AD&D thief skills. Some of the changes away from D&D
were innovative, particularly by the standards of RPG design in 1981, but overall
it’s still kind of a mess.
Characters have eight attributes (I.Q., Mental Endurance,
Mental Affinity, Physical Strength, Physical Prowess, Physical
Endurance, Physical Beauty, and Speed, and wow I remembered
all of them off the top of my head), and all except for Speed go by
a two-letter acronym: I.Q., M.E., M.A., P.S., P.P., P.E., P.B., and Spd.
If you’re making a human character, you roll 3d6 like in D&D, but if you roll 16
or higher you roll an additional d6 and add it to your total. (Later on, they added a
rule that if the bonus die is a 6 you get to roll another d6, so that attributes can
potentially start at 30.)
There are bonuses for attributes rated 17 or higher, and they vary massively in
their usefulness. Physical Strength adds to your melee combat damage (which is
helpful in games where hand-to-hand combat is a thing, but becomes all but irrel-
evant in games like Rifts), I.Q. gives you a bonus to all of your skills (even physical
ones) and P.P. gives you a bonus to Strike/Parry/Dodge, whereas P.B. gives you a
percentage chance to Charm/Impress and M.A. gives you a chance to Trust/Intim-
idate, and neither one is ever actually explained.
Each character has both Hit Points and S.D.C. (Structural
Damage Capacity). S.D.C. was originally just hit points for in-
animate objects, but Palladium quickly adopted the idea of HP
damage being directly life-threatening and S.D.C. damage be-
ing a buffer where damage was relatively superficial.
Palladium games always have levels, similar to D&D but with a few differ-
ences. Each class has its own XP table covering levels 1 to 15, even though
Siembieda outright said that in his longest campaigns, PCs were barely

3
approaching level 10, so that levels 11-15 are there to make powerful NPCs even
more overpowered. (Also, it would’ve been trivially easy to make a set of standard
XP tables and not have to print a page of new ones in every single supplement.) It
does have the innovation of the XP rewards being less about finding treasure or
killing monsters and more about solving problems and achieving goals, which was
a nifty idea in 1981.
Most Palladium games have character classes, though because of
Siembieda’s penchant for unnecessary acronyms they’re called O.C.C.s (Occupa-
tional Character Classes), with Racial Character Classes (R.C.C.s) and Psychic
Character Classes (P.C.C.s) coming in later on. (Also, some of their games with
modern settings instead let characters pick a certain number of skill packages ac-
cording to their education level.) Some classes have stat requirements, though it’s
rare for them to require anything higher than a 12. Some classes have long, baroque
descriptions of unique abilities, while others are basically a set of skill options and
gear.
There was a time when RPGs didn’t have “skills” as a type of character trait.
As soon as people figured out that those could be a useful thing, a bunch of RPG
designers promptly went way fucking overboard, and Palladium is definitely one
of those. The selections will vary depending on the setting, but a typical Palladium
RPG will have over a hundred skills, divided into 15 or so categories. A standard
skill will have a short description of what it covers, a base percentage chance of
success, and the amount it increases per level.
Your class gives you bonuses to certain skills, but unless you have a high I.Q.
stat, any two characters of the same class and level will most likely have the exact
same percentage for any given skill. In practice, skill checks are just a percentile
roll where you want to get under your skill rating, which is boring but functional.
Some skills start with really low percentages though, so depending on the particu-
lar field, you can wind up with characters failing kind of a lot. The Computer
Hacking skill in Rifts for example starts at a mere 15%. A level 1 City Rat (who
gets a +15% bonus to skills from the Rogue category) with an I.Q. stat of 30 (+16%
to all skills) would start with their Computer Hacking skill being a bit worse than
a coin flip at 46%.
Physical skills meanwhile include several that just give bonuses to physical
stats, and the Boxing skill also gave you an additional attack per round. That means
that nearly every character made by anyone with any experience with the Palla-
dium system was a boxer, and possibly what amounted to a CrossFit weirdo.
It would be pretty easy to divide all of the skill percentages by 5 and have a
d20 roll-under mechanic. That way skills would just go up by +1 per level (granted
you couldn’t make skills that go up by +2% per level, but I could live with that),

4
but the real obstacle to improving the system is that it would involve changing
things.
Combat is bog-standard stuff, with some annoying
twists. You roll for initiative, then you start a “melee”
round (which is defined as a period of 15 seconds and is
not at all how human beings normally use the word “me-
lee”). Each character has a certain number of attacks per
melee, and you take turns making attacks. When you at-
tack, you roll a d20 and add your bonus, and unless the target
can defend, a roll of 5 or higher hits. The target can make a
roll to defend (which distinguishes Palladium from D&D’s static AC), though in
the case of dodging it uses up an attack. That process repeats until everyone is out
of actions, and then you start a new melee. In practice, anything remotely built for
combat just has a lot of capacity for damage, so fights are often slogs unless you
get some ridiculously inappropriate weapon, which to be fair is a pretty common
occurrence in Palladium games. Our characters sure used a lot of high explosives.
With Robotech they introduced the concept of “Mega-Damage” to better rep-
resent things like giant mecha and spaceships. One point of Mega-Damage Capac-
ity is equal to 100 points of S.D.C., though for some reason the rules keep saying
it’s “approximately” 100 S.D.C. In Robotech the standard Veritech has 250 M.D.C.
in its main body, while the basic Zentraedi cannon fodder battle pod has 50. Then
there was power creep, and in Rifts a basic suit of non-powered armor can have
40+ M.D.C., while actual giant robots have 500 or more. The fact that Mega-Dam-
age pistols exist makes the Rifts setting weird in that most PCs will have handheld
weapons that can vaporize any normal person in a single hit.
Rifts also has the conceit that heightened levels of magical energy make the
supernatural more potent, so that most supernatural beings are themselves M.D.C.
Demons can be on par with power armor or giant robots, while literal gods and
supernatural intelligences (i.e. Cthulhu tentacle monsters and their ilk) can have
tens of thousands of M.D.C.
The Megaversal system has the distinction of being one of the vanishingly few
non-D&D RPGs to include an alignment system. Kevin really doesn’t like the
idea of neutral alignments though, believing that a truly neutral character would
just stand there. In D&D at least, that isn’t what “neutral” means, but that hasn’t
stopped Kevin from including the rant even in games like Robotech where the
alignment system is an awkward inclusion in the first place. The system divides
alignments into Good, Selfish, and Evil, and they’re more like morality archetypes,
ranging from Scrupulous (annoyingly Lawful Good) to Diabolic (cartoonishly

