I've not played RIFTS for a while, my group becoming bored with it and the continual power-rises in our later teens, but I have purchased or had access to some of the books along the way, and the setting, with it's inherant allowance for virtually any character from any setting, not to mention a great deal of style in the main setting itself (initially, at least), has always been interesting to me.
Given the vast number of books produced for RIFTS, I was amazed to hear about a GM's Guide which collected together a vast amount of the information from those books, as well as promising rules clarifications and GM's advice for RIFTS, and thinking it might allow one to get RIFTS under control, to at least have a few "nostalgia" games, I purchased it.
The Game Master Guide is a massive tome, with it's 352 pages, and with small text and not too many illustrations, it's absolutely packed full of information. There are literally too many sections to list individually. The contents go on for 2 and 3/4 pages, and the quick-find is another page and quarter.
The book starts with sections on the RIFTS setting, lexicon, timeline, etc., before progressing onto "Designer Notes", which appears to be Palladium-ese for "GM Advice".
It then goes into game mechanics, which contains alot of further commentary on the mechanics of RIFTS (such as Levels, MegaDamage, etc.) rules clarifications, and revisits more or less the entire RIFTS combat system, detailing pretty much everything you could ever want to know about the actual rules of RIFTS from automatic dodge to how the four different strength types (normal, augmented, supernatural, and robotic) work. It covers, amongst other things, virtually every "Hand to Hand" style in the RIFTS game (excepting only one CyberKnight Hand-to-Hand style. Why this was left out, and they acknowledge it was, is mysterious).
Next up is skills, more or less just a summary of every skill that has ever appeared in a RIFTS product, and there are a VERY large number of them, I must. Probably rather too many, but this does help with what was a big problem even back when I was playing RIFTS: finding out which book your skill was in.
After that it's Psionics, with a similarly complete listing, and couple of rules notes. Suprisingly few Psionics have been added (comparatively speaking), and the rules clarifications are minor, still a useful section.
The heart of the book is the Weapons section, and it's 71 small-printed, sparsely illustrated (not every weapon that's been drawn is shown, they seem to "get bored" of putting all the drawings in, and thus only use them for the commoner weapons, and some other, later attractively drawn ones), pages of guns, guns, and blades. Every non-magical weapon is in there. Unless you have all the RIFTS books, you will find quite alot of new stuff, and it is interesting to see how, in general, the power of weapons curves up and up, peaking at somewhere before "Coalition War Campaign", and then slides back down, with odd outrageous piece of kit. This could undoubtedly save alot of flicking through books, and if you play RIFTS regularly, might be worth the price of admission alone. There's also a couple of pages on controlling the availability of weapons.
No Techno-Wizard weapons, note. I assume they are in the magic book, they certainly aren't here, even the purely psionic ones.
Then there's Equipment, a perhaps even more useful section in some ways, because RIFTS equipment is frequently overlooked, and much more spread out than the weapons. Seemingly very thorough, with alot of information, some of which appears new, or at least taken from non-RIFTS Palladium books.
After that is the Body Armour section, again, very complete, with pretty much all the non-magical body armour in RIFTS, all 21 pages of it. Sadly not much illustration, but they do have limited space.
After that we get sections on Power Armour, Robots and Vehicles, again, virtually all non-magical vehicles listed, but here we have more problems, because they only list the MDC of the Main Body, now, listing every section might have been problematic, but a few more would have been appreciated, and it severely limits the worth of the section that they don't have it. They don't mean "condensed" vehicle stats, they mean "cut-down" vehicle stats...
After that it's basically just listings of "X is in Y book on page Z", first with Bionics (rather irritatingly, I had hoped details would be included, as with weapons and armour), then with Character Classes, then races, and then a terrifying 14 pages(!) of experience tables.
The book concludes with another, more formal "Running the Game" section, as well as some campaign and adventure ideas, which I could *swear* I'd seen in a RIFTS book before (some sort of "Compendium", I suspect, but I can't recall it's name. I'm pretty sure it had Skelebots on the cover, though), and at the very end, a nice section with maps of all the continents on RIFTS Earth, and the territories therein.
Phew! That's alot of stuff, and this book certainly is packed, but it's missing something...
Firstly, the GM advice sections, and rules commentary, first from Kevin Siembieda himself, and then the later section by Bill Coffin, are, well, how to put this nicely?
How about "Aimed at Beginners".
The advice given is very simplistic, and not, if you ask me, suggestive of a good GMing style, certainly not from Siembieda himself. It's very revealing, if nothing else, but not in a good way.
Siembieda reveals that he likes to run very large groups, 8-12 players (in a world where most of us are in groups of 3-6, as he notes), and thus the gaming style he suggests is very basic and streamlined, even a little patronising to the players. He suggests very direct and "goal-oriented" adventures, and really uses the Alignment system as a way of forcing the PCs to stay withing certain boundaries, in an inflexible manner, to whit:
"As a Game Master, there have been many times where I pause the game action to announce to a player. "A Scrupulous (or whatever) character would not do that. I think your character should reconsider. Now, you can continue, but your character's alignment is going to drop to Anarchist (or Miscreant or whatever is appopriate depending on the deed). You won't be a good guy any more." And then I let the player think about it for a minute."
This is shocking, considering the man wrote the game, and the Alignments are pretty clearly defined as entire personal worldview, not a god-given, god-enforced Absolute, as it is with D&D, and it seems wildly unlikely that one can "drop" (his word) from Scrupulous to Miscreant for one misdeed, considering Miscreant entails an entirely different world view and associated attitudes.
