Putting It Together: Crossing The Streams

RIFTS is a tabletop role-playing game that professes the capacity to play whatever you can imagine. While the reality of this is less than the imagery created by the advertising copy, this is not false; it just takes some work to make it viable at the able. With that in mind, let us take a moment to talk about doing that.

There is a difference between "crossing the streams" (a campaign that melds two or more archetypical campaign models together) and a kitchen sink game where anything goes no matter the sensibility of it. We want the former, and not the latter, so we are not sloughing off the necessary work that running a campaign entails. Instead, we are changing what the workload is and the order of operations.

No, no handy media example this week. Now I'm making you do your own research. Hop to it, and get used to doing it; that's what it takes to make the pre-game work of a GM into something useful at the table.

RIFTS and Your Game: Use the Sources as Guides for House Ruling

As I said previously, RIFTS uses geographic separation as the primary means to contain different genres--and different forms of gameplay--in a single line of products. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that RIFTS draws on a lot of source material for inspiration; as much of RIFTS comes from freelance writers' submissions, many writers draw from a lot of media sources for their work (which Uncle Kevin filters in turn when he rewrites the manuscript). Being able to recognize those sources, and them to use those sources for your own purposes, is a useful way to make this trend in Palladium's publishing practices work in your favor.

The most blatant example comes from the first Triax book, where there is a rather obvious lifting from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, and many of the other mecha and cyborgs in the book are likewise only a step or two away from their source inspirations in Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, and similar science fiction works out of Japan originating in the mid-to-late 1980s or so. Another is the Burster from the core rulebook (Stephen King's Firestarter and Pyro of Marvel's "X-Men"). Once you know the sources, you can--and should--investigate them to see how the original material executes the concept and compare it both to what the as-written game version executes it as well as how you want it to work (assuming that it differs).

Digging into this will involve engaging with the mechanics of Palladium's game engine at various points, and that means dealing with math. Have your calculator handy.

Say, for example, you're a big Gundam fan and you want to play this up. Using the Triax Devastator (the not-Gundam), you want to know in playable terms things like (a) how far can it move per round (involves converting real-world measurements into game-playable ones), getting in and powering up (vital for ambush scenarios), speed of reloading/refueling (matters in long engagements w/ nearby resupply, especially if not using an engine w/ practically unlimited fuel), and other concerns that real (para)military pilots should (and do) concern themselves with. Converting all this into a set of data that players (who are NOT pilots, and often lack (para)military experience, and so would not readily think of such thing) can use at the table is necessary tedium. Some similar process is necessary for every other source material analysis you want to make, even if the material is about something so unreal that you're going off game mechanics and hunches.

The purpose for this is simple: by generating the data, you're testing to see if the claim (explicit or implicit) has the evidence needed to back it up. If your robot doesn't perform the way you think it does, then having the data on hand is a good thing. First, you have evidence on hand to disprove the claim. Second, you have a start point from which you can make useful changes to get the result that you want in a manner that will work in actual play and be supportable when (not if) it's disputed. Being the Game Master means mastering the game, and that means mastering the rules; making the rules work to support what results you want out of the game comes easily once you achieve rules mastery. It's worth the effort.

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.

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.

Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Exploration Campaign

Five-year missions, expeditions into the unknown, seeking the Northwest Passage- these are stories of exploration and RIFTS has plenty of room for those who seek to make known what is unknown.

The core of a campaign focused upon exploration is that the players assume the roles of individuals who are either trained for exploration, or they are specialists of a different--but necessary--sort assigned to such a task. The specific venue varies widely--overland, oversea, undersea, space, planar, etc.--but the format is the same: a team of explorers forms to investigate what, if anything, lies beyond a given threshold. This can be a mountain range or other significant terrain feature, space itself- you get the idea. Adventures are built around penetrating this threshold and then seeing what is there; making first contact with locals, mapping the territory explored, and preserving this information long enough to report back to their patron(s) so follow-up expeditions can be made with the benefit of that knowledge.

Exploration campaigns, therefore, are mixtures of diplomacy and adventure on a dangerous and unknown frontier. Players should be working with low amounts of information, dealing with material scarcity due to being at the tail end of a long logistical train (so they can't operate at optimal efficiency or effectiveness most of the time; this is "count your rations and arrows" territory), and have to deal with constraints that players in other campaigns either don't have to worry about or never even realize exist. Figuring out how to compensate for these scarcity issues, often by interacting with the locals and learning their methods, is part-and-parcel of a properly-executed exploration campaign.

The other issue with an exploration campaign is that what often follows is either exploitation of natural resources, or population movements into colonial settlements, and either development not only strains extant relations with the locals but--unless reversed--inevitably pushes back the frontier as Civilization (i.e. whom the explorers represent) comes in to fill the void that a frontier represents. You can either end a campaign when this phase of exploration arrives, or you can roll with the punches and take the opportunity to shift the campaign in a different direction; each primary exploration expedition, each first contact situation, each push into the unknown presents an opportunity to find something heretofore unseen and unknown to the players. New mysteries to solve, new cultures to interact with, new lands to investigate- this is the feature that keeps it fresh for years on end. Exploit this feature whenever things start to flag.

Exploration campaigns are best done the old-fashioned way: the sandbox. The GM should decide on the region to explore, and set up initial sets of circumstances (including what Occupations, technologies, etc. are allowed to players), and then let them interact without any concern for narrative logic of any sort- the players will, without fail, fill in all such voids with their own notions and thereby succeed or fail without so much as a word out of the GM's mouth. (And that is the other side to all of this: expeditions fail, often disastrously. If they want to be the Donner Party, let them.)

This is a model where your Men-at-Arms will not be so heavily represented, and your Men-of-Magic/Psychics will be likewise reduced in prominence, in favor of Adventurers and Scholars. You need Wilderness Scouts, first and foremost, and then Scholars and Scientists (including medical experts and technicians) with focuses on field operations (which is done by skill selection and equipment choices; someone that needs a big-city lab is not the sort to send on such things, unless it's based out of something like a starship, and that likely means such an individual will be a NPC). Generalists will be more prized members, speaking of Armsmen and Magicians/Psychics, over specialists and time-limited augmented individuals like Juicers are bad choices- as are those tied to logistical trains (Cyborgs) or already unstable (Crazies). (This, again, is where the magical sorts have an advantage so long as magical power is in sufficient abundance.) Problems are better solved by talking or fixing than by fighting, most of the time, and running is not a bad idea- players cannot presume that whatever they face they can handle.

