Rifts

So I was once very stupid and somehow acquired 33 Rifts books.  Kevin Siembieda probably bought himself several nice dinners thanks to me, maybe put a down payment on a house.

I noticed Jonathan's off-hand comment about doing this on Story Games (http://story-games.com/forums/comments.php?DiscussionID=13102): an AW adaptation of Rifts.

Well, this afternoon I paged through my vast Rifts library at my parents' house and started scribbling some notes.  I likely won't be posting much to the forum about it (spotty Internet here), but I DO plan on making mutant capybaras playable (like they do in the South America worldbook).

Oh, what crazy creatures we humans are.

TURN BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

BEHOLD - THE APOCALYPSE MEGAVERSE!™

All joking aside, I'd be interested in seeing if revamps of a Rifts / Torg / GURPS multi-genre system would be feasible within the indie game development scene.

When you get down to it (after having reviewed the books), Rifts is a bunch of incoherent adventure seeds that have hardened (ossified?) into a vast game world over time... thanks to sheer persistence.  Could we do the same with AW (or another game) without making it suck?

Rifts, for all its warts, had some moments of beautiful lunacy.  I have slightly fewer than 33 of its artisan-typeset volumes kicking around (only slightly) and I am unashamed to display them.  I can't say much more at this point than I wholeheartedly support the idea.

I do think that some of the gonzo wonderful was the bright mirror of things that made Rifts suck (wildly disparate power levels, I'm looking at you).  How to tease out that beauty from the festering stuff, hm.

~Gary

Okay, so what you do is take AW as written. Then add all the LE, Custom and Other playbooks into the mix.

Then add all the custom moves for AW that you can find.

Then look at all the threads in Hacks and all the Hacks subforums. Add all of that content. Even if it doesn't make sense, is unfinished, or otherwise incoherent. Strata? No problem! New stats? Not anymore! Basic moves? No such thing!

Like, just copy-paste every hack thread with custom moves in it into a bit file and then print it out. Include all those stay PDFs of various hacks floating around. Dungeon World, Bulwark, Dead Weight, Monsterhearts, Planet Algol, Goblin World, whatever. Tell the players that everything in this document is legit.

Whenever there are gaping wounds in the mechanics (which should be 99%-100% of the time) house-rule a custom move on the fly.

Whenever a Player says: "I like this playbook but I wish that..." or "Can I be or do or have..." come up with a custom advance / piece of gear / character crap / custom move / name / look / &c. on the spot. Don't worry if it fits either mechanically or thematically. Don't worry if the move you come up with is any good or is consistent. Whatever you can think of in the space of one-to-three minutes is good, so long as it roughly adheres to "Advanced Fuckery." Roughly. Do not worry about petty things like 'tone,' 'balance' or 'coherency.' In between sessions, come up with new subsystems, power creep and read lots of National Geographic and comics.

Be sure to make lists and maps like crazy. Even crazier than in AW. I remember the lists and maps in Rifts and they would make Vx blush.

And voila!

THE APOCALYPTIC MEGAVERSE IS NOW LIMITED ONLY BY YOUR IMAGINATION!!!

i think this is a great idea as long as you put in the good parts of Rifts and not get all silly with it. At least that's the way i prefer my Rifts games.

I'm new to Apocalypse World, and im working on a Chaos Earth aesthetic for the game i'm eventually going to MC.

Chaos Earth is the Rifts prequel. Better apocalyptica, less silliness.
I think my aesthetic will work out well because i dont have to deal with cyber-gunslinger-sea titan-space gorillas. Just regular people trying to survive a fucked-up world. :)

I think that the best part is the gonzo; otherwise, you can basically just play AW straight with some fluff rewrites with tags like +hi-tech +magic and +techno-magic. As the game goes along, custom moves will fill in the rest of the tone.

that's cool. some people really love the "gonzo" and some people not so much.
i've been running rifts for years and the gonzo is totally played out to me.

Fair enough.

We played Rifts a couple of times when I was a teenager and didn't really turn up the gonzo. I think we were trying to be mature or something.

The notion of playing a gonzo game now seems appealing to me only because my gaming since then has been a lot of gut-punch emo porn. Not always, just mostly.

So playing a cyber-ninja demon with a nuclear heart sound like fun. Alot of the silliness came not just from the fiction but from the rules too.

. Alot of the silliness came not just from the fiction but from the rules too.

definitely. which is why im porting over the setting material i like into a system i actually enjoy running.