A Geek History of Time - Episode 277 - Paladium Games Part II

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

See, people when they click on this, they'll see the title, so they'll be like, poor Ed. What does that even fucking mean? However, because it's England, that's largely ignored and unstudied. I really wished for the sake of my sense of moral righteousness that I could get away with saying no. He had a god damned ancestral home and a noble title until Germany became a republic. You know, none of this highfalutin, you know, critical role stuff. a noble title until Germany became a republic. So they chewed through my favorite shit. No, I'm not helping them. Make sense. Also trade wins are a thing. Ha ha, just serious.

Like, no, he really has a mad on him. Yeah, we'll go upon a tangent. As we keep doing. Like, yeah, this is how we fill time. Yeah. This is a Geek History of Time. Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history and English teacher here in Northern, California

And right before we started recording this episode I went into the other room to go to the bathroom and when I got done I I went to flush like you do and When I did so heard a snap from the inside of the toilet tank and nothing happened and I Had to open the tank up to realize that the chain connecting to the flapper valve had snapped and So tomorrow morning instead of joining my wife and my son when they go to a birthday party or another kid,

I'm going to get to go to Home Depot and perform basic household maintenance, which, yay, home ownership. So that's what just happened to me. How about you? Well, I'm Damian Harmony. I'm a US history teacher here in Northern, California I have to ask does your wife regularly listen to this podcast? No good. Okay, so not good, but for the purposes of this next statement

You know when these parties are if you want me to come over and just like you know use your restroom and snap chains more than happy to do so because then oh no honey i i mean i will i will work cheap uh if you want me to fuck up a sprinkler head uh like you you name the thing that you want to gain experience in fixing um that that will take an indeterminate amount of time because you're new to it etc etc Yeah, I'm there for you. I got you 10-4. Oh, yeah, I appreciate. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yes. Yeah, so Most of the time I gotta say most of the time Most of these parties don't bother me. Mm-hmm But occasionally there there have been a couple where I've been like,

oh god, how much longer are we going to have to be here? Well, and that's the thing is like, you know, they might be pleasant parties, but like, it's always nice to miss. So, yeah. So what I've got going on is two games have erupted in my house the first I have taught my daughter chess Yes, no it's it's cool cuz like She actually was figuring out How to like okay if I do this and he does like she was playing ahead and that meant she had to try to Think of what I was Trying to accomplish and I'm like that's fantastic. You're already trying to do that. That's great

So we'll calibrate it until I can figure out how many pieces I should be spotting her So there's that the other game that's been burgeoning in our house Is that my son has really gotten into the force unleashed and one of the reasons that I was late to recording tonight was because he was pulling down a star destroyer. So I wanted to see him finish that off because that's the same exact scene that after which my brother and I have both like cool we pulled down a star destroyer. That was tough. We are clearly a very, very powerful dark side Jedi, because this is before Star Wars got bought by Disney. Yeah, actually, before my son was born. Yeah.

And like, wow, we really did it. And then we stepped on a slanted surface and fell to our deaths. But so. Ah, yes. The vagaries, the vagaries of video game difficulty. fell to our deaths. Yes, the vagaries of video game difficulty. It's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, those are the two games going on in our house. And I actually I think I'm going to try to entice them to play

risk with me. I have a Star Wars episode two Clone Wars risk, and it's actually superior, superior to the original risk I have a Star Wars episode 2 Clone Wars risk and it's actually superior superior to the original risk Because it doesn't have the limitations of so many choke points. Oh Yeah, yeah, cuz you got hyperspace lanes instead and there's no one of those. So the game goes quicker. Oh God, I would hope so Game goes quicker. Oh

God, I would hope so Yeah, like yeah, I have never actually played a game of risk to completion. No, don't you play someone quits? Yeah Fuck it. Yeah, so anyway So yeah, the force unleashed. I remember I I didn't play that like anything like when it actually came out. It was several years it had been out before I got the opportunity to play it. And I remember what struck me, the remark I made to another friend who asked me, so you know, how is it? Because they hadn't played it either.