Exploration campaigns are also easily transitioned into and out of because the core of the campaign's paradigm is inherently unstable, and thus temporary, so you can use an exploration phase as a change-of-pace for another campaign when you see the need for such a thing. If you start as exploration, but the players are not interested anymore, it is not hard to let the frontier shift away from them and let them take up positions in the emerging post-exploration communities that arise in the wake of successful exploration expeditions. When devising what to do with a game of RIFTS, don't count exploration out; even as just a temporary phase, you can really get to the heart of what makes tabletop RPGs special by returning to the origin of the hobby- exploration of the unknown, be it for gold, for glory, or for getting away from where they came from.

Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Starship Campaign

This is the sort of thing you'll see in a Three Galaxies setup, usually, though a Earth System version ("Spaceship" instead of "Starship" due to the lack of FTL technologies) does happen. You've seen this in other media in many variations--Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars, Outlaw Star, Angel Links, Space Battleship Yamato, etc.--so it's not a hard one to figure out here. The players assume the role of a ship's captain and crew, and the campaign focuses upon their activities. Other tabletop RPGs, such as the venerable Traveller, are all about this sort of thing.

You've got three major variations of this campaign archetype.

• The Tramp Freighter: The ship is a working commercial vessel of some sort (usually a small-scale cargo or passenger vessel, working as a for-hire charter vessel or along adjunct lines tied to major commerce lanes). The scope of the campaign is often "local" (in space-faring terms; working within a solar system is the lowest end, within a small stellar region or zone the typical end, w/ greater scope being very rare). Common gameplay activities revolve around keeping the vessel operational, keeping themselves in good health, and keeping their difficulties away. Players assume the roles of characters with little or no augmentation, supernatural power, or out-of-the-ordinary technologies. (So, we're looking as the sort of table where being a City Rat is not out of line, and being a Vagabond is a viable option; ordinary military personnel in their ordinary capacities are a significant challenge, and better outwitted than outfought.)
  
• The Exploration Expedition: The ship is a public or private vessel configured for (if not purpose-built for) long-term, and often long-range, exploration. The scope of the campaign is often very far-ranging, and both the crew and the vessel will be trained and equipped to operate in a self-sufficient manner. First Contact is a common gameplay activity, and with it the potential to engaging in a wide variety of diplomatic and economic negotiations (and their intrigues) with heretofore unknown parties. While the nigh-platonic form is classic Star Trek and it's Five-Year Mission, taking inspiration from real-life histories of exploration expedition is a good idea. Players assume the role of key officers, and often take up alts of lower status who are more likely to engage in shore expeditions or otherwise do stuff that matters away from the ship. As with the Tramp Freighter, the characters are unlikely to be superhuman or super-powered (in relative terms, if not absolute ones) and the same will be--for the most part--true of the technology at their disposal at any time.
  
• The Warship Campaign: The ship is a warship, engaged in warfare operations. In this respect it's a shipborne variant of the Mercenary or Military Campaign, but as with the others the ship as both homebase and focal point is part of the paradigm. Campaigns of this sort take their cues from Space Battleship Yamato, various Age of Sail series, and the real-life accounts of ships such as the Enterprise in World War II. Their activities focus around military operations, so there is an overall objectives to keep in sight, and there is a determined opposition out to stop them by means of blowing them out of the sea of stars. Combat--fleet and personal--is a common occurrence, but this need not be a series of fights; real warfare is about objectives, not slugfests, so it's about getting yours before the other side gets theirs. Players also assume the roles of key officers, and should take up alts that do stuff the key officers wouldn't do.
  

In addition, you're going to have the following traits in common:

• The Ship: Whatever form it takes, the ship is a character unto itself and should be treated like one. Even if the stats for it enter play as any other of its class, that specific vessel is specific to that captain and crew and should be individuated accordingly. ("There are many like it, but this one is ours.") Players should value the ship as the expensive, mission-critical thing that it is and not be cavalier about its welfare. The ship is homebase for the characters. It's the focus of their operations. It's the center of their lives, without which they're unable to carry on at all.
  
• The Travelling: It's not a starship campaign if you're not sailing the sea of stars. It's a naval game, so get out of port and out in space. You should be visiting new ports of call on a regular basis, with only a few locations being seen frequently; regular visits to a known friendly port is something that depends on the specific set up of your starfaring campaign (tramp freighters and exploration vessels will visit on very different rates of regularity and frequency). Being that this is RIFTS, it's going to be more Space Opera than Hard SF, so you've got that going for you; don't be shy about the planets and what's there.
  
• The Other Starfarers: Your opposition is very likely to be as spaceborne as your allies are. This means that you and your players need to figure out how your table wants to handle ship-to-ship interactions (combat and otherwise) to ensure that the players aren't bored when time comes for the crew to make the ship happen. This will differ depending upon the ship; tramp freighters with some guns attached are not the same as a naval dreadnaught in command of a squadron or even a massive fleet. (Yes, you can get your Legend of the Galactic Heroes on here, so go for it.)
  

The rest is your bog-standard figure-that-shit-out-at-your-table stuff. Enjoy.

Playing a Psychic in RIFTS, Part 10: Putting It Together

By now, you know what kind of psychic your psychic man is. You've gotten into your man's head, so you know where he's coming from and how his thinks. Now, how does your man deal with others?

Good question.

First, a simple and pragmatic matter: you are playing a team-based game, wherein you cooperate to accomplish objectives and deal with scenarios put before you- either self-generated or encountered via emergent gameplay, so it behooves you (and the others at the table) to play well with others, part of which being making a man who does so.

Now, on with it.

Regardless of your man's abilities and level of power, your man is still a psychic and therefore has a unique perspective on things that non-psychics do not share. Exactly what that perspective is will vary--see the previous Archetype posts--but magic-users and mundanes cannot see things as your man does; what your man does, and especially how your man does it, is beyond their capacity to comprehend and as such your man bring a vital asset to any team that your man joins.