5
Chaotic Evil). It’s not terrible, but especially with the “no neutrals” rant it doesn’t
need to be copied and pasted into every single game.
Every Palladium RPG also has insanity rules, regardless of whether it makes
any sense for the subject matter. When a character suffers psychological trauma,
the GM can tell the player to roll to see if they acquire an insanity, and there’s a
bunch of tables with things like phobias, manic-depression, schizophrenia, alco-
holism, and drug addiction. The table of bonuses based on attributes says that M.E.
provides a bonus to “save vs. psychic attack/insanity,” which is weird because the
insanity rules don’t actually have saving throws. Also, apparently due to cribbing
from the DSM of the time, some of the early Palladium games list homosexuality
as a form of insanity, so that a character could potentially turn gay if something
bad happened to them. The insanity rules are not a high point is what I’m saying I
guess.
One last thing I want to call out that’s
kind of bonkers: In the Villains Unlimited
supplement for Heroes Unlimited (and later
reprinted in the Rifts Sourcebook) there’s a
half-page section where Siembeida explains
that in real life knocking someone out is re-
ally hard to do, and very dangerous to the
person you’re trying to do it to, such that in Palladium terms you’d only really
manage it on a natural 20. That’s all true—the effects of blunt trauma to the head
are scary—but he seemed to forget that this was a superhero game. The difficulties
of knocking dudes out in real life have zero bearing on Batman, who in a more
narrative system could have a pretty high “Knock Out Random Thugs” skill. (Net-
flix Daredevil meanwhile has that skill, and also took an advantage that gives him
a further bonus when fighting a bunch of guys in a hallway.) A superhero RPG
based more in gritty realism is an interesting idea, but Heroes Unlimited is not that.
Siembieda seems to just have a blind spot for genre emulation and dumps a bunch
of attempts at realism into his games whether they need it or not.
You could do worse than the Palladium system, but it would take some looking.
There are some published RPGs with rules that just plain don’t work, with very
basic choices where one is overwhelmingly better, or that just give you a punishing
amount of pointless work to do. (The System Mastery podcast has covered a lot of
those by the way.) But on the other hand, the Palladium rules do have a lot of
pointless busywork and odd cul-de-sacs, to a degree that is now pretty weird for a
product line that makes its way into most tabletop game stores.

6
Odd Palladium Skills
• Branding (50%+5% per level of experience)
• Weapon Proficiency: Rope
• Recycle (30%+5% per level of experience)
• Language: Techno-Can (50%+3% per level of experience)
• Naval History (30%+5% per level of experience)
• Boat: Paddle Types/Canoe/Kayak (50%+5% per level of experience)
• Roadwise (26%+4% per level of experience)
• Lore: Cattle & Animals (30%+5% per level of experience)
• Dowsing (20%+5% per level of experience)
• Telephone Networks (40%+5% per level of experience)
• Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (60%+6% per level of experience)
• Microfilm/Microfiche/Microdot Technology (40%+4% per level of expe-
rience)
• Weapon Proficiency: Mouth Weapons

Production Values
Books from Palladium all have a very particular look and feel. Like everything
else they do, they’re not the worst in the world of RPGs by a long shot—I’ve seen
a couple of RPG books with horrible font choices and jpg artifacting on images
like they’re halfway to a Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff comic—but they could stand to
be way better.
The details vary a little, but most books from Palladium with anything even
vaguely objectionable have warnings along the lines of:

Warning!
Violence and the Supernatural
The fictional world of [GAME TITLE]® is violent and deadly, and I’m going
to ramble on about how there’s bad stuff here but it’s definitely fictional, and it
may be inappropriate for young readers/players.
We suggest parental discretion.