And I said, well, it really gives you a feeling for the way that the empire performed a genocide on a very personal level. Right. As you just wade through levels, just like cutting everything down. Oh yeah. Throwing people just. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah, I have, I have, I have some fond memories of the catharsis of that gate because I was, I was playing it right as I was going through the first phase of divorce like my first life Okay, there you go. So the feeling of of you know, oh, hey, yeah, no, I have a lot of rage backed up I can do this this was wild. I'm okay with it. It's wild cuz I I'm hearing the sounds and the voices and I remember playing it we were expecting with William like that's how long ago I played it. So yeah yeah anyway so what we're doing why Ed always plays a paladin? That could be a worthy thing to analyze

If I'm ever willing to get quite that personal on in this forum But no I'm looking at rifts and palladium games more broadly. Okay, and so in our last episode I went through as we often do kind of the prehistory and and setting the stage going through the Development of the medium of tabletop role-playing games, right, you know through through the early to mid 80s And so now is the point that we actually get to palladium books. Mm-hmm so Kevin shimby Ada So now is the point that we actually get to the palladium books So Kevin

shimby Ada one of the one of the issues that I ran into when I started doing research for this is Kevin shimby Ada and I'm pronouncing his name that way because my understanding is that's the Polish way of pronouncing It is a Polish name Okay And that is that is as close as I can get to the Polish pronunciation of the name my understanding is That that people who have worked with him have indicated that he pronounces it CMB Ada Okay

which You know but anyway I've I've looked at his name for 30 plus years on the covers of books and, and not really understood how to pronounce it, but there we are. He founded palladium books in 1981. And the first RPG that they put out was the mechanoid invasion. It's a science fiction game with an original setting. It's a science fiction game with an original setting. It's set on a human colony world that is facing invasion by the mechanoids, the titular aliens.

And they are cybernetic. They're cyborgs. They're kind of like Daleks in that to look at them from the outside, all you see are robots. But inside there's a biological component. There is a brain and biological component to them. So they are in fact cybernetic. They're called mechanoids. They are not only cybernetic, but they are also psychic. So one of the, one of the tricks that you run into as a player in the game, it's kind of one of the things that gets revealed is when you get into a mechanoid base, there

are no buttons and there are no levers on anything because they control their own machinery psychically and you wind up, you know, it's either a switch that's inside the wall that you have to sense to control telekinetically or you know something you have to Psychically tell the the machine what to do And so this colony world is facing invasion by by the mechanoids Mechanically the game builds on ideas out of D&D characters have stats that are reminiscent of the six in Dungeons and Dragons characters have classes in the form of an OCC or occupational character class

Okay, there are class levels and hit points the combat system is based on a d20 Now it innovates in some other ways Skills which like weren't on a thing in first edition a D&D Skills which like weren't on a thing in first edition ad and e The closest they had to skit to a skill set in a D&D was you could roll on a table Or if you're damn allowed it you could pick From a set of hey as part of my character's backstory. This is my profession and Like okay, so as a backstory, you know how to do these things.

Right. Uh, but in, in mechanoid system, it was no, no, your occupational character class gives you access. You, you have these skills. Basic, you know, you start with these skills and you can pick from this list of other skills. And all of those skills are based on a percentile rule. And with every level that you so like you would, you might have auto mechanics at first level your skill and auto mechanics would be like 30% plus whatever bonus to skills

you get from your IQ stat your intelligence And so when you were doing something with your auto mechanic stat You would roll and you need to roll under whatever your percentage is The same way that you would do a percentile roll in Dungeons and Dragons Usually, you know, you have a 30% chance to do this thing. You got to roll a 20-node over on percentile dice, right? And so this, in this system, and this wasn't the first system to do this. There had been others before it.

But this takes this percentile skill system and kind of gloms it onto a very D&D-esque combat system and set of statistics. Right. I remember there being, forget what the name of the game was, but it was essentially like some sort of caveman times type of game. Right.

And like maybe not even Bronze Age Okay, um and it was a similar thing like you get your percentile up to like 99% you're almost guaranteed to always hit yeah, you know that kind of thing yeah and Chaosium's system Kind of thing yeah, and yeah chaos IMS system Was one in which all everything was percentile based your your combat skills were percentile based all of your skills were percentile and

in combat there was you know a Competent you know it was it was a contested kind of role And there was a way to compare your result with your opponent's result to see whether you hit. And other systems had done stuff with percentiles. And this wasn't the first time that somebody had decided, hey, I'm going to introduce, hey, no, in addition to knowing how to hit monsters over the head with a sharpened piece of metal, you also have these other skills that you know how to do. In D&D, particularly, and then in AD&D, all of this stuff was usually handled by, okay, that's going to be a dex check. And the problem with that was, from a gaming standpoint, as a player and as a game master,