Telepaths and Sensitives are good at facilitating communication and unit cohesion amongst a team, either directly through psychic mind-to-mind contact or by facilitating mundane leadership and management skills to get desired results faster. Psycho-Kinetics are able to augment a team's firepower and work as a force-multiplier. Gishes have their own well-defined niches, and Hybrids suggest their own engagement within a team by what they blend together. When making your man, it's a good idea to talk with the others at the table to establish these team relations before you start throwing the dice around; the sooner that everyone is on the same page, the better everyone's gameplay experience will be and the faster that all of you can get to the good stuff and maximize your fun and entertainment.

That last part is a matter that is specific to your table, so I really can't get too specific in advice; what I can do is recommend that you look into non-fiction books about making the most of teamwork environments, and take notes as to how well your man either conforms to or contradicts the proven methods and techniques for successful integration into such environments so that you can play your man accordingly- and, if possible, do this with your fellow players. Even for the most powerful of psychics, the ability to do well with others makes succeeding at your goals far easier and more common than those who lack such social faculties.

And next week, I'll move on to something else altogether: a shift to the sorts of common campaigns in RIFTS.

Playing a Psychic in RIFTS, Part 9: Hybrids

If a Gish is a psychic whose powers synergize with a mundane occupational suite to create a superior whole from the parts, then a Hybrid is a psychic who also wields a second power source with equal power. In RIFTS, this is most obvious with the Mystic, which I covered in the Magic-User series previously. There are variations on this in other books, which I leave to you to review at your leisure.

While the Mystic is a hybrid psychic and magic-user, focusing upon sensitive psychic powers and basic spell-casting, both derived from a strong connection to the unseen cosmic forces via their intuition, the archetype in general can cast its net much wider than that. Therefore, what makes the mind of a Hybrid is not the nature of their powers, but rather that they have two or more sources of power at equal (roughly) levels and therefore have to split their attention (and develop their consciousness) between them. This is how a Hybrid's perspective enables them to become capable of seeing multiple points of view, making them capable diplomats and mediators due to this cognitive bias that comes out of their development.

The price, predictably, is that a Hybrid is never fully able to assimilate their sense of identity into either of their sources of power; the blended power perspective grants diversity and breadth at the cost of specialization and depth. Therefore they tend to seek out others like themselves, with varying levels of success, if they seek a community of their own at all. (Mystics, for example, tend towards a level of self-reliance otherwise seen only in the Telepaths and Psychokinetics.) For the player, this means that your man will always be in a liminal mind and social space where things are unclear and one's existence is more of a frontier (even in the middle of a highly-civilized place).

This makes Hybrids good for your usual gameplay scenarios. Even if they prefer to operate above-board at all times, they will still be in that liminal space and therefore be open to the sort of scenarios that are typical in RIFTS. Their ability to operate in two distinct environments (literally or otherwise) give them something other than their powers to bring to the table, and due to Hybrids being sufficiently different amongst themselves due to what powers they blend together you can have multiples of this type and not end up with carbon-copies. Distinctiveness of character is quite possible with Hybrids.

A character's personality writes itself when keeping the archetype's major traits in mind. Individuality comes at the edges, where specific encounters and experiences can color the specific manifestation in different direction. When making a Hybrid, this is your space for customization of his persona, so exploit it; you'll come up with a sufficient background in the process, and still able to put it all on a 3x5 card. Simple, quick, easy.

Playing a Magic-User in Rifts, Part 20: Epilogue

We're at the end.

Going over the way magic works, and the useful examples of how magic-use manifests, in RIFTS has proven quite instructive and beneficial to me over these past few months. Most of what I wrote about here can be applied to other RPGs, be they tabletop games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons) or video games of various genres (e.g. World of Warcraft, Dragon Age: Origins), so I do hope that you keep them in mind. Furthermore, because I applied some real-world occultism (*gasp!*) to bring order to the usual Palladium mess of concepts and conceits, you can look over at the New Age and Occult shelves at the bookstore for sources to fill the gaps that Palladium's amateurism and incompetent approach leaves in the material.

So, let's review the core of magic in this game:

• Magic can be taught. At first it's by supernatural entities striking deals with ordinary mortals for the former's reasons, but in time it always turns into a wholly secular pursuit no different to how real-world science and engineering works: a body of lore on how the universe works, then applied as useful tools to solve practical problems and open new avenues of interaction.
  
• Magic is both science and technology; the use of spell and ritual is how the science is applied as technology. Since both are internal to the user, this makes the knowledge into the tool and not just a means to get to a tool; this is why magic is considered dangerous- it doesn't give people bombs, it makes people into autonomous bomb-throwing bomb factories.
  
• Magic is natural. It's powered by infinitely-renewable, clean (by default), naturally-occurring energy and the core of all use of magic is the ability to tap into this energy and transmute it into whatever form the desired effect takes. "Unnatural" magical energies, therefore, are caused by pollution into these natural clean flows by other entities. A magic-using civilization is one of the most environmentally-friendly ones possible, and it is always one that is post-scarcity so long as that magic energy remains available.
  
• Magic-using civilizations are, without fail, always going to become stronger and tougher than those that eschew it; you can't be a Megaversal power-player if you are not a magic-user. This is why magic-use is a leveling thing, restricted where it is used by those in power and outright persecuted by those that don't; this includes those civilizations who have access to powers akin to (but are not) magic, for all intents and purposes.
  

Magic, contrary to what most think, is Promethean. It is how a simple boy born in the middle of nowhere in a backwater world as the son of an utterly ordinary man can become a godlike being contending successfully with Megaversal powers on their own terms; other routes to that destination require qualities that cannot be taught, require transformation of one's body or mind, or have some other random element or external constraint forever freezing out people out and keeping down those let in. Magic alone has no such constraints; the limits to a magic-user's scale and scope of power is entirely dependent on the will, imagination, and drive of the user- and those already at that point are well-aware of this fact, which is why they act as they do (out of either fear or love) with regard to magic and magic-users. Magic is what makes mortals and gods into equals, and the gods never forget that fact- and neither do powerful mortals made powerful through the use of magic. Remember this in your games and characters to come.

Next week, I begin "Playing a Psychic".

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 19: An Overview of the Megaverse

Aside from the core of North America (i.e. Coalition territory) and a few places with similar attitudes, magic-use is a far more complex socio-political matter and its going to leave its mark wherever it goes.