That’s the first page that greets you when you flip past the cover. It’s a far cry
from how White Wolf got into the habit of writing warnings along the lines of “It’s
not real. It’s pretend. Don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. Can we move on? Christ,

7
I need a drink.” Siembieda on the other hand is earnest to a fault, and self-con-
scious about making games with violence and supernatural stuff.
There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of Palladium’s books are 8½”
× 11” paperbacks with incredibly simple layouts of two columns in Times New
Roman, broken up with frequent use of line art. Even the headers are mostly larger
text in Times New Roman Bold, though they do at least use other fonts for logos.
I normally use Goudy Old Style or Garamond if I want a serif font, but I made this
zine in Times New Roman as a sarcastic tribute or something. (The headers are in
Serpentine Bold, which Palladium used on the cover of Rifts.)
One of the few ways Palladium was an innovator was that they started releas-
ing RPG rulebooks as perfect bound softcovers. At the time, the industry was
largely putting out boxed sets (with 2-3 saddle stitched booklets and other goodies
inside) and hardcovers, and it let Palladium price their games significantly lower
than competitors like TSR and Chaosium. As a poor kid who desperately wanted
more RPG books, the fact that most of the TMNT supplements only cost $7.95
was a huge plus.
On the other hand, Palladium was way behind the times technologically. They
waited an extra decade or so to get on that whole “desktop publishing” bandwagon,
and were putting layouts together physically with paste and cropping tools well
after the industry came to view those things as obsolete. I got the tiniest bit of
experience with those when I helped with my high school yearbook, and I assure
you, you’re not missing out. The use of archaic methods may explain why their
book layouts are so basic.
Palladium was also slow to get into offering sales of PDFs. Their publicly-
stated rationale for this was piracy. I’m not going to try to justify piracy to you,
but I am going to point out that Palladium pirate-fans had already scanned and
OCR’d most of their catalog. Not putting out PDFs means that piracy is less effi-
cient, but it doesn’t stop it from happening, especially at Palladium’s level of pop-
ularity. The more legitimate reason for Palladium to drag their feet on doing PDFs
is just that unlike InDesign, paste and cropping tools don’t come with a PDF export
option.
Siembieda also has a very particular style of writing and formatting that shows
up not only in his books, but in the company’s press releases. If someone shows
you some verbiage from the RPG industry, you can spot Siembieda’s writing from
these tells:
• Extensive use of underlining and bolding (for the record, every reputable
guide to graphic design will tell you not to use underlining)

8
 • Trademark™ symbols® after every use of every remotely trademark-able
term; if he sees this, I assume he’ll be upset that I’ve been calling his flag-
ship game “Rifts” and not “Rifts®”
• Lots of exclamation points! AND SOMETIMES ALL CAPS TOO!!!
(“But this is a lie! The library still exists as a secret source of lost history
and technology for the Chi-town Coalition. ALL OTHER BOOKS ARE
FORBIDDEN!!!!”)
• Any pop culture references are thoroughly dated (“This person might be a
cross between Daffy Duck, Errol Flynn, and a stand-up comic on speed.”)
The artwork that Palladium features in their games is all over the place. They
had a lot of talented artists working for them, but there was seemingly no art di-
rection per se, so that the quality and styles of art would weirdly clash at times.
Siembieda is a bit of an artist himself—it’s how he got his first professional work
in the industry—but shockingly, he apparently knows his own limitations (which
are to do with proportions and facial structure), and has largely stopped doing art
in his books. Instead, they’d have these brilliant pieces by Zeleznik and Kevin
Long alongside the hyper-detailed anime-style art of Newton Ewell, the super-
stylized chunky characters of Vince Martin, and Wayne Breaux’s competent line
art slathered in cross-hatching. The earlier TMNT books actually had a bunch of
art from Peter Laird (one half of the team behind the original comics), which was
pretty great. A lot of the better artists have since stopped working with Palladium,
which explains why the quality of the art in Palladium’s books has declined, to the
point where they even put out a book with shitty Poser graphics on the cover.
If you read multiple Palladium games, you’ll find that there’s kind of a lot of
stuff that gets copied and pasted from one game to the next. Some of that is una-
voidable when you have multiple games with the same core rules, but that does
mean that any given Palladium RPG can be more than half reprints of previous
rules and other material, especially if they include much in the way of magic,
psionics, or guns. They also reuse a lot of art, so for example the section on robots
in Heroes Unlimited has a bunch of illustrations from The Mechanoid Invasion,
totally repurposed and recontextualized, not to mention a ton of stuff from Ninjas
& Superspies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in other parts of the book. The
second edition of Heroes Unlimited even uses the same art of some kind of speed-
ster dude twice in the same book.

9
Questionable Magic Spells
I did not make any of these up, though I did go through a lot of books.
• Create Mild Wind
• Heavy Breathing
• Color Water
• Fist of Fury
• Magic Pigeon
• Vicious Circle
• Finger Sparks
• Crunching Egg Shell
• Melt Bee’s Wax
• Seal a Wound with Bee’s Wax
• Colored Egg
• Breathe Air (Without Gills)
• Little Force
• Curdle Milk
• Cursed Bread
• Ventriloquism

Licensed Games
In the 80s, Palladium picked up two media licenses that became very important
to the company: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Robotech.

Turtle Power
At the time, TMNT was a cult favorite comic by
Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and Palladium hap-
pened to still have the license while the syndicated
cartoon launched a mass media franchise. Erick Wujcik
was the main designer for the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur-
tles & Other Strangeness” RPG, which wound up be-
ing a sort of low-powered superhero game about mu-
tant animals. While it retains the Palladium core rules,
the way you create mutant animals is one of the more
interesting things Palladium has published from a de-
sign perspective.
The book has writeups for several different species of animals, and once you
pick or roll a species, you allocate “BIO-E” (biological energy) points to determine
your character’s size, human features (speech, looks, upright stance, opposable