you never get better at anything. Right. If it's always based on your stat your stat is fixed and right like as a 15th level fighter You'd think you'd be better at some things than somebody who's just starting out as a greenhorn Right as a as a you know tenth level wizard You should know more about things than just again, and in a friend, you know, somebody barely out of apprenticeship, but using, using stat roles, nothing ever gets better. Saving throws in Dungeons and Dragons improved as your level went up, but that was more about

avoiding stuff and resisting or surviving things. Sure. fighting stuff and resisting or surviving things. Which again makes sense because we go back to what I mentioned before that AD&D and D&D are both coming, you know, first generation straight out of war gaming. And so that's, that's going to be more where the focus is. Now we're, we're the medium is developing to the point that like, okay, now we actually want to get into challenges that aren't just punching people, you know? And so, so mechanoids is, or the mechanoid invasion is part of that developmental process. This is happening in other places while palladium is doing it with the mechanoid invasion.

But this is part of this second generation role playing kind of development. And so totally also, before I get to the tone of the game, the mechanoids and any of the human players who have or develop psychic powers. There are psychic powers that are in the rule book and they use, um, psychic points or inner strength points, uh, rather than like, okay, well you're a second level psycher, so you can use two first level psychic skills. It doesn't use the, uh the level spell slots kind of ruling. It is, you know, these abilities and you have this pool of resources to draw on to use them. Okay. Which is another

development. Like at the same time this was going on, you'd see articles or letters to the editor in Dragon magazine and people going like, okay, no, being a first level wizard sucks. So, you know, instead of just having them have the one spell, I've, you know, I've come up with this house rule where we use mana points or we have this other, you know, sure, this other resource that you can use so you can cast spells more than once and you can, you know, pick which one because what's, what's all this shit about memorizing spells and it's bullshit, right? Yeah. you know and and this was the thing that was going on in the community and this is part of the development of the art Form if you will from the first generation into the second generation of it. Mm-hmm now tonally

Meccanoid invasion is a big departure from Dungeons and Dragons it in that it is apocalyptic the mechanoids Are intent on killing all the humans their goal is the the not merely we're going to take over the planet But we're gonna kill everybody on it Okay, and they are relentless They are utterly merciless and the human colonists are hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered Like this is this is total underdog

You know how this is about survival less than it is about anything else and The game got generally positive reviews in magazines like space gamer and dragon. What year was this again? 81 81 okay it just I Come back to this question all the time you Have the ability to create any fantasy world you want

You come up with one Where it's worse Like yeah Well, yeah, I and I understand that like there needs to be adversity and challenge yeah But that doesn't mean you have to have like this just constant threat to the existence of humanity as the underlying mythos of the genre. Like, you know, it's, it's wow, congratulations, you recreated frontierism.

Way to go, Gary, you know? And I get it because that's who he was and that's what he was about, but like, okay, you've seen people do that and you decided to go further. Like, you know? And obviously, you know, again, it's 81, so the backdrop is nuclear annihilation. So I get it. I get it. I get it but there there is a stunning lack of

Variety mm-hmm when it comes to The creation of role-playing games like I bet you there's an economy economy based on scarcity Mmm. Yeah, you know So, yeah, anyway, it just it just It's it's one of those if anybody ever asks like, you know, Damien were you surprised that we reacted the way we did to COVID? No, because I'm an historian Damien I'm surprised that we always make the worst choices possible as a society. No Because I play role-playing games

Yeah, yeah, yeah kind of makes sense so It's worth noting in the context of that bit of interpretation that he was born in 19 Samietta Was born in 1956 So he is a boomer and so yeah. So global devastation and the, the imminent threat of everybody dying. Oh yeah. Stop, stop and cover yourself.

Drill. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't the hallway drills. Yeah. You were a part of his experience growing up and you know, the science fiction movies of the era were, you know, heavily, heavily focused on you know, had, had a heavy apocalyptic feel were heavily, uh, influenced by, um, you know, or, or, or very frequently involved alien invasions and all of this kind of stuff. So this is, you know, this is, this is an outgrowth of all of that.