• The magical societies of the entire Megaverse, let alone Rifts Earth, are tied together by groups of Ley-Line Walkers (and those with the same power; this is an Atlantean-dominated group) and supplemented by Shifters (and similar practitioners). Massive levels of conspiratorial and operational capability requires their involvement; this is one of the reason for why "major power" and "institutional magic-use" go hand-in-hand, because non-users cannot operate on this level.
  
• This includes the dimensions where demons, devils, angels, etc. reside; cross-dimensional schemes require command over ley lines and dimensional rifts, something that only magic-use reliably provides. Because these entities are the top-tier powers in the whole of the Megaverse, their conflicts will encompass and subsume everything else; they operate on scopes and scales that make even the long-term perspectives of god-like intelligences seem somehow subpar- but their motivations are hardly beyond mortal comprehension.
  
• Magical societies of any significant maturity will be aware as to the existence of other dimensions. Fully mature societies will possess a mostly-accurate comprehension of what the dimensional connections binding the Megaverse together are, and how they interact; this includes the critical matter of mana flows (i.e. very powerful such as Rifts Earth, moderate such as Palladium, or weak-as-shit like some other dimensions; the latter ones are avoided and treated as useless backwaters, sometimes exploited as a place to dump dissidents and criminals).
  
• The gods and similar powers are very powerful, and from a mortal and gameplay point of view might as well be omnipotent, but they are not truly alien in their mentality and not truly omnipotent either; when working at a Megaversal scope and scale, we'll see comprehensible motivations and actions coming out of these godlike beings. The illusion comes from the limited perspective that most beings possess relative to that of the greatest powers in the Megaverse; this means that perspective, knowledge, and paying attention are keys being a successful magic-user regardless of Occupation- it's how magic-users born as humble, ordinary mortals can become viable competition to the most god-like of entities.
  
• Operating at this level means that maintaining awareness, and quickly getting up to speed on local conditions, is vital; your man need to be as much a competent scholar and intelligence operator as you are a magic-user (which, given the real world history of occulism and occulist overlap with espionage and intelligence operations, is hardly unusual). Gandalf, returning to a well-known example, was as much a handler and operative as he was a wielder of knowledge often hidden and employed in equally hidden ways (in addition to actual supernatural powers). (There is also the examples of Jack Parsons, for those wanting inspiration for a Techno-Wizard angle, and John Dee for a more old-school example.)
  
• Operating at the Megaversal level means that your fiction inspiration starts with the Lensman series and those that it inspired: The Green Lantern Corps, the Nova Corps, and (inside the game) Cosmo-Knights. That doesn't necessarily mean that your man wields such power, but that your man does possess the capability to think and operate on that level and therefore may acquire that degree of power- but it's not strictly necessary to be effective.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 18: An Overview of the Three Galaxies

As noted in the Interlude, I'm bringing this series to a close as its useful life has run out.

This week, as an end-cap, I'm going to bring some notes about playing a Magic-User away from the core milieu of the game and bring my notes instead on the wider Megaverse over the next few weeks.

• The Three Galaxies has a norm of institutional magic use, such that de facto techno-wizardry is the norm (and by that, I mean that is it normal to view magic and science as separate, but complimentary, disciplines). Magic-users are core parts of all of the agencies of the Three galaxies, either as full agents or as associates/auxiliaries. Each of the major powers (and, by extension, many minor ones) recognize the power and advantage that magic use grants to those that employ it, so anti-magic sentiment is rare out of institutions and almost as rare out of populations. The sentiment of the Coalition States, therefore, is one of the things that would mark it as a minor power (if recognized at all) in the wider scheme of things.
  
• Institutional magic use also means institutional magic development and refinement. Unlike most of Rifts Earth, magic-users in the wider Three Galaxies are far more likely (regardless of the form of their magic) to enjoy the benefits (and pay the costs) of a formalized and systematized pedagogy. There will be "Harvard men", "Oxford men", etc. because institutions leave their marks upon those that pass through them and those marks become tells to those who are aware of them. Relationships between educational and training institutions and various agencies of Megaversal powers will form and normalize, much as they do in real life between our universities and governments or corporations. (e.g. The Consortium of Confederated Worlds' service academies will include magic-users, and those magic-users who come out of those academies will go on to join the CCW Fleet, and then those who survive will go on to political or corporate positions- and the potential for being a skilled magic-user will be one of the paths out of poverty for CCW residents seeking to better themselves using socially-accepted means.)
  
• Institutional magic use also means institutional awareness of the power that magic provides, and that it can be taught/bestowed upon others, so therefore magic will be treated like any other science or technology which poses a probable threat to a government: it will be regulated, restricted, confined, controlled, and otherwise fettered to minimize that threat while maximizing its benefit to the government. (Or, in actual anarchies, the nation.) Magic use outside of the boundaries set by the government will be like political groups outside such boundaries: they will go underground, act in secret, and operate in a conspiratorial manner. (Much like being a magician or psychic in Coalition territory.)
  
• Magic use in the Three Galaxies, while diverse in an absolute sense, will be homogenized in actual play due to players being in regular contact with the major institutions and their institutional cultures- which, as noted above, will include their magic societies. Local variations will not vary much, if at all, from examples found on Rifts Earth; it's going to be different sets of trappings, but the substance (and therefore the mechanics) will be the same. Shaman are Shaman are Shaman, as it were- and it is still quitely likely that the Kreegor will brutally exterminate them with superior magical prowess coupled to overwhelming conventional firepower should they decide to do so (which further homogenizes the Three Galaxies' magical community).
  
• The minor players, where not already given useful examples in the product chain (e.g. Splugorth), will conform to varying degrees to the examples of the major powers because it is necessary to do so to maintain some form of autonomy apart from them; if they are not lost colonies, auxiliary or vassal states, or otherwise derive their origin from a major power then they will do so because--admitted or not--the example of the major powers is better than their own development and they adapt to survive.
  