10
thumbs), and what animal abilities (natural weapons, night vision, etc.) they retain.
I have mixed feelings about the human looks options, because they resulted in a
lot of PCs just looking like guys who were kinda scruffy.
This was one of the better Palladium games in that it was a good mix of gritty
and gonzo, with the mechanics a decent fit for weird low-level heroics. The adven-
tures in the core book and the material in the supplement got seriously bonkers.
• Evil mutant bears with the different cruel psychic powers, called the Terror
Bears. And yes, they were a Care Bears parody.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Guide to the Universe was a little treas-
ure trove of super-weird aliens from the comics, including the Utroms
(who were a race of pacifists who were the basis for the design of Krang
in the cartoon) and the militaristic Triceratons.
• Turtles Go Hollywood, an adventure book where the PCs go up against a
band of evil mutant animals called the Ratt Pak. The adventure has an anti-
drug message, and the villains need to gobble down designer drugs to
maintain their mutations. There’s a great picture of the group, with the
leader, Labb Ratt, offering a handful of random pills while the sexy cat
lady named Space Case hangs on his arm.
• A whole supplement on time travel and interdimensional travel, including
rules for mutant dinosaurs, mutant humans (which made it very easy to
create a floating fetus with massive psychic powers), and time magic.
• The After the Bomb post-apocalyptic setting (later turned into its own
game after Palladium lost the TMNT license), with supplements for vehi-
cle combat, Australia, the Yucatan, and a whole Arthurian setting in Eng-
land.
• Mutants in Orbit was a supplement on what’s going on in Earth orbit for
both After the Bomb and Rifts. That’s why the book also has Glitter Boys.

Protoculture Junkies
The Robotech TV series is the result of a company called Harmony Gold tak-
ing three different anime series—Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Dimen-
sional Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada—and doing a
bunch of editing to make them into a single series that would be palatable to a
syndicated TV audience. Macross is one of the all-time great mecha anime fran-
chises, and it’s had a bunch of TV series, movies, and OVAs over the years, most
recently 2016’s Macross Delta. Southern Cross and Mospeada meanwhile largely
faded into obscurity, and if not for Robotech not a lot of people would even know
they existed.

11
 Despite Robotech’s flaws, it was a first, enticing taste of anime for a lot of
people (though that’s true of Star Blazers too), and the Macross portion in partic-
ular had both fantastic mecha designs and a sophisticated story. It was an animated
series where characters loved and lost and where (although the editing removed
any traces of blood) characters sometimes died, something virtually unknown in
the U.S. at the time. Seriously, they made a whole Robotech movie (with footage
from Megazone 23) and test screenings were a disaster just because people saw
that it was animated and assumed “CARTOON = FOR TINY CHILDREN.”
How good Palladium’s take on Robotech was depends a lot on what you want
out of an RPG adaptation of the series. In terms of providing books with pictures
and stats for all the cool robots, it was a rousing success. In terms of conveying the
feel of a story about love and humanity during an interstellar war, it’s kind of a
miserable failure. It doesn’t even have rules for how pop music clouds the minds
of the Zentraedi, which was a critical point in the series. Instead, Palladium basi-
cally made a straightforward sci-fi military RPG with giant robots.
They also only gave the sketchiest details about the actual story and setting,
seemingly on the assumption that people could just watch the TV series, even
though in a lot of markets they couldn’t. Palladium did go as far as to publish VHS
tapes of the series, but for my part, I didn’t know anyone who had the money to
order all the tapes to get all 85 episodes. We were lucky to live near KTEH, a PBS
station that had been airing science fiction shows on Sundays and decided to sup-
plement their offerings of Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 with anime, so we finally got
to watch all of Robotech. It wasn’t until ADV Films started releasing the series on
DVD in 2001 that it really became widely available though. In the meantime, the
closest we could get were the Jack McKinney novels, which were distinctly non-
anime in feel, and got super weird towards the end.
Most of the supplements for the Robotech RPG were pretty straightforward
introductions to more parts of the setting and successive eras. Once they’d covered
everything in the actual series, their original books were even more boring military
sci-fi, though there was an adventure book called “Lancer’s Rockers” that added
powerful sonic weapons called “instrumecha” to the game’s repertoire (plus the
mecha martial art of Mecha Su-Dai) for maximum goofiness.

Macross II: Zentran Boogaloo

Palladium also did an adaptation of Macross II as a separate game in 1993.
Macross II is a sequel to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross that is not consid-
ered part of the main Macross continuity. It has some neat ideas in it, like the
Marduk aliens who control the Zentraedi employing “emulators” who sing songs
of battle, but overall it was just kind of meh.

12
 Palladium put out the core rulebook, then a sourcebook, and then worked with
Dream Pod 9 (the company behind Heavy Gear) to produce a series of three deck
plans supplements, in case you needed stats and maps for every spaceship in
Macross II in excruciating detail. Also it was really weird to see Palladium game
material presented with competent graphic design.
Palladium’s adaptation of the series was very much along the same lines as
their adaptation of Robotech, which is to say mostly a straightforward sci-fi mili-
tary RPG, though since one of the main characters in the anime is a reporter, they
were kind of forced to include an O.C.C. for that. On the plus side, Newton Ewell’s
art of the mecha was fantastic.