Further, he then talks about how he tells players how their characters feel, ie. he decides, based on their Alignment, not on the character's personality (which I guess may be hard to gauge when you're dealing with 12 PCs), and further still, he tells the players what they have to do to "keep" their alignments, ie. stop other PCs, NPCs, and so on! Again, rather shocking, and makes me feel guilty for all those times I claimed that RIFTS Alignments made "so much more sense" than D&D Alignments. It seems abundantly clear that he pushes alignments around for single deeds, which is downright bizarre.
He also talks about how he puts an NPC or two in every party, so he can "direct" the PCs when they're "not on the right path". This seems rather patronizing, to say the least, and like the sort of GMs I endured, with much annoyance, when I was 13. Also, and in something that I, as a player, would outright call "cheating", or at least "abuse of trust" on the GM's part, he suggests using the NPCs to INTENTIONALLY screw up ambushes and to start fights, and so on, which, considering he's forced the NPCs on the group, and they're with them at all times, seems even more dubious!
Then there's a long rant on how "MegaDamage doesn't suck". Most of what he says is entirely correct, though we have already been forced to endure this rant in previous RIFTS books, albeit in slightly altered forms (the one about the kingdoms of Magic features much the same rant about how "RIFTS Magic doesn't suck". He goes on about percieved problems with the MDC system, but misses the central flaw:
That it doesn't match up with the fictional portrayal of the RIFTS universe.
In particular, frequently in text, or in comics, in the RIFTS books, one character will kill another, or destroy a suit of power armour, or the like, in a single shot, stab, etc. Only, it doesn't work like that. In the fiction, a psychic uses one character to grapple another, and to stab *through* his undamaged armour, with a Vibro-Blade, killing him instantly. In the game, this just can't happen. Similarly, in a comic in RIFTS Germany, a suit of Power Armour shoots another with it's normal gun, destroying it instantly. In the game, this is totally impossible, even with a critical.
So despite many pages of combat rules clarifications and adjustments and so on, the central flaw of RIFTS, that it's combat is boring and dependant on wearing down the enemy, emptying E-Clips in massive bursts, or repeated called shots, or all three, and that it doesn't resemble the fiction of RIFTS, whether it's art or writing, is completely un-discussed.
I noticed that some rules clarifications answered questions I hadn't asked, either, whilst missing more obvious ones, like Simultaneous Attack's wild potential for abuse by regenerating MDC-types...
It's perhaps unsuprising that Bill Coffin's GMing Advice, at the end of the book, rather contradicts that of Siembieda's, at the start. Coffin's advice is still pretty low-level, and involves a rather forced use of the Seven Deadly Sins to illustrate allegedly common GMing problems and issues, but it's a little better, and could help some GMs.
I came away feeling smug and self-assured, however, and that's not a good thing from a GMing advice section, if you ask me. All the really great GM's books I've read, such as the classic CP2020 guide "Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads!", have challenged my GMing methods, illustrated problems I was loathe to admit, or avoiding, and have offered new insights and ways of doing things, and generally left me smarting and somewhat annoyed, but definately a better GM.
With Siembieda's section, it's even worse, as you don't come away smarting, or even smug, but vaguely appalled, and feeling for his players, all twelve of them... I'm also left with a bad taste in my mouth for his willingness to blame, by name, CJ Carella for the RIFTS South America books (and possibly others, by implication), for being too powerful. Surely he is not without sin in this regard? He decides what gets printed, after all. Changing a few, even alot, of 1d6x10s to 5d6s or 4d6s would surely not have been too much for him.
What about the information, though, that's why you would really buy it, eh?
Well, it's variable. The starting sections are very good. They clear up alot of rules, and the summarisation of many others is extremely helpful. They change a few, which may present problems, particularly in dodging ranged weapon attacks, which only two classes out of the literal hundreds in RIFTS are allowed to do with any proficiency, rather a reverse on previous rules, but on the whole, these sections are good, or at least functional. The Psionics and Skills sections are precisely what they purport to be, nothing more, nothing less.
The weapons, equipment, and armour sections are similarly functional, but rather more useful, as the weapons actually have some detail in their use and so on. The pages on limiting weapon use are rather pathetic, basically saying "If it's not from there, they can't have it!", yes, thank you, we got that, and then basically saying it's entirely the GM's own fault if things go wrong, rather than offering actual solutions.
What these sections disturbingly lack is a TABLE of weapons, their damage, capacity, and so on. So there's no TRULY easy reference for these things, you still have to look them up, the're just all in one book.
Then, as they seem to run out of space, we have the vehicle, bionics, and classes sections, which are sparse, and not particularly useful. Indeed, one suspects that that vehicles would have been better off in another book, with bionics properly detailed.
Overall, I wanted to give this book a 4, or even 5, for substance, but the thinning out of information towards the end, lack of alternate rules (though there is a "cut-down combat" rules section, but an unexciting one, and one doesn't play RIFTS for the LACK of detail!) or rules ideas (less than the Conversion Book, indeed), means it only gets a 3.
For style, it gets a 3 too. It's well-referenced, and generally fairly easy to find things in, but the commentary and individual rules are still rather all over the place, and the text is thick and in the ugly RIFTS font, making it hard to speed-read, and there is so much of it that you want to. The artwork is understandably sparse, as noted, but this gives the book a claustrophobic feel.
In the end, it fails as a GM's Guide (pick up a "Listen Up..." if you want a good one for games with such huge power-ranges, RIFTS has much in common with CP2020), and it's only "decent" as a reference, but far from perfect. It's only a must-buy if you GM RIFTS very regularly, and find looking through all those books a slog.
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