Um, I'm going to go out on a, I think fairly stout limb and say, he probably had seen doctor who, at some point and had seen the cyber men and the Daleks and had thought, okay, that's pretty cool. What if I, what if I do something with that idea? And this is the direction the idea went. Um, the psychic powers part, um, you know, this is the early the idea went the psychic powers part You know, this is the early 80s the 70s. There was a psychic kind of craze in the 1970s I talked about a lot in the the the dark crystal episodes. Yes And so, you know you kind of look at it and that just kind of makes sense. Sure. Sure And so the game the game generally did pretty well

Now Shambhya had to get a loan from a friend to publish that first game but by 1983 Palladium books had made enough money For him to expand and publish palladium fantasy For him to expand and publish palladium fantasy And the fantasy game built on the system introduced in mechanoids Now the system was really clearly like I said before D&D inspired

But it introduced some different ideas mechanically okay, so like I said before Skills were a thing At this point. We're still in 80 and the first edition. I don't have in front of me when Reficiencies first became proficiencies don't show up or non weapon proficiency don't show up in 80 and D until the Dungeoneer Survival Guide and that wasn't until 85 or no it was later than that 87. Okay.

So, by that point you're in second edition right? No second edition came out in 89. So it's still first edition AD&D but it's toward toward the later period of first edition. It's 10 here, okay Survival guide the one where like the guys climbing up a thing and there's like he's beset on all sides by flying beasts that are Yeah, there's like gremlins hanging off of yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's the Dungeon Ears survival guide It was followed very short like within a couple of months by the wilderness survival guide which included a whole lot of rules about outdoor travel and and You know survival proficiencies and that kind of stuff sure

And of course I have both books Because it's me right so But and and those books introduced into a D&D The idea that okay as a wizard you have this many other things that you know how to do You know that these are the skills that you've learned how to do Okay as a fighter you have these as you know, whoever you have these right and Actually, you know the books may have come out earlier than that because non weapon proficiencies were also part of Oriental Adventures

So anyway, but it's it's after 80 it's it's post 83 it's 84 85. Okay So in 2485 okay So in Palladium fantasy just like in the mechanoids skills are percentile based so crafting or whatever And with your Occupational character class because he used the same acronym in the fantasy game Again, you would have these are the skills you know for sure

because everybody who has your class knows these. And then you can pick, you know, if you're a mercenary, you can pick this many other skills. If you're a wizard, you can pick this many other skills, et cetera, et cetera. And armor class, which in D and D and a D and D you wanted your armor class to be a low number. Right. And, and, and that was, that was counterintuitive. And in first edition a D and D there was a really complicated chart. It was actually more complicated than THACO. THACO was a simplification. First edition AD&D, if you got a 20, like modified 20, you actually, instead of only hitting,

like if you're a second level fighter, if you've got a modified 20, instead of hitting an AC0, you'd hit like an AC negative 4. Because on you hit like an AC negative four because on the chart 20 had Like four spots on the chair had a band. Oh, yeah. Yeah And and it like and and I remember that because I always played, you know fighter types fighters Paladins Rangers sure And that chart every every couple of levels that chart would shift right? And so that girl was actually a simplification Which I know that anybody who who like started Dungeons and Dragons with?

3.5 or fifth is it gonna be like you're kidding no seriously they go as a simplification In palladium fantasy it was much more intuitive your armor class instead of armor class you had an armor rating and instead of low number good it worked in a more intuitive high number good way so leather armor had an armor rating of like nine and if somebody rolled more than a nine they got past your armor and they were gonna hit you right unless you parried or something Yeah, unless you affected like you added a modifier of some sort to the role by a declared action Actually, well, it's a little bit more involved in that but yeah there was You could always

Try to parry always try to parry. Okay. Trying to block an incoming attack was free and you would have to roll higher than the attack roll against you. Okay. So they got a 15 to hit you alright well I'm gonna try to parry

and like using a shield gave you a plus two to your parry roll cause it's a big shield right? Trying to parry with a weapon, it was whatever your, you know, whatever your bonuses were anyway to attack, right? You could always parry. If you didn't want to parry, you could try to dodge, but dodging

would use up one of your, one of your attacks. So instead of getting to take an attack action, you'd have to give one up in order to dodge And and there were all kinds of other options that were available Now The other thing that Palladium did was hit points were always something that Felt weird and they felt kludgy right because it's like okay. Well. I've been hit