Modern Stuff
One of the major veins of Palladium games is a series of titles that take place
more or less in the present day (or roughly around the time they were published, if
the stats on the computers listed in the games’ equipment sections are any indica-
tion) with various kinds of genre elements tossed in.
Heroes Unlimited is Palladium’s superhero RPG. It gets
points for having a wonderfully bonkers range of character op-
tions, including mutants, cyborgs, robots, mutant animals (basi-
cally an excerpt from TMNT), psychics, wizards, people with
magic items, super-soldiers, and so on. Siembieda definitely
knows superhero comics (at least in terms of the types of
cool powers dudes have), and he crammed just about every
superhero archetype in there.
The first supplement for Heroes Unlimited was Villains Unlimited. There were
a few other goodies in it like new superpowers, but the core of it was a collection
of NPC super villains. Some were kind of neat, but on the whole they felt like the
kind of third-string characters that in actual comics would be the kind of obscure
trivia that would show up in The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl as a gag. The one I
crudely drew above is Whirligig, who has the Tasmanian Devil style spinning
power, and also a candy cane striped zentai outfit.
Ninjas & Superspies is Eric Wujcik’s RPG about superspies and martial art-
ists. It was most notable for having a ridiculous number of highly detailed martial
arts styles. They didn’t go into full-on wuxia or fighting game stuff, but they did
have a lot of kung fu movie nonsense, including the Dim Mak death touch. There
was a supplement called Mystic China that got into Chinese demons, Taoist im-
mortals, chi magic, and so on. I don’t know how authentic it was, but it was won-
derfully gonzo.

13
 Beyond the Supernatural is a game about supernatural investigators, kind of
like Call of Cthulhu, except it feels a bit more like a comic book and it has a major
emphasis on PCs with psychic powers. This is where Siembieda introduced the
concepts of ley lines and Potential Psychic Energy (P.P.E.) that would be an im-
portant part of Rifts. It had a curious idea that psychic characters start with a bunch
of P.P.E. and permanently burn their base P.P.E. to gain psychic powers. It’s genre-
appropriate perhaps, but BTS characters are pretty weak compared to most every
other Palladium game. Also, it has a sample adventure titled “Teeny-Bopper Terror
or The Tomb of the Perpetually Cool Adolescents” where you play as 12-year-old
girls. It includes a table to roll on to see how far into puberty your character is,
which is an extremely normal thing to put into an RPG.
Nightbane was originally called “Nightspawn” until Todd McFarlane, flush
with action figure money, decided that he owns all uses of the word “spawn” in
any context, and threatened to sue Palladium and, I assume, fish. Palladium de-
cided it was easier to rename the game than waste a bunch of money on a lawsuit.
ANYWAY. NightBANE is from C.J. Carella, who did a lot of the most gonzo
Rifts books. He also did some GURPS books and a bunch of work for Eden Studios,
including the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. He has odd sensibilities and tended
to make overpowered stuff even by Rifts standards (and when Kevin Siembieda
tells you that the plasma guns you made do too much damage, wow), but he was
one of the more creative Palladium writers.
The backstory of Nightbane goes something like this: During the event people
called the Dark Day, an unnatural darkness covered the world and people went a
bit nuts. During that time some people found that they had weird powers and could
transform into monsters. Those are the Nightbane, and you create your character’s
monster table by rolling on a baroque series of tables so that they can look like just
about anything imaginable. They can be beautiful or hideous, have aspects of most
any animal, sport unnatural features, be part machine, or some combination thereof,
and that’s just with the 14 pages of appearance tables in the core rulebook.
The Nightbane are earth’s last best hope against the forces of the evil Night-
lords who want to subvert everything and take over. The Palladium mechanics
hamper the game a bit, but the gonzo World of Darkness type setting is pretty fun.
There’s a whole thing with a shadow world called the Nightlands where there are
doppelgangers of regular people, and the Nightlords are trying to take over human
society, so for example there’s one that runs a food company that makes “zero
foods” that have no calories and eventually destroy your ability to derive suste-
nance from food. The game gets maybe a little too kitchen sink for its own good,
and includes rules for wizards, psychics, vampires, and half-human “wampyrs.”

14
Dumb Superpowers
And now, a list of dumb superpowers from Heroes Unlimited:
• Clock Manipulation
• Color Manipulation
• Enlarge Body Parts
• Flying Force Disc
• Unnoteworthy — Forgettable
• Alter Physical Structure: Putty
• Mega-Wings
• Spin at High Velocity
• Super Power Punch
• Awe Factor (optional)
• Dwarfing
• Alter Physical Structure: Rag Doll
• Junkyard
• Mega-Tail
• Self-Explosion

A Few Other Games

There are a few other Palladium games I want to go over briefly, mostly just
to fill in some gaps in the story.
The Mechanoid Invasion (1981) was Palladium’s first ever RPG. Siembieda
had wanted to make Palladium Fantasy their first, but he initially didn’t have the
$10k he needed for it, so he went with a smaller game to start. The Mechanoid
Invasion is a sci-fi game (albeit with psionics and space wizards) about humans
and alien allies in a desperate struggle against the Mechanoids, a race of xenocidal
alien cyborgs bent on wiping out all bipedal life. It’s kinda neat! It came out in a
series of three books (The Mechanoid Invasion, The Journey, and Homeworld),
and had a lot of what has become standard Palladium stuff. Palladium announced
a new and fully revised RPG in the setting called “Mechanoids Space” in 1993,
but it still hasn’t come out yet. Palladium isn’t great at hitting announced release
dates, but usually not anywhere near this bad.
Recon (1981) is the other RPG Palladium has done with a different system
(though it’s one of those early RPGs that’s kinda sorta a wargame), a gritty game
about the Vietnam War. Recon Revised (1986) updated the system and added other
theaters of war. It’s a very early game from Palladium, and was less of an oddity
in the RPG scene of 1981, but it’s still very different from what they did after.

