Rifts Sourcebook One, Revised

The revision is pointless, but the book is still good.

Overall score:

Back when Rifts was shiny and new, and people were clamoring for more, Sourcebook One was a drink of water for a dying man—it was filled with a Q&A, some awesome robot rules, some neat Coalition stuff, and a cool adventure about an artificial intelligence called ARCHIE. It was great stuff, and we were all delighted to get it, but we knew it was a stopgap; everything about it said “I didn’t fit in the main book, so here I am now to tide you over until the next book comes out.”

In other words, it’s not really the kind of thing you’d expect to see revised and reprinted 60+ books later.

As strange as it is, though, Sourcebook One is back, and in much more substantial form. The Q&A player mail stuff has been removed, of course, and the other sections have been expanded and updated: the robot rules and equipment stats are all new (i.e., caught up to the power creep), the monster sections are a little more fleshed out, and the stuff about ARCHIE has been updated to match the current state of Rifts Earth. There’s even an all-new section about an NPC group called the Republicans.

The trouble with all of this stuff is that it doesn’t really fit together—it’s just a bunch of stuff. On one hand, this really bothers me: a book should be more cohesive than this, with some kind of obvious thread to pull you through. On the other hand, the scattered feel of the book essentially turns it into a double-size Rifter full of official, Palladium-produced content, and by almost any measure that makes it a pretty good deal.

If you think of it as a book, you’re liable to be a little put off, but if you think of it—as we used to—as a magazine intended solely to get new info into your hands, you’ll probably be pretty dang pleased. And since the normal production values of a Palladium book and a Palladium magazine are identical, that’s a very easy thing to think.

Cohesive or not, the “articles” in Sourcebook One are almost all excellent. The robot rules are solid and very useable, the equipment is good to have (though completely redundant if you already own the Gamemaster’s Guide), and the ARCHIE stuff is a welcome update to a very interesting NPC.

The only major problem in the book, in fact, is the section on the Republicans, which adds nothing but padding—there are no rules or classes or equipment, though there are a few NPCs, and the background info is some of the laziest world-building we’ve seen out of Palladium since…Spirit West, maybe, or Rifts England. It’s really bad.

The idea behind the Republicans is not, in itself, flawed: a group of high-tech warriors survives the apocalypse of the Coming of the Rifts and spends the next few hundred years trying to help rebuild human civilization. The problems are two-fold: first, where do these people live? Shouldn’t we see some kind of information on the vast, hidden community of the Republicans?

Forget the fact that they’re one of the oldest continuous organizations on Earth; the mere fact that they have high-end technology means that they have to have manufacturing plants and access to resources, which further means that they have to have some kind of large, stable presence in the world. Where is it? How do they keep it hidden? I’m not asking for a factory invoice here, just some kind of discussion about how a group this big and this advanced gets by in the crowded world of Rifts North America.

Second, and far more damning in my eyes, is the fact that the Republicans have retconned their way into every major event in Rifts North America in the past four hundred years. Who created ARCHIE? The Republicans, of course. How did Free Quebec get Glitter Boys? The Republicans gave them the technology. Who killed the leader of the Federation of Magic? You thought it was Karl Prosek, leader of the Coalition, but it was actually the Republicans, and the Coalition stole the credit.

In fact, as far as that goes, the entire Coalition was apparently created by the Republicans—despite the fact that the Republicans are not affiliated with the Coalition in any way, and they follow completely different philosophies. What the crap? They even created Tolkeen, despite the fact that that’s completely ridiculous and fantastically unbelievable. Essentially, they built the backstory for the Republicans by stealing the backstory of the entire world. It’s very hard to take them seriously as NPCs when their primary activity is claiming credit for everything that’s ever happened in the game.

Fortunately, the Republicans are not enough to ruin the book, because they are easy to ignore. If you own the original you don’t need to even consider buying the new one, because they’re the only new material in it (and because the new cover is painfully worse than the original); if you don’t own the original, the Republicans are a very small portion of the new one and you can easily skip over them on your way to the good stuff in the book.

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Written by Fellfrosch on May 31st, 2007