Game Review: Palladium

If anyone has gamed with me or talked with me on message boards they know that I am a fan of the d20 system. Its simple, quick, and flexible not to mention that d20 is in it's infancy compared to other systems and still has plenty of room for improvement.

That being said there are many other gaming systems out there that I enjoy as much as d20, well there are two systems really, and I'm starting to build my own which is a slow process. These two systems are the Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS) and the Palladiun System. This article is my review of why I enjoy the Palladium games.

The biggest boon for Palladium is that their material is superb when if comes to content, background, premise, feeling and setting. In my opinion Palladium games are probably the best written in all these aspects. Palladium is a system that uses various dice, with the d20 utilized for attack rolls and saving throws and d% used to accomplish skill rolls.

Character Creation is vary in depth, utilizing 8 attributes, and a thorough combat system, where there characters can take boxing, wrestling, and other such skills to add techniques and improve themselves physically.

Magic and psionics are integrated from the ground up and utilize a point system that is tied into the world directly and lets you as a psychic or mage to tap into source to draw power and boost your skill.

The most well known game made by palladium books is RIFTS. RIFTS is literally the culmination of fantasy, sci-fi, cthulu horror, and post apocalyptic action. There are hundreds of classes (all are very unique too), and thousand of races. It is designed for a little high powerer feel with the whole addition of Mega Damage. In short mega damage allows a single 1st level character to walk into a town of poorly equipped folk and quite literally wipe it out. Mega-damage is fairly standard as the high-tech and high-magic setting revolves around MD and all characters start with MD items of some sort.

Another game is much fun is Nightbane...in this game demons have invaded the earth and their powers (or some other power) chooses people at random to become extremely powerful creatures (which is thought of as a reflection of your soul). As these creatures you fight the Nightlords who are slowly invading the infrastructure of the world and subverting humanity to their whim. Its dark, moody, and can be creepy as you never know who is a friend or who is an enemy.

As for me I have played Rifts before I played D&D and enjoyed it much more than AD&D 2e, but thats and opinion. If you are ever looking for something different than d20 I highly recommend checking out both of these games. Rifts to this day still holds the record of premier sales, selling over 10,000 copies in the premier month, and over 250,000 copies without going to a bigger company for promotion...mainly living by word of mouth and a few small adds in RPG -zines.

This system and RIFTs and Nightbane are both highly recommended and I garauntee you will be hooked the moment you step into a suit of power armor to fight a dragon, or peel of your facade (host body) to fight demons in your own twisted form of power. This is my plug for palladium because it is a great game, and rather affordable compared to many d20 books.