That must mean I take yeah, how many how many cuts get like what's the difference between like the first hit I take? Like you know if I have I'm a second level fighter. I have you know 15 hit points right you know the first Two-point hit I take I'm you know there's there's no penalty at all the you know eighth to hit point hit I take kills me like what's the difference right mm-hmm and you know Gary Gygax spent some time in the DMG for AD&D explaining that, well, you know, uh, you know, it's, it's not always, you know, hit points don't always indicate that you've been, you know, hit and you're bleeding. It could mean that like, you know, the first, the first hit is, you know,

uh, you know, just taking a couple of hairs off of your arm, you know, it's, it's like a near miss, right? But you're, but you're winded and you're off balance. And so, you know, and and so, you know, he And it was you know, it was all hand waving him, right? Right. Well, so so clearly Kevin Shambierdo looked at that and was like that's that's I don't like that too much. That's too much So as a way to try to hand wave the ridiculous of hit points palladium introduced the idea of SdC and

hit points SDC structural damage capacity So everything has SDC people objects whatever have SDC Okay, if you get hit normally in combat by say a table leg Because I know how enamored you are of that idea leg because I know how enamored you are of that idea the damage is gonna go to your SDC first and This kind of reflects the same kind of fuzzy was a near-miss grazing hits kind of explanation of damage that you see in a D&D Right sure sure

After your SDC is used up though once you start taking hit point damage You start to really be in trouble, and this is where is a Reflection on the character sheet of okay. No now This is this is the blow that's actually drawing blood. This is the you know clear hard connection to the side of my head You know right? It's not just you hit me on the shoulder. Yeah, no, this is now, now you're really, you're really hurting me. Now there wasn't at this point a really significant, meaningful mechanic to reflect this increased seriousness, but it's in, kind of in-game shorthand to explain how a lightly armored character could be hit by enemies six times and not, you know, dead.

Right. Character could be hit by enemies six times and not you know dead right, okay? Spell slots in palladium fantasy got replaced by a pool of magical energy called PPE potential psychic energy Wizards could cast however many spells they wanted until they ran out of psychic energy Okay, still couldn't cast spells above your character level say your first level wizard You can only cast first level spells anything else is too complicated too demanding for you But you can you can throw that that light spell However many times you can until you run out of juice, right? And

You know that means you could do this four or five times and as a note, this is one of the things I like most about palladium fan when we decided let's play palladium fantasy. It was one of the things I liked most about it, uh, was because if you wound up being the party wizard, you weren't useless after the first round of combat. Right. I spent my thing and now I have a dagger. Uh, and that was, that was like one of the most frustrating things to me was No, I have a dagger And That was that was like one of the most frustrating things to me was like, okay

No, look, I'm supposed to be this student of the nature of a reality Like I have spent however many years honing My will to be able to do stuff that literally violates the laws of physics You mean to tell me I get to do that once Right, and then I'm I'm not only just a guy with a dagger I'm a really squishy unarmored guy with a dagger right like being a low-level wizard sucks. Yeah, and One one year in the campaign that I was in in college we we'd play a new campaign like every year. We'd roll up new characters Second or third year I showed up late to the first session and so I got stuck playing the party wizard and

I made it to second level and I was not having any fun and Another one of my friends joined the game and he rolled up another wizard And I said to her DM. Hey, we have a wizard now Can I roll up another character? He said no He just he was like no, this is the character you got you get okay cool. Um So the very next session I Okay cool. So the very next session, between one session and the next, I looked through the PHB and like, okay, what can I do with the spells that I have? And I found that one of the things that you could do is you could cast light on yourself. And the spell description

said this can be intimidating for some monsters and whatever, whatever. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. So we got into a fight with some goblins. I threw magic missile and then I cast light on myself and I went running down the quarter after the goblins saying, no, no, I'm trying to intimidate them. Ryan, God bless him. I was the table at me and went there are six of them Yeah, yeah, I'm intimidating them. Are you trying that scene in Star Wars? Are you trying to get yourself killed? No, I'm screaming to them that I'm Kaila Menchikane the elven god of war and I've come for their souls

I'm trying to intimidate them. Are they intimidated? Like holding eye contact the whole time, because we both knew exactly what I was trying to do. After that session, let me roll up a Ranger. It's like, fuck you. I'm not having any fun. Right. Screw that. Just, I mean, think about, think about where the state of gaming was where a you show up late so you get stuck with the class Yeah, B. You say after a while of trying to do it. Hey, there's someone else who wants to play that class I'd like to switch. No, you cannot

Yeah, well, I was that that's a personality issue as much as anything else. But yeah. Yes, yes probably. But also, think of where the state of gaming was. That's true. That's the norm. Like, hey, here's hoping that you roll up the stats. You know, you said last episode that you, your very first character was a paladin. I remember thinking, fuck, he had to have rolled really good for that.