• One consequence is that magic-users, in general, will be encountered more often. The bulk of these encounters will be with the tradesmen or technicians of the magical community; their skills and knowledge are narrowly focused, and shallow in depth, but often honed to a professional grade of competency because they--despite being magic-users--are still ensconced in the same level of socio-economic reality as the mundane population. The magic that they work is the means by which they make their living, and as such they either the ambition or the ability to fully manifest the potential that magic-use in general permits to mortal users. This is the realm of NPCs. The technician who oversees the Rift Drive on a United World of Warlocks starship is a magic-using engineeer specialized in the practical aspects of Rifts and dimensional magic theory; he's, at best, Scotty- and not at all Saruman.
  
• Another consequence is that non-users will not take magic as seriously as they should most of the time because the users that they encounter do not wield world-smashing powers, or even city-smashing powers, or have the potential for such; no one worries that the dude making custom bikes in a workshop out of the way of the main street in town is going to unleash nuclear forces that can't be handled- that's what the magic-using technicians and tradesmen are at. As a consequence, the perception of difference between magic and science is somewhat blurred; the conditions for full and proper techno-wizardry are there, but the breakthrough cognitive thought just hasn't happened yet. (Not unusual in real history; the Greeks has steam and hydralic technology, but did not think to use it to do real labor due to the massive slave and servant population.)
  
• Warfare, therefore, will account for what the known norms of magical practice allow for and will--in all competent actors--be planned for as best as that actor's resources allow. As with warfare, so with personal combat; if you're in an environment where your opposition can freely move at short-range with portal mechanics, you're going to train to deal with that and have counters ready to go.
  
• The Three Galaxies is a setting where magic-use is open, wide-spread, and institutionalized magic makes possible. Play accordingly.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS: Interlude

While there are plenty more magic-using Occupations in the game, those that remain are now variations on the Archetypes that I put down early on in this series. It is not a useful employment of this space to go over such details, so I won't spend this entry or future ones doing that.

So, wrapping up this series will be some posts on magic-users away from RIFTS Earth, focusing on the other major milieu of the game (i.e. the Three Galaxies), and then--for you tinkers, designers, and others who're inclined to mess with mechanics--some posts on my opinions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of playing a magic-user, and how to exploit the former while fixing the latter.

After that, I'm putting this series on the shelf for a while and shifting gears to another pillar of power in the game: Psychics.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 17: The Shaman

Palladium, for some reason that I think is not too hard to understand, seems to think that shamanism is an American phenomenon that is confined to the First Nations of that hemisphere. Furthermore, this seems to be confined to North American First Nations (due to Central America being overrun by vampires and South America being overrun with alien invaders of other sorts), so when one picks up RIFTS: Spirit West it is not surprising to see that the various Shaman Occupations are built on the assumptions that those Shaman are going to be First Nations (specifically, from the various Great Plains and Southwest nations or remnants originally from elsewhere that nonetheless relocated there). There is no concept extant that Shaman can arise in any other context, so there is no consideration given to any other variation thereof; this greatly limits the scope and scale of the Shaman Occupations in this book. Spirit West, therefore, is far more about making the mysticism of the 19th century Old West playable in a monster, mutants, and massive machines milieu than anything else.

That said, let's take a look at what's on offer.

The book has two Occupations that are not magic-users; these are two of the Warrior Occupations (Tribal and Mystic, respectively; the former is purely mundane, the second is a psychic.). The rest, be they labelled as Warrior or Shaman, are shaman variations; the variations are in emphasis and specialization, but otherwise they conform to the Shaman archetype of an individual chosen by the spirits to become a bridge of some sort between the ordinary and supernatural world. Totem and Spirit Warriors are Magic Knights; they trade some portion of mundane existence for a magical augmentation to their martial capacities, at the cost of some degree of behavior restriction (and an ongoing relationship with the source of their powers, which needs to be kept happy). The Shaman are, for our purposes, primary magic-users; they make the same sort of bargain, but are more about using their powers to aide the tribe and afflict hostiles using those powers themselves instead of in additional martial arts. These split by focus or source of their powers (Animal, Plant, Fetish/Mask, Elemental, Paradox, Healing), but otherwise are similar enough that one can generally grok one another's abilities and restrictions.

Okay, now, to extrapolate without resorting to outright mechanical revisions.

They chose you. Shaman are chosen, neither born nor made; senior shaman can, and do, foster their juniors (and societies of shaman chosen by a given spirit or spirits are very much a thing; priesthoods form out of them, should the circumstances allow it) but this is not necessary. The spirits are more than capable of teaching their chosen shaman how to do what they wish from him on their own; more formal priesthoods lack this they-call-you provision, which is a clear mark of distinction between these traditions.

Your powers are gifts from them, that come at a very palpable price. You are not an ordinary man anymore; you are taken up and adopted into the spirit world, to a certain extent, and you are expected to abide by the conditions that come with those powers, period. Your spirit patron comes first, always, and your duty to your people is--in large part--to keep them in harmony with the spirit world as your patron shows it to you. This can, and will, lead to conflicts between shaman societies when their spirit patrons' interests conflict. (Deer societies and Wolf societies are not friends.) A hippy you are NOT.

Your people expect you to represent them to the spirits. Bridges are two-way affairs, and the spirits expect you to be the one who relays between ordinary and supernatural. When the people are in distress, and are unable to handle things as they usually do, they will expect you to contact your spirit patrons and consult with them about the matter as best you (and they) can.

Now, that in mind, you're going to play a character that's not a self-serving loner. You're part of a community, part of a culture, and being a Shaman (any sort) means that you're participating in that situation--in that environment--and therefore you are part of both that tribal society as well as your shaman society. Keep that in mind when you chuck those dice and see that you can opt to play some form of Shaman; you're not a free agent, so if you don't want to deal in that sort of relationship work then I suggest you choose another Occupation.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 16: The Necromancer

Palladium's take on the Necromancer first appeared in RIFTS: Africa, and like everything else in that underwhelming product, this Occupation is a disappointment that does not fulfill player expectations and reveals that quality control at Palladium was (and remains) something that is akin to that of Taurus firearms: when good, great; when bad, horrible (and when good, often built upon another's framework). To play a Necromancer, as shown here, is to have one of those lemons and be in need of a juicer.

