Palladium holiday order just came in

[Popertop]

I am so excited to try these out.
Here's what I got:

Rifts Ultimate Edition
Rifts Adventure Guide
Mutants in Orbit
Dead Reign

What did you get in your orders?
Have you tried any of these before?
What are your favorite adventures?
Don't you love Palladium books?

I also recently bought some pdfs off of drivethrurpg:

Exalted 2ed
Legends of Anglerre
New World of Darkness
Weapons of the Gods
The Laundry
Artesia
Corporation Rpg

All of these were highly rated and recommended.
What are your experiences/thoughts?

[Duncan_Ruadrik]

RIFTS is fun. we had oodles of fun with that one summer. Character building is addictive.. but time consuming.

[LibraryOgre]

I am so excited to try these out.
Here's what I got:

Rifts Ultimate Edition
Rifts Adventure Guide
Mutants in Orbit
Dead Reign

I have somewhat mixed feelings for Palladium. Obviously, I've been a fan of theirs in the past, but I've drifted away from them over the past few years.

That said, the RUE is a pretty good book, but check your printing number (easiest way is to look at the Borg OCC... if some of the powers are weirdly out of order, you're looking at first printing). I somewhat prefer the original Rifts main book in terms of organization, however. Dead Reign is also kinda fun, though I'd probably limit it to more common zombie types, leaving things like Half zombies and the like to legends of the apocalypse.

I don't have much opinion on the Adventure Guide, but Mutants in Orbit is pretty much worthless. I've gone into long rants (on the Palladium Message Boards) about why the counter-orbital debris field is both impractical and an inefficient deterrent (put simply, if the Splugorth want Low Earth Orbit, there's nothing the orbital communities can do to stop them... and that's using nothing more than is explicitly referenced in the Atlantis book, to say nothing of Phase World). The weapons they cite as being space-based deterrents to Earth-launches are laughable. Really? It's got a range of three whole miles? I might be worried if it could do enough damage to threaten a man in armor, but my spaceship is going to shrug that off like spitballs, and is going to get out of range before they make more than a couple attacks. This says nothing about their idea of space speeds and ranges.

If you like Palladium, you might want to take a look at Third Eye Games and their "Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.". There's a lot of inspiration there from Palladium's mechanics, but I find it to be a tighter system overall, with a lot of good ideas and adaptability to other genres (the base assumptions are for Beyond the Supernatural/modern sci-fantasy type games). Wu Xing, also by 3EG, is supposed to be very good, using a lighter version of the API system, but I haven't looked at it personally, so can't say much.

[Mojo_Rat]

I always enjoyed the thematics behind Rifts, and in gneral many of Palladiums game ideas were origonal and interesting. i got to thinking about that recently when i saw Nightbane advertised on Paizo recently.

Sadly, all the fluff and cool themse are draped over a rightningly poor mechanics system.

[Duncan_Ruadrik]

yeah... the system is long winded and clunky in execution... Also, I remember having three different books, all of which stated three different things for the same rule we were looking up. We all just looked at each other (because we were all arguing different sides of "the rules say this!") and started laughing. Only in RIFTS can you all be right when debating a single rule.

Otherwise though, very fun game, very fun.