This Coalition Worship Has Gone Full Retard

So, today I received the weekly email from Palladium Books updating subscribers on what's out and what's coming. I cannot make this shit up.



QUOTE!

Rifts® Sourcebook – The Coalition States: Heroes of Humanity The events unfolding in World Book 35: Megaverse® in Flames threaten to change the entire landscape of Rifts® Earth, as the demonic minions of Hades and Dyval seek to bring Hell on Earth and turn the planet into a dimensional gateway to Armageddon!

The Coalition States, along with Northern Gun and Lazlo, take the lead in the defense of North America. Heroes of Humanity explores the good and bad in the Coalition’s efforts to save humanity and send this new threat back to the pits of Hell.

• New Coalition weapons, armor and war machines.
• The Coalition States: Are they heroes or villains? Or does it depend on whether you are human or not?
• Can the CS fight alongside mages and D-Bees if it means saving the world?
• How is the CS dealing with the Minion War on Earth?
• One plan to battle the Xiticix and who really pays the price.
• Adventure ideas and more.
• Written by Kevin Siembieda, Matthew Clements and other contributors.
• Final page count and cost yet to be determined but probably 96 pages – $16.95 retail – Cat. No. 889.

What is this I don't even.

But wait, there's more!

Rifts® Secrets of the Coalition States: The Disavowed

“Desperate times require desperate measures. War has nothing to do with morality or justice. It’s all about winning or dying. We cannot bind our hands with high ideals, even our own, or worry about the laws of renegade nations or the rights of alien people. We must fight fire with fire. And you are the match.” – Colonel Lyboc, addressing a Disavowed team.

The Disavowed are so Top Secret that their existence is known only to a handful of the Coalition States’ most elite, top echelon, with Joseph Prosek II the mastermind behind the Disavowed operation, and Colonel Lyboc its shadowy face. Find out who these men and women are. How the Disavowed get away with using magic, traveling to other parts of Rifts Earth and even to other dimensions in pursuit of enemies and strategic information that cannot be had through conventional means. Learn about the secret parameters in which these hard-boiled warriors, secretly hand-picked by Joseph Prosek II, operate, why almost every mission is considered a suicide mission, and why they must forever be the Disavowed.

• CS operatives so secret that even the top military and political leaders right up to Emperor Prosek know nothing about them. And if they did know, would they condone their activity or condemn it?
• Are the Disavowed heroes or renegades? Assassins or soldiers? Madmen or super-patriots? Or a little of them all?
• Unsung heroes who keep the CS safe, or thugs and pawns of a shadow agency within the Coalition government?
• What role does the Vanguard play in this group?
• How do they reward their D-Bee “teammates” when the mission is over?
• What happens to the Disavowed when they have seen or learned too much? Adventure ideas galore and so much more.
• Written by Kevin Siembieda and Matthew Clements.
• Final page count and cost yet to be determined, but probably 96 pages – $16.95 retail – Cat. No. 892.

Full. Retard.

We can stop fapping over these techno-Nazis any time now. They're Nazis. Stop trying to make Good Guys out of them, Uncle Kevin. Yes, I do blame you and not the "co-author" whose manuscript you--if you hold to your pattern, and you usually do--suckered out of the guy and then hacked up to suite your sophomoric sensibilities (which haven't matured since the 1970s). Christ, folks! This is just the sort of crap-tastic content that I spent so many posts trying to clean up and make sensible. Bother.

The Juicer: Augmentation For Expendable Assets

RIFTS posits a handful of well-known archetypes for human augmentation, and one of them is the chemical route. Juicers are chemically-augmented soldiers, usually used as Special Forces assets and commonly deployed as snipers and assassins, whose chemical enhancements bring them super-human capabilities in physical might and endurance at the cost of burning out the body within 5-7 years of completing the conversion process. As these are the facts behind this fictional system, I can only conclude that this process came about because the state or other entity that needed it had a massive surplus of men willing and able to serve as soldiers, but for whatever reason deemed utterly expendable and unwanted by the oligarchy ruling that state or entity.

In other words, Juicers came about because someone need a lot of jacked-up cannon fodder and didn't want to deal with the consequences of having that surge of veterans re-enter civilian life after the war ended. Long-time gamers may recall another game with a very similar vibe to it--Underground, published by Mayfair--that also had this question come up; the difference, as is commonplace with Palladium products, is the lack of effort spent in answering that question. Oligarchies that are prone to scooping up large segments of their population, using a large subset as a resource for achieving an objective and then discarding it like soiled toilet paper are exactly the sorts that would embrace Juicer augmentation technology.