The player expectation for a Necromancer is not just that he be able to gather useful information through contacting the dead, but to call them forth from the grave and bind them through his will to be his slaves--his immortal, unyielding agents--and execute his orders. Furthermore, the player expectation includes the ability to manipulate the minds and flesh of living targets as well as all of the dead. In terms now relevant to talk of gaming design, a Necromancer is expected to be a primary-spellcaster that also has one or more pets to manage (some temporary, some permanent); in other words, they expect an undead-themed version of the Warlock class from World of Warcraft (which is, quite frankly, a very good iteration of a playable Necromancer) or the Avatar class from Green Ronin's (now out-of-print) The Avatar's Handbook. The former, to an extent, is met. The latter is lacking.

The Occupation has all of the expected look and feel, but lacks the substance. The Occupation's spell-list looks good on paper, but in practice the targets of the spells can either work around non-crippling effects or ignore them entirely. It lacks direct damage, and the pets that it creates are completely irrelevant to the expected quality of opposition in RIFTS; it doesn't matter if your NPC pets can reform after being blown to bits if you can't do any harm to them whatsoever because those you reliably control are too week, and those that are not cannot be reliably controlled- and that is the case with undead a Necromancer creates. Those who would want to play a Necromancer, therefore, must change how they employ the powers of this Occupation.

In short, a Necromancer is not a tactical threat. It is not primarily a strategic threat. It is primarily a threat on a logistical scale, and logistical threats are NPCs. When your man is someone who's ability to contribute at the table might as well be that of a Rogue Scholar or Scientist with some supernatural benefits and pets because properly leveraging what your powers can do and making the most of your Occupation's assets means that you're playing a different game from everyone else, you've got a problem. Working around this problem means changing your table to something that spends a hell of a lot more time and attention at the logistical and strategic levels, which means that you're playing a wargame or an economy simulation and not a true and proper adventure game (which is what a proper TRPG is). If that works for you, go for it; otherwise, your options are to cut it out from player access or to change the Occupation into something that works for you. Given how Palladium rolls, make some shit up that you think would be fun; you're unlikely to fuck it up any worse than it already is.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 15: The Temporal Wizard & Warrior

Introduced in RIFTS: England (of all things), Temporal Magic enters the game through the Temporal Raider Racial Occupation (not playable as-written) and its two playable Occupations: the Temporal Wizard and the Temporal Warrior. Alas, those looking to get their Time Lord on will be sadly disappointed.

These two Occupations are unique in that a player may opt to enter play above 1st level, but at the price of a restriction in his character's Alignment options (downward, of course) and sanity (also downward). The options are to represent the effects that the Wizard or Warrior sustains from his association with the Raider that trained him, who is a universally evil and abusive entity that cannot help but to corrode the character of his mortal associates if they stay too long. The benefit, of course, is more power and the other benefits of being higher level (which, this being a Palladium game, aren't that great). Quite frankly, it's a bad deal; don't do it.

These Occupations are supposed to be all about time travel and time manipulation, but the spells at their disposal are weaksauce; this is because, quite frankly, player access to such things cannot help but to take a campaign and turn it into a Time War due to players wanting to make the most of the time manipulation powers at their disposal as well as time travel traditionally being just a MacGuffin used to set a story in whatever genre that the writer wanted to mess with in that story. (As so well demonstrated by Doctor Who, of course.) Instead, the time powers at a player's command tend toward the tactical end of things with some provision for forward travel through time and (oddly) dimensional manipulation (i.e. appearing as a 2D image so one can go flush along a wall). This is unlikely to satisfy anyone who would be interested in either of these Occupations.

So, how to play them? You should look at the Wizard as being a technician focused on the manipulation of time in the same way that a IT specialist is a technician that focuses on some form of computer or network technology, and the Warrior as being a Magic Knight with a time theme to his wiggly-fingers stuff (and that, in turn, being more like the magical martial arts of a wuxia film or the Jedi arts of Star Wars). (The powers of the Raider are vaguely defined, as one would expect of something intended to be just a NPC, but are said to be far more powerful.) Both Occupations are not proper scientists or engineers that grok Temporal power at a core principle level; they're limited to applied comprehension, at best, and it would not be wrong to think of them as being a tool-user/maintainer caste meant to be under Raider supervision most of the time. This would account for their weaksauce abilities in comparison to expectations.

While Shifters and Stone Masters often end up as NPCs due to logistics, I expect these Occupations (and the Raider) to be primarily NPC or not appearing at all because--quite frankly--they suck. They suck enough I recommend against including them at all, and I recommend instead just rolling your own Time Lord RCC because that's what you really want anyway.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 14: The Stone Master

The Stone Master is one of the academic Occupations. It's in the same boat as the Techno-Wizard, as it is an artificer Occupation, but instead of items or vehicles the Stone Master specializes in architecture primarily and jewelcrafting as a sideline. As such it--as with the Shifter and the Techno-Wizard--is also very concerned with places of power (ley-lines, nexus points) and has a long logistical train requirement to make the most of his powers; as such, he also requires a great deal of planning and attention to detail from both the player and the Game Master to fully enjoy what this Occupation offers.

The other issue is that, as-written, the Stone Master must be a True Atlantean. While this can be waived--and I recommend that you do so; there is nothing about this Occupation (or, for that matter, the Undead Slayer) that actually requires that your be a True Atlantean--I will presume, for now, that this is not going to happen. Therefore your Stone Mason is always going to be a Human and thus cause some problems for you when dealing with certain bits of the overall RIFTS milieu. That's an issue; your man will, alternately, have to hide the Marks of Heritage or will wield them like a big ol' badge in order to min-max his House status to best advantage. That's yet another detail to track, and it can be bothersome for both players and Game Masters.

As with the Shifter, the Stone Master's powers require a lot of set-up and forward thinking. They, by necessity, are strategic and logistical in their application vs. the tactical applications usually required by active adventuring gameplay. This is another aspect of the Occupation that turns people off of it; when they play a magic-user, they want to pew-pew their enemies in combat and not pull out a gun instead. (For the common man, what you do when you get into a fight is the defining aspect of an Occupation; everything else is, at best, secondary to what most people think is the majority--if not the whole--of actual play- and that bugs the shit out of me at times.) You're playing an architect that can do his own bulldozing, crane-lifting, stone-carving, etc. so think less Gandalf and more Saruman; you're a guy who works best when he can shape things to his liking and makes the time to do so- be the thinker and planner (and GMs, let them).

