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Saturday, October 18, 2014

House Rules and RIFTS: Introduction - Making This Your Game

Palladium Books, as a matter of publisher and editorial intent, is a strong advocate for taking the rules and content that they publish and making it into something that you are willing to run and your players be willing to play. In short, Palladium Books' policy is friendly towards using all the house rules that you desire. However, Palladium also has a history of being skittish about sharing the home-brewed stuff due to a fear of law suits over conversions of properties that they neither own nor have a license to use. There shall be no such things in this series of posts.

Instead, I will talk about something more fundamental, and that is making the rules of RIFTS conform to what results you and yours want them to produce. I will start with the most fundamental rule mechanics, and then I will slowly wind my way out from that core towards subsystems like Magic and Psionics. I will talk about making sense of the gear creation (lack of a) system, inter-system dependency (and when you should use it), and other things of this nature- all with an eye towards keeping the results of your home-brewing on target with your intended objectives.

In doing this, I will explore the whole of Palladium's published corpus of rules and content (with a focus on RIFTS, of course). We'll take a good look at what Palladium offers, and see how these things work when run as-written, so we have something to compare our house rules against- and I expect that we may find that some of you will be satisfied with what already exists in some respects (or even across the board). This should be a fun and useful series, and I hope that you get a great deal of value out of it.

Next week, we will take a look at the core mechanics--and there is more than one--at the heart of Palladium's games and how they are applied. This will prove to be illuminating. See you then.

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