15
 Palladium Fantasy (1983) is, as the name spells out, Palladium’s fantasy RPG.
It resembles some other fantasy RPGs of the time in terms of being similar to D&D
while offering a bigger and more gonzo selection of stuff. The races include gob-
lins, hob-goblins, trolls, changelings, and the wolfen (noble humanoid wolf peo-
ple), and while the classes include the mind mage (psionics), the summoner, and
the unfortunately-named “Palladin.” There’s not all that much to distinguish it
from other fantasy RPG settings, but it does boldly set out all kinds of exotic lo-
cales for adventures, plus it has Cthulhu mythos style alien entities in the Old Ones.
Valley of the Pharaohs (1983) is an Egyptian fantasy RPG, and one of Palla-
dium’s two games to use a different system. The most notable thing about it is that
it shows Siembieda’s fascination with Egyptian mythology, what with how the
Egyptian gods also appear in both Palladium Fantasy and Rifts Africa.
Systems Failure (1999) played on the whole Y2K bug thing for a short post-
apocalyptic game about survivors fighting energy-sucking bugs from another di-
mension. It’s by Bill Coffin—one of the better Palladium writers—and benefits
from having an unusually tight focus for a Palladium game.
Splicers (2004) is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting where machines have taken
over and mankind uses living weapons to fight back. It’s kind of like Guyver vs.
Terminator, turned up to 11, and if you got all of the component references of that,
you get a Nerd Cookie. Also, it’s one of Palladium’s few other Mega-Damage
RPGs.
Dead Reign (2008) is a zombie horror RPG. The premise has been done before
(notably in Eden’s All Flesh Must Be Eaten), but it does explore the premise in
some interesting ways. There are different kinds of zombies, and the O.C.C.s in-
clude the Half-Living (not quite a zombie yet) and the Hound Master (who has
dogs!).
Palladium also put out a series of system-agnostic weapon compendia. They
did a series of small books on ancient and modern weapons (1981-1989) that they
then compiled into The Compenium of Weapons, Armour & Castles (1999) and
The Compendium of Contemporary Weapons (also 1999). Each has stats for prac-
tically every item in its respective categories in the world. While it’s hard to care
all that much about this material if you’re not a huge nerd about guns and/or swords
(yes, it also covers polearms, GARY), the sheer volume of information in these is
genuinely impressive.

16
RIFTS!
Rifts is by far Palladium’s most successful game, and among
their most fascinatingly weird too. It’s an overwhelming stew
of kitchen sink post-apocalyptic science-fantasy horror, with
some bits of anime and cyberpunk thrown in for good measure.
The short version of the Rifts backstory is that at some point in the future a
nuclear war broke out and killed a shitload of people, and the psychic energy they
all released at the moment of death caused a massive increase in the level of su-
pernatural activity around the world. Ley lines flared so strongly they became vis-
ible to the naked eye, and tears in spacetime—rifts!—opened up, bringing in all
kinds of supernatural monstrosities from other dimensions. More than a century
later, a lot of the world is wilderness dotted with villages struggling to survive, but
the oppressive and extremely Nazi-like Coalition States,
based out of Chi-town (a new city build near the ruins of
old Chicago; no word on what their hot dogs are like), is a
human supremacist, xenophobic, anti-supernatural, techno-
logical superpower with lots of skull-faced power armor
and stuff. There are other civilizations, including the unam-
biguously good kingdom of Lazlo, but the Coalition is the
single biggest player in North America.
Rifts has bits of basically every other Palladium RPG, with ley lines and P.P.E.
from Beyond the Supernatural, the Coalition as an updated version of the Empire
of Humanity from After the Bomb, robots and power armor (and M.D.C.) taking
inspiration from Robotech, cybernetics partially pulled from Heroes Unlimited and
Ninjas and Superspies, and so on.

Power Creep
One of the most interesting things about Rifts is that the original rulebook put
a lot of emphasis on scholars and adventurers fighting the good fight to preserve
and spread knowledge, to help common people facing Coalition oppression. Of
course, with the way the game was designed (barely, badly), this was basically
flavor text, which probably explained why supplements put so much emphasis on
providing cool new guns and robots. The early books present the history and set-
ting through the eyes of Erin Tarn, a rogue scholar in her fifties who collects all
sorts of historical records and travels to far-flung corners of the world. It’s kind of
a neat choice honestly, even if the game definitely went far, far away from making
her a viable PC. Rifts Ultimate Edition has a great illustration showing her facing
off with Karl Prosek (the Coalition emperor), with each staring daggers at the other.