Because Stone Masters lack the sort of immediate applicability that your standard RPG wizard brings to the table, it's not surprising to see that Stone Masters (as with Shifters, Techno-Wizards, etc.) are more often seen as NPCs than actually played at the table. If you choose to play one, or have one at your table, then don't gimp them out of hand; sit down and work out what needs to be done to make the most of the powers it has, and then dedicate game and play time to making that happen as best as campaign events allow- don't let other players push you around into doing otherwise (which is the last big reason for why this Occupation, as with the others aforementioned, aren't seen often).

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 13: The Priest

The Priest, originally appearing in Palladium's fantasy game, returns in RIFTS with the supplement wherein multiple divine pantheons are statted up for use as NPCs. The Priest appears, adapted for the new game, but otherwise is the same Occupation as its Fantasy counterpart: to be the god's agent on that plane of existence, in that locality, and fulfill the god's agenda. To this end, the Priest is no different from the Witch, and much of what I said with regard to Witches applies here.

The big difference is that the Priest is the product of an institution, and therefore is an Occupation that only arises amongst communities that achieve a given threshold of economic and socio-political development, something that commonly coincides with the transition to agriculture and the beginnings of a city-centric sedentary pattern of settlement and the rise of a hierarchical oligarchy. Furthermore, be the Priest or his institution fair or foul, his is the very definition of a legitimate profession; priesthoods are up there with warriors and whores as the earliest of professions to arise in Civilization.

For the player, this means that--regardless of what happens after that point--your man began as part of a sacred institution and learned from a community of fellow priests. The magic you wield is a gift from the god that your man serves; it's an investment, and unless your patron is a God of Magic sort you likely have no fucking idea how magic works or why your powers actually work the way that they do. You're in the same position as a Shaman, but you have the advantage of a large institutional infrastructure to work with; you also have the responsibility to that same organization and can be called upon to act for the benefit of another priest, so this is a two-edged sword.

For the Game Master, Priests are no-brainers to include in a campaign regardless of any other genre elements you're throw into your crucible. Along with Witches, Mystics, Shaman, and other folks of similar levels of easy adaptability you've got ready-made world-building when you allow Priests into your game and you should take full advantage of that fact. The specifics of the Priest will vary greatly not only by the patron god itself, but also by how that specific priesthood organizes itself and execute its patron's agenda; a priesthood devoted to a public outreach program will not have the same sort of culture that one--even one devoted to the same god--organized to hunt down enemies of the god. Exploit this.

Outside of specific milieu such as the Coalition states, or similiar kill-all-magicians societies, you're going to have a priesthood of some sort due to gods being real and active in the universe. You might as well make that work for you, both as a player and as a Game Master. Enjoy.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 12: The Mystic

The Mystic is one of those Occupations where the magic-user's powers stems from a source other than study and application of magical principles; his is the archetype of the innate power-wielder. Not only does the Mystic possess an intuitive comprehension of how to cast spells, he is also a psychic of considerable power. This access to two forms of supernatural power, combined with his inability to gain additional spells or powers any other way, make the Mystic very interesting indeed.

The Mystic likely doesn't maintain a firm distinction between his spell-casting capacity and his psychic capacity, though he likely does make one due to how each form of power looks and feels when he uses them. As the core rulebook itself notes, Mystics are not likely to value formal schooling due to the way that they relate to their powers. Mystics, therefore, favor holistic and non-linear reasoning; strict linear cause-effect schooling is, at best, seen only as something to add to their mental toolbox- at worst, they are outright hostile to the very idea due to their inability or unwillingness to see the merit in it.

Mystics have no infrastructure requirements to their magic-use. Because all of their spells are intuitively discovered and mastered, they have no need to tie themselves down to a specific place; in this respect, they are akin to Ley-Line Walkers. Because they have no strong association with ritual magic, they aren't that obsessed with places of power; they aren't that tied to items of power either, so they have little in common with Shifters or Techno-Wizards (or any other Occupation with similar logistical requirements to their practice). They have no formal ties to supernatural patrons, so they see such magic-users as fettered or enslaved usually (and they would be correct). They are, like Warlocks, a very loose community amongst themselves (and see kinship to varying degrees with others like them) and therefore are often friendly to the traveling lifestyle.

Because Mystic powers are intuitive, they will reflect their spiritual and mental well-being; barring specific mentoring intended to create, in some form of controlled manner, the need to manifest specific sorts of powers (ala Warlocks) the spells and psychic powers that a given Mystic develops are tells to a savvy observer of that Mystic and can give useful insight into how that Mystic thinks and behaves. Whatever mundane skills and knowledge a Mystic has is also indicative of that same internal self, as they will be the ordinary manifestations of their supernatural capacities.

For the Game Master Mystics are very easy to run and incorporate. While not as much of a Gandalf sort that a Ley-Line Walker is, a Mystic can be a more adventurous Galadriel (or, as a NPC, the mature one see in The Lord of the Rings); they work very, very well as seers, diviners, and other sorts whose magic and psychic powers tend towards the seeking and refining of knowledge or the healing of body and mind (and are not nearly so hung up on the mastery of mundane martial skills to defend themselves from attack). It is painless to use this Occupation in your campaign, regardless of where it is, due to the nature of its powers and the personalities that this Occupation typically produces.

Tying it together, the Mystic is one of the most universal of Occupations and can find itself a niche in damn near any RIFTS campaign that's likely to get past the pitch phase. Easy to play, easy to portray, easy to incorporate, easy to handle- easy peasy all around. What's not to love? Roll up a Mystic, just an ordinary Human (or near-Human) Mystic, and take the implications aforementioned to heart when you figure out what your Mystic is and what he does with his powers. Just remember that you're not the blaster-master sort; you're the seer and reader, whose powers allow you to punt problems away by avoiding them or press them down by mitigating them- you're not the guy who casts the spells that makes the people fall down. (That is why you have a gun.)

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 11: The Techno-Wizard

The Techno-Wizard is an artificer. It is an Occupation that focuses its mastery of magic--itself an iteration of the Western High Magic archetype--upon the creation of items, both for one's own use and for others to use. Its knowledge of spells and rituals is combined with its acumen concerning sciences of the ordinary sort to blend together into what today is sometimes termed "magitech", but it can cast spells and conduct rituals as any other magician of his archetype does. What makes this Occupation distinct is its friendliness to high technology; it often combines specific applications of spells, or the results of rituals, with existing technologies to create hybrids to varying degrees.