In the canon, this is said to come out of Europe and I can indeed believe that one or more European states (or factions thereof) would indeed invent and deploy this sort of technology. They would use it to target the young men of their underclasses, recruit them into the military, convert them into Juicers and then manipulate the wars to last long enough for the process to kill them all off within months of the war's end (for all but a handful; all are dead within a year or so). Once the Detox process became viable, this could easily be extended to civilian convicts: accept service as a Juicer in return for your record being wiped clean upon Detox. (Once Cyborg technology gets to a point where swapping brains into shells becomes reliable, "promoting" Juicers to Cyborg shells becomes another viable alternative.)

As chilling as seeing European governments "solve" their "undesirable" problem through exploiting the men--and some of the women--as Juicers may be, I think that it would be far more commonly done in the Americas and Asia once the technology got out there and the means to convert people became easier to establish and maintain within a country; waves of wars would come as one age cohort reached prime draft age, got sucked into it as Juicers and either died in combat or died due to the process burning them out, with only a small core remaining to train the next cohort. The poor of the world, already a prime target for exploitation of this sort, become little more than crops reaped in regular intervals- and the very expendable assets used abroad would become used at home to quell dissension against such exploitation.

The real game-changing point, however, becomes when (by comparison) rather ordinary criminal syndicates become able to field Juicers. Right now we have well-known cartel organizations such as the Medellin of Colombia and Los Zetas of Northern Mexico, groups that were or are sufficiently flush with capital to acquire and maintain military gear and the skills necessary to make the most of it. In this hypothetical situation, once Juicer technology becomes that reliable and replicable these same organizations will be able to take scores of gang-banging street thugs and transform them into superhuman hitmen- utterly expendable superhuman hitman at that, and they will not have a hard time recruiting. The same goes for partisan or terrorist organizations, as they walk in the same circles, and (for the same reason) it's likely to come when this or that intelligence agency flubs an operation and loses a Juicer conversion set-up to a group of that sort.

All this, by the way, is pre-Rifts. After the Coming of the Rifts, there's no reset button- it's all the way back to the worst scenario as soon as someone starts up a conversion operation again because the scope and scale of institutional organization is so small. There's the Coalition & Free Quebec, then Lazlo/Tolkeen/Dwemeor and then Everyone Else- so far as North American goes. Elsewhere is no better, and often a lot worse.

So, what are we left with? The Juicer is a loser. If he volunteered, then he's either a well-meaning sucker or a brain-addled fool. Most likely is that he's forced into it somehow, which means that he's not at all privileged- and likely comes from an underclass or outcast status of some sort. The bravado, the bullshitting, the glamor- it's all ego-armor covering the fact that they're going to die, die horribly and die soon. To be a Juicer is to have No Future; you've chosen to burn out than fade away- so act accordingly.

Coalition Jucier Units: The Three Most Common Types

Spartan: This is the common penal Juicer. He is an otherwise normal human male, either heterosexual or bisexual, who committed an offense and got caught. (Or got framed, but we're talking Official Dogma here.) He is a trained soldier, and the specific form of Juicer he becomes depends upon that training; most are baseline, a few are Phaeton (pilot) types, with others being rare or non-existent. These guys get used like marines; they get sent first where the resistance is hardest, and they are expected to succeed or die trying- those that retreat do get shot by their (not-Juicer) officers. Very few ascend into the Immortals. Their CO is always "Leonidas", and they come in 300-man units; amongst the Inner Elite, this is considered hilariously funny.

Theban: The Inner Elite has little love for homosexuals. Thanks to DNA testing, male homosexuals are identified early and then tracked into training as a Juicer upon draft age; neither they nor their families are ever told that this is anything other than a high honor. They are not mistreated, but--as with their namesakes--are encouraged to find love within the ranks. If those Spartans are the dogmeat sent into the grinder, Thebans are glorious soldiers sent to do Very Important Things that nevertheless are usually certain death such as hold the line during retreats, make diversionary assaults against hard points or take on enemy elites and tie them down so artillery can tear them up. (The artillery commanders aren't told to be precise, by the way.) Most of the Immortals come from these units. These also come 300 at a time; this too is often thought of as a hilarious joke.

Gorgon: The Inner Elite has no need of women that can't breed (not won't; they send those women elsewhere), and are too ugly to use as spies (not too plain; again, those women get sent elsewhere- we mean fugly). These women are the rarest of the Coalition Juicers, are always of the baseline model, and operate as three-man teams. They aren't used in military operations on the battlefield. They're used strictly as deniable killers by Intelligence. The team leader, usually the most personable of the trio, is "Medusa"; their handler is always "The Eye". The Inner Elite snicker like brats over this also. Gorgons that ascend into the Immortals are rare.