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.

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 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.