This book is a long overdue addition to the Rifts world of magic and sorcery.
The cover art immediately grabs your eye, who could resist that Parkinson cover? The interior art is also stunning. The black and whites of Perez (I never get tired of that stuff!) and the eerie pencils of Dubisch really deliver this book. Solid additional art by Scott Johnson (consistantly and constantly good!), McKenna and Breaux put the imagination of the reader into full blown reality.
This book, of course, has more wizard spells. That's no surprise. In fact if it didn't have anymore spells we'd be disapointed, right? The spells boost the punch power of a mage considerably. Lest we forget that mages are not meant to go head to head with a full conversion cyborg, Siembieda provides a brief "essay" defending the role of mages. This was unnecessary, but some people just have to be told, that RIFTS is no more a power game than anything else that you play, it's HOW you play it.
The book also goes into the history of the True Federation of Magic, the Federation of Today, hidden cities, strange automaton defenders, Techno -Wizard Weapons (not as many as I expected!), and a few new vehicles. This book has no less than 8 new character classes! I know, what is left? Well, some character classes could be more of a description for a character archetype, but some are truly relative to the new information, the Magus O.C.C.s work quite well with the new background information.
The book also provides some major NPC descriptions. Which isn't bad, but I wish we had more fiction or short stories, than just a page or two, to go along with these NPCs, otherwise they just seem like character stats and not a character. They do add some color to the world.
The interior layout, like all Palladium books, is rather boring. There are no real graphics aside from the art. Then again, the margins are relatively narrow, teh colums are well organized and there is maximum word count per page. Less truly is more!
If you GM Rifts in North America, you simply need this book. If you play a Ley Line Walker, you WANT this book, trust me there is a certain beauty to a spell called "soultwist".
The only downfall is the real size. Yes, 160 pages crammed with information, for only $16.95 is a great deal! I just wish it would've been longer, like 190-270 pages. I would've waited another 6-8 months for that.
Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 4 (Meaty)