17
 The power creep of technology and NPC monsters also left a lot of playable
characters with supernatural powers behind. The Burster is a powerful pyrokinetic
psychic, able to easily burn any unarmored human to a crisp, but they can just
muster 2D4 M.D. by spending entirely too much of their I.S.P. (40 points, out of
the 3D4×10 that the class gets, changed to a cost of 4 I.S.P. in Rifts Ultimate),
making them pretty much worthless against the most basic power armor.
Offensive magic fares a little better, but on the whole mages have to be trick-
sters to accomplish anything, and even then, the game’s answer to how supernatu-
ral powers work against robots and power armor is largely “they don’t, because
reasons.” You can make a cloud of smoke with a spell, but you just can’t put that
cloud inside of a giant robot’s cockpit, shut up. Seriously, they could’ve said that
robots typically had magic dampeners or something. Of course, if you go by the
contents of the various Rifts supplements—and holy crap there are a lot—the game
pretty much abandoned the notion of low-powered heroes being viable some time
around the book on Germany. Robots and power armor are just numerically better
in a fight, period.
Rifts also has a lot of stuff to do with human augmentation. There are borgs
(who have most of their bodies replaced with military-grade prosthetics), crazies
(who have special implants that stimulate the brain to enhance their abilities, but
cause insanity), and juicers (who wear a special harness that injects them with per-
formance-enhancing drugs but reduces their remaining lifespan to around 6 years).
None of them are great in terms of standing up to power armor, but they’re neat
ideas that reinforce Rifts as a setting where people undergo extreme shit to have a
fighting chance in a world gone mad.
Other notable classes include the Cyber-Knights (a knightly order of guys who
have cyber-armor grafted onto their bodies and can manifest a psychic sword that
does a little bit of Mega-Damage), Glitter Boys (who pilot the power armor of the
same name, which features a crazy powerful electromagnetic rail gun and silvery
laser-resistant armor), dragon hatchlings (Palladium’s take on dragons is pretty
weird, but still, you can be an awesome dragon if you want), and the Coalition Dog
Pack (mutant dogs that the Coalition uses as cops and cannon fodder).
The wizard classes also include the Techno-Wizard, who sucks at casting
spells, but can make all kinds of P.P.E.-powered devices. A Techno-Wizard can
convert a laser pistol or a car to run on magic energy (though emphatically not a
particle beam gun for some reason), and they can make cool gliders or even a magic
power armor. Of course, these things are largely inferior to technological gear.
Seriously, given that the increase in supernatural energy makes magic Mega-Dam-
age is a core conceit of the game, you’d think it would actually be viable in combat.

18
Supplemental
As I write this, Rifts is up to 36 World Books, 18 sourcebooks, 15 Dimension
Books, 3 Conversion Books, and I could go on, but the point is there are a hell of
a lot of books. They certainly live up to the name “Palladium Books” in terms of
publishing a lot of, you know, books. I might take issue if they tried to call them-
selves “Palladium Games,” even though that would be a more sensible name for a
game company. The World Books have developed most of Rifts Earth now, and
it’s become kind of glaring that the world has a fair number of technologically
sophisticated nations that aren’t really talking to one another, apart from the ties
between the Coalition and the New German Republic.
More than any other RPG, Palladium or otherwise, Rifts has tons of material
that seemingly came from an artist drawing something that looked cool and the
writer (usually Siembieda himself) writing up stats for it. The original cover of
Rifts itself is a great example. It’s a strikingly bizarre piece with a weird tentacled
humanoid creature holding a staff with a glass sphere containing an eyeball, stand-
ing on a hover platform surrounded by sexy identical women in what look like
swimsuits and holding blasters. It wasn’t until the game’s first supplement, the
Rifts Sourcebook, that we learned that this was a Splugorth Slaver accompanied by
a squad of Altara Blind Warrior Women, and that the slaver just works for the
actual Splugorth. It wouldn’t be until the book on Atlantis that we got information
about the Splugorth themselves, which turned out to be tentacle monsters with tens
of thousands of M.D.C. and capable of casting basically every spell ever.
The first Rifts “Dimension Book” was Wormwood, which was that same ten-
dency on a grand scale, where Siembieda spun a 20-page comic (that would’ve
been at home in 2000 AD I think) into a 160-page supplement. It’s a really weird
setting, taking place on a living planet, where nearly everything—food, water,
clothes, weapons, etc.—is derived from the planet itself in some worryingly direct
way. The people of Wormwood don’t grow food, they find food caves where
Wormwood grows nutritious food fibers. There are classes for various kind of
priests and knights, and a lot of PCs can have symbiotes derived from Wormwood,
which will fall off and die if the character ever leaves the planet. The heroes of
Wormwood are in a desperate struggle against the Unholy and his demonic min-
ions, who want to conquer and corrupt the world. Also, humans from Wormwood
are Mega-Damage for some reason.
The second Dimension Book (with a whole bunch of other Dimension Books
serving as supplements to it) was Phase World, which was a neat science-fantasy
setting. It spanned three galaxies, and included the vile Kreeghor Empire, the more

19
Star Trek like Consortium of Civilized worlds, and the magical United Worlds of
Warlock. It’s as awesomely kitchen sink as Rifts, but in outer space.
The original Rifts core rulebook kicks things off around 100 P.A. (Post-Apoc-
alypse), and they’ve since advanced the timeline a bit. The Africa book had a bunch
of space taken up by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the heroes who
gathered to fight them, and we learned in later books that the heroes won, so yay.
In the Coalition War Campaign book, the Coalition got new kinds of armor and
whatnot (with designs by Vince Martin), which caught them up to the power creep
of other high-tech stuff, but thereby made them even more ridiculously overpow-
ered compared to magic and psionics. There was a whole “Siege on Tolkeen”
storyline across a series of books where the Coalition walloped the little bastion of
freedom and civilization, surprising no one.

Actual Quotes from Rifts

• Heck, back in 1984 when I designed Heroes Unlimited it had sections on
bionics, robotics, and augmented super-humans that contained elements of
the so-called cyberpunk science fiction genre.
• This is the Han Solo, Star Wars, character.
• “Borg” is the popular slang term for cyborg.
• Generally, a wilderness scout is a rough and tumble fellow, who enjoys
tests of skill, strength, and cunning, and who enjoys life to its fullest (and
purest).
• This character never sweats.
• But enough of my schoolgirl musings, let me set about to the task of chron-
icling my journeys.
• 35. Africa is again the "Dark Continent," mysterious and wilderness.
• The metamorphosis can be canceled at will, but the arcanist will be naked.
• Dual drive system, hard memory is 16 megabytes. Weight: one pound
(0.45kg). Cost: 4500 credits
• Black market cyber-docs are seldom nice guys.
• Note: There is no practical difference between old an new weapons. Any
perceived difference is purely psychological.
• Yeah, so the world of Rifts is a colorful place brimming with possibilities.
Great.