The big problem with this Occupation is that the rules governing its artifice capacity are not really rules, but examples and very poor guidelines instead, and for players and Game Masters used to a ruleset that actually is a ruleset governing item creation playing a Techno-Wizard is an exercise in Making Shit Up. If you're cool with that, go nuts; sit down and figure that shit out. Otherwise, you're going to have a bad time; choose something else.

Okay, that out of the way...

Playing an artificer is a fancy way of saying that your man is a gadgeteer. Your shtick is to make widgets that are useful during gameplay, either as a way of participating in the action directly (making weapons, armor, sensors, medic kits, etc.) or to facilitate the strategic or logistical processes of adventuring (making vehicles, portals, shelters, etc.). In this respect, you share a niche with Operators and others who also build/fix/repair things; your edge is that you are also a magic-user, and therefore are privy to the same knowledge and lore that Ley-Line Walkers, Shifters, and others who have to study and master magical theory in order to access and use magic have to do. Your downside, shared with Shifters as well as Operators, is that your man needs downtime and has to deal with a logistical supply train to make the most of his abilities.

In other words, Techno-Wizards need to make plans, prepare contingencies, and otherwise do the same sort of thinking and behavior that Shifters have to do; you're just adding "need to source parts", and "has to have a garage/workshop" to that bothersome aspect of playing such a character. For people of this Occupation, who are very much focused on applied knowledge, figuring out how to balance the requirements of the Occupation with the requirements of adventuring is one of those bothersome inconveniences that--like Shifters--turns many off of this Occupation and relegates Techno-Wizards to NPCs in many campaigns.

Game Masters who want to have Techno-Wizards be a thing that players want to play are going to have to put in some work beforehand figuring out something useful in terms of how Techno-Wizardry actually works due to the aforementioned crap guidelines and lack of useful benchmarks for what can be done with it compared to more genre-standard magical artifice. The sample items and devices have no sensible pattern governing the relationship between the item and what it takes to create them, so Game Masters are going to have to make up such a scheme themselves; this too often results in such magic-users being a NPC-only affair, as Game Masters find the task too bothersome to deal with.

In short, and in a bit of irony, making a Techno-Wizard is very much a fixer-upper Occupation. If you're not up for that, don't bother. If you're okay with it, then you're going to make a character that really is very much what you make of it; it's the Erector Set of Occupations in this game.

Playing a Magic-User in RIFTS, Part 10: The Shifter

The Shifter is the second of the Occupations in the core rulebook derived from the archetype of the Western High Ceremonial Magician. This Occupation, in contrast to the Ley-Line Walker, focuses its skillset and magic knowledge upon the practice of ritual magic- specifically, on rituals that cross barriers of time and space to allow communication and travel across those barriers. The closest synonym, in Palladium's offerings, to this Occupation is that of the Summoner from Palladium's fantasy game; this means that the Shifter is at its best when played by an individual that comprehends how dependent this Occupation is upon preparation, planning, and attention to detail.

The Shifter's emphasis on ritual magic requires that a Shifter pay attention to the geography of the area, including its inhabitants. Does it have a ley-line? Does it have a nexus? Can he reliably access that power, if present? With whom, if any, does he compete with to acquire that power? Why is he so concerned? Because he cannot possibly work his ritual magic using only his own cultivated reserves of mana. He has to find and use mana sources outside of himself, or his rituals cannot work; he won't have the power necessary to succeed.

The Shifter also needs to keep careful and meticulous records of time, due to the effects that particular moments and occurrences have on their access to external power sources. The Shifter, if he suffers certain deficits of character, may also become proficient--if not expert--at medicine for purposes of practicing animal and human sacrifice; this too is a proven, and therefore known, way to acquire mana external to one's own reserves. Combined, all of this means that a competent Shifter will have a significant bias towards being meticulous, detail-oriented, practitioner of magic who relies on planning ahead and preparing accordingly to succeed.

The Shifter cannot avoid being charismatic, strong-willed, and intelligent if he wishes to succeed; the best of them, contrary to expectations, will also be healthy and strong in body due to the connection between bodily and mental health. He regularly traffics with entities comprehensible (variously so) to him, and is capable of striking bargains with some and compelling the obedience of others. Contrary to expectations, this requires that the Shifter has a command over interpersonal skills that one would expect from someone trained to command subordinates and parley with equals- someone trained to lead men. (It is not accidental that mythological examples have such backgrounds.) Because he needs to prepare, he does not travel light or often; he's the sort to think in terms of expeditions when departing from well-traveled roads (literal and otherwise) and act accordingly. He is likely to be found at one of his sanctums, as his emphasis in magic requires prepared spaces and other infrastructure; while fully capable of casting spells, what he knows is far fewer in quantity than a Ley-Line Walker and often focused on utilitarian needs. Veteran Shifters acquire an entourage, a warband, of henchmen and servants; some are ordinary folk, some supernatural, all bound to the Shifter and acknowledge him as leader- if not master.

While many Shifters do reveal themselves deficient in character over time, and revel in evil accordingly, not all of them do. Far more likely is that the Shifter simply becomes obsessed with the potential of his practice and loses sight of the reason for why he took up this Occupation originally; in other words, you're far less likely to find Faust and far more likely to find Radagast- someone who takes up residence in a particular place of significance (if not power) and becomes increasingly immersed in his particular pursuits. (If left alone, he is practically harmless.) Dealt with in the proper manner, one can parley profitably with such a Shifter; do it wrong, and you're in for a world of hurt- if he's merciful.

Using a Shifter for a NPC is a good choice for someone who either acts as a mentor and captain for a group, or for a group's opposition. Their powers over cross-dimensional barriers makes then particularly good for adventures and campaigns focused on making the most of what RIFTS has to offer; in this respect, they are equal in potential to Temporal Raiders and their playable Occupations (Wizards and Warriors). They make for great NPCs that a Game Master can do some solid world-building, in the local and regional sense, around; if you need someone of note who's big on otherworldly stuff, a Shifter is your go-to option.

So, if you want to think ahead, be prepared, and otherwise pretend that you're a Time Lord then this is the Occupation for you.