In May 2024 we presented two offers featuring Kevin Siembieda‘s Rifts RPG from Palladium Books of a shattered Earth invaded by countless realities. The revived December 2022 Rifts Core Megabundle once again provided everything you need to run a complete campaign of mind-blowing adventure across a future Earth shattered by otherworldly invasions. And its new companion, Rifts Coalition Wars, adds Rifts sourcebooks about the Coalition States and the Siege on Tolkeen.
Rifts is set centuries in the future. Magic energy has flooded back to Earth, fracturing space, tearing through reality, and opening doors to supernatural realms, strange dimensions, and alien worlds. From these portals emerge mythical gods and Elemental creatures, hordes of demons and monsters, dragons and creatures of magic, Shadow Beasts and the undead from dimensions of darkness, and aliens from many realms.
Earth itself has become an alien landscape where the people, cultures, technologies, and madness of other worlds and realities collide with our own. It is an environment simultaneously familiar and alien, wondrous and horrifying. The magical, supernatural, and alien may come to you, or you may find them. Technology and science co-exist and clash with magic and psychic power. Robot warriors and power-armored troops battle dragons, demons, and magicians. The setting is one of constant change, conflict, horror, magic, and endless possibilities.
RIFTS CORE MEGA [from Dec 2022]
This December 2022 Rifts Core Megabundle had the core rulebooks and all the essential supplements and sourcebooks. If you’re new to the game, start with these books.
There were seven titles in this revived offer’s Corebook Collection (retail value $71), including the complete Rifts Ultimate Edition core rulebook (plus the Rifts Primer); the Adventure Guide, Game Master Guide, and Game Master Kit; and Index and Adventures V1 and V2.
This offer’s Sourcebook Collection added eleven more titles worth an additional $129, including Sourcebook One, Book of Magic, the Bestiary, Black Market, the Bionics Sourcebook, all three Conversion books (Book One, Two: Pantheons of the Megaverse, Three: Dark Conversions), and three more sourcebooks: Vampires, The Mechanoids, and Mindwerks.
RIFTS COALITION WARS [all-new]
The supplements in this new Rifts Coalition Wars companion offer involved the Coalition States, a dominating presence across the central United States. A militaristic high-tech human-supremacist dictatorship ruled by Emperor Karl Prosek, the CS brands itself a defender of humanity in a stand-or-die war of survival against wizards, psychics, mutant animals, and D-Bees (Dimensional Beings).
The Rifts corebook and early supplements portrayed the Coalition States as unambiguously evil – lots of skulls, etc. Fans used the shorthand term “Illinois Nazis.” Over time, as CS character classes and equipment proved popular with the audience, Palladium shifted its depiction toward moral grayness. This trend shows in the seven-book Siege on Tolkeen campaign (2000-2002), about the Coalition’s “Campaign of Unity” against the magical superstate of Tolkeen. The campaign starts as a brutal war of choice. But in Book 3, Sorcerers’ Revenge, the Techno-Wizards, aided by the Legion of Dragons and an army of Cyber-Knights, respond to the CS invasion with blitzkrieg retaliation, motivated by “pure and simple revenge.” Corrupted leaders of the once-virtuous Tolkeen form an alliance with nightmarish Daemonix monstrosities. The war becomes “a murderous vendetta driven by a demonic lust for blood and revenge.” By the end – by the year 109 P.A., and the changed world detailed in the final installment, Aftermath – almost the only real heroes left on either side are the player characters.
The Coalition supplements, and the mercenary books with them, offer a wide range of cool stuff in over-the-top Palladium style, such as (among many, many examples) Techno-Wizard Spin-Disk Shooters and Turbo-Wing Boards, Northern Gun’s 1F Red Hawk Flying Power Armor, Cyber-Knight Zen Combat, Super-Psionic Powers, Shadow Dragons, Psi-Stalkers, Hellion Skelebots, N’mbyr Gorilla Men, Corgi Dog Boys, Dinosaur People, Threno Bat-Things, Iron-Dragonfly Heavy Air Juggernauts, Feculence Daemonix, and the Meganomicon. And the Siege storyline brings forward the movers and shakers in the setting – the Prosek dynasty, the Circle of Twelve, Cyber-Knight Lord Coake, Atlanteans, Timewalkers, and many mercenary companies – along with a gazetteer of Rifts hotspots like Mad Town and the Northern Baronies of Minnesota, the Dragon King city of Freehold, the Great Skelebot Graveyard, and of course Tolkeen itself, before and after the war.
Whether you send your Rifters to the front lines of the siege, or just want a trove of locations, characters, powers, and equipment, this Coalition Wars offer had 15 big supplements and sourcebooks for your own campaign across the shattered Earth – including the most recent Rifts supplement, Coalition Manhunters (2022), which forcefully reassigns the Illinois-Nazi regime to its original role as villains.
There were seven titles in this Coalition Wars offer’s Coalition Collection (retail value $72) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including Coalition War Campaign, Coalition Navy, Secrets of the Coalition States, and four mercenary supplements: Mercenaries, MercOps, MercTown, and Mercenary Adventures.
This offer’s Tolkeen Collection added eight more titles worth an additional $97, including Coalition Manhunters and the entire seven-part Siege on Tolkeen campaign: Coalition Wars, Coalition Overkill, Sorcerer’s Revenge, Cyber-Knights, Shadows of Evil, Final Siege, and Aftermath.
Four of these supplements (total retail value $42.50) have appeared in one or another of three past offers: MercTown in the original July 2017 Rifts Bundle; Coalition War Campaign and Coalition Navy in Rifts Worlds (July 2018); and Secrets of the Coalition States in Rifts Minion War (January 2020).
Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to these two Rifts offers’ designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.
“Palladium Books,” “Rifts,” “The Rifter,” and “Megaverse” are registered trademarks, and other names, titles, game terms, characters, character likenesses and slogans are trademarks owned by Kevin Siembieda and Palladium Books Inc.