20
Savage Rifts
In 2016, Palladium licensed the Rifts setting to Pinnacle, which published a
Savage Worlds adaptation. Not only does Savage Worlds shows actual competent
game design, but the Savage Rifts books are just plain better-written. Each charac-
ter archetype has an interesting backstory that makes them sound exciting to play,
and the books generally make it feel like Rifts is a place where stories happen
rather than a container for ever more powerful batches of new guns.
Where the Palladium version is vague about what the PCs are supposed to be
doing, Savage Rifts adds the conceit of the Tomorrow Legion, a group of do-good-
ers who are trying to make the world of Rifts Earth a better place. The PCs are
members of the Legion, which can send them on missions, generally making the
whole thing more focused and cohesive.

Weird Rifts Class Names

• Butter Trolls
• Cyberai O.C.C.
• Cyberoid O.C.C.
• Fingertooth Carpetbagger
• Full Standard Crazy O.C.C.
• Glitter Girl Pilot O.C.C.
• Gypsy Wizard Thief O.C.C.
• Jackaroo O.C.C.
• Maxi-Man O.C.C.
• Mutant Capybara R.C.C.
• Paradox Shaman O.C.C.
• Psi-Ponies R.C.C.
• Refurbisher O.C.C.
• Songjuicer O.C.C.
• Tandori R.C.C.
• Were-Dragon R.C.C.
• Whack Job Scientist O.C.C.

21
 Since I had a little extra room, here’s Palladium-tan, an anime mascot girl
based on Palladium/Rifts that my friend Thinh Pham designed for Mascot-tan.

22
The Robotech RPG Tactics Debacle
Tabletop RPGs are a small hobby, especially for those of us who do anything
that isn’t D&D, to the point where it’s a bit of a stretch to call it an “industry” per
se. Since there isn’t a lot of money to be made, the people working in the industry
are mostly passionate hobbyists. While that’s a good thing in a lot of ways, it does
mean that there isn’t a whole lot of razor-sharp business acumen on display. Pal-
ladium isn’t the most egregious example of that—I can think of multiple supposed
industry veterans whose Kickstarters became huge clusterfucks—but they still
make you wonder how they’ve managed to stay afloat.
Palladium already weathered an embezzlement/theft scandal that Siembieda
dubbed the Crisis of Treachery™, and while it’s extremely Siembieda to call it that,
it does suck that someone he trusted cost the company around a million dollars. He
was able to rally his fans and sell limited edition prints, and Palladium kept going.
More recently, there was something that might ultimately tank the company.
In 2013, Palladium ran a Kickstarter campaign for Robotech RPG Tactics, a
miniatures game based on Robotech. Making a miniatures game based on Ro-
botech is kind of a no-brainer really, given that it’s (the Americanized version of)
one of the most popular mecha anime series of all time. Of course, Palladium isn’t
exactly known for state-of-the-art game design (as I hope I’ve made clear), and
they were smart enough to team up with Ninja Division, a well-established pub-
lisher of tabletop games, including the Super Dungeon miniatures games.
The Kickstarter raised $1.4 million, and from there it descended into an epic
clusterfuck. It’s a bit much to try to squeeze into this zine format, but there were
severe problems with manufacturing the models in China—which you’d think that
Ninja Division could’ve easily avoided—and with all the wasted time and money
a whole lot of people didn’t get what they paid for.
Harmony Gold had been really happy with Palladium up until then—which I
guess shows how little they know and/or care about the intricacies of RPG de-
sign—but the giant mess with the miniatures game was enough for them to decide
not to renew the license.
Of course, Harmony Gold isn’t a great company in the first place. They’ve
used legal threats to stop people from so much as selling (official, clearly legal)
Macross merchandise in the U.S., and they’ve been extremely litigious over giant
robot designs that are even vaguely similar to those in Robotech, which is how
early BattleTech got to into such a mess of lawsuits. Given that the license is shaky
in the first place (since it’s unclear that Tatsunoko actually has the rights and thus
the ability to sub-license in the first place) and given that HG sued Tatsunoko,
chances are when the license runs out in 2021 it won’t get renewed.

23
 A relatively unknown publisher called Strange Machine Games picked up a
license to publish Robotech tabletop games—including a new RPG called Ro-
botech: The Macross Saga—and while I wish them the best, it may turn out to be
one of those licensed RPGs with a short lifespan.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Kickstarter backers have already filed legal complaints against Palladium, and
there’s been talk of a class action lawsuit. It remains to be seen whether that could
be the thing that finally brings the company down. I wouldn’t celebrate it, but I
wouldn’t be the tiniest bit surprised.
Robotech was my gateway into RPGs, and in high school my friends and I
played a ton of Robotech and Rifts, and got at least some use out of practically
every Palladium RPG. I’m grateful for that in a lot of ways. It taught me not to be
satisfied with what I’d been playing, but we also did in fact have a whole lot of fun
over the years. I wrote a pretty ridiculous amount of original material, and even
got an article published in The Rifter (the thing on space and space magic in issue
#10). I don’t think I could go back after discovering games with better rules like
Mekton Z, Fate, Truth & Justice, and Apocalypse World, but I’ll still treasure my
experiences from back in the day.
Whatever happens to Palladium in the future, let’s try to remember it as a com-
pany that was always really excited to bring us stuff they hoped we would have
fun with.

24