Because I rolled on a chart. I answered a whole bunch of questions. I did all this and I was stuck playing a certain type of character according to the rules as my parents had understood them. And because you had rules that were written in that way. If you were the type of person who didn't just sit there and go, you know what, there's nobody around, I don't see a cop, I know the lights are red, but, and you just fucking

go because you got shit to do. If you're not that person, then you very likely would have been like, well, I guess I'm going to stay here. Man, this red light's taken for a while, but like you know it's red light right if you're that kind of person You'd be like well. It says that I have to do the the the roll up this way You know I mean I remember playing a game where it was like okay. Well. What do you want to play? I don't think I'd like to play this okay. Well. Here's hoping you get it when you roll like and Based on the roles I was like, oh, I'm a bard

Yay. Now this is at a time where bards were super lame. Yeah and And it was I can I can tell that you're talking about early second edition. Yes And so, you know, it was like, oh, yay, I'm a bard. Like, it's not very fun. Yeah, but that's what you're old. Like, it's like that mentality. Yeah.

You know, it reminds me of there's a post-apocalyptic episode. It was the Y2K episode of Family Guy. And Peter apparently was the only one who was right that the world was gonna end. And so he's running a town and somebody shows up to the town and they're like, ah, what skills do you have? Well, you know, before everything crashed, I was a doctor.

Cool, hope you get to pick that one out of the hat. And so they just bring him like a big old hat with like jobs. And it's like, jester, there you go. You know? Yeah. Yeah. That kind of thing. It just arbitrary as fuck. You know, back in the day of like you only roll three D six. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And you roll it six times you write them down in that order. Yeah, that's what you get to be like Yeah, we you know Various this is where the power of house ruling comes in on stuff. Absolutely Cuz like we we were like, okay, we're gonna roll 46 drop lowest, right and like, okay, we're going to roll 46 drop lowest. Right. And that was, that was in the game in college was 46 drop lowest in high school. What we frequently would say is, okay, we're

going to do 46 drop lowest and you get to reroll the first beyond drop the lowest. If you get like you roll 46, you can get like a bunch of ones and twos You get mulligans you can yeah, you get mulligans Yeah, you can ignore some of the ones and twos right because you know we wanted to play badasses like right That was fun. Oh, I guess Barbarian is it because I have a three and I could put that in intelligence. Yeah, like yeah, it's it's it's just it's quite something to me to like you know to hear you're like yeah, I showed up they gave me this class I didn't like and

You know I had to basically engineer my own death now part of me like agrees to that because it's like hey I don't want to play his character anymore. Okay, how would you like to, would you like your character to die or is he gonna wander off? Right? And then you have that talk and then you play it out. That makes sense because it's like, hey, I'm trying to tell a collaborative story here. But like straight up, like, are you trying to die? No, here's this bullshit reason why this is okay. Okay, I guess I have to adjudicate it. Here's this bullshit reason why this is okay Again again holding eye contact with them within the whole time like right. Yeah. Yep. No, I'm dead serious But I mean just the dynamics that the game promoted in the end that like yeah You know, no you have to play the thing and it's like I don't fucking want to I don't

Yeah, you know like I'm in a game right now and I was playing a Cleric and it was I mean it's in cursive straw you fucking need clerics Oh shit, do you need a and I'm a twilight cleric so I am just this like hit point battery Right for everyone right everybody's getting like 13 points from me her round Right of temporary hit points like yeah, it is really hard to beat I got so bored playing him like mechanically that's really cool for the party as a player It's like I want to try these other spells

Yeah, yeah, your experience of the table is like I'm doing the same thing every fucking round. Yeah, what do you do? I mean Duracell You know yeah, but so so I told the DM you know hey Getting getting kind of bored of this He's like alright. How do you want to get rid of him? Oh? Great cool all right cool yeah, and then you know what do you want to play next don't know? I'll think of something and then you know what do you want to play next don't know I'll think of something and then you know all right well Let me know so that I can fold him into the story that was it and the college of the idiot bard

No, he's doing a squash buckler Different different game. I've got a college of the idiot bard But more more to you know what I'm saying like he immediately was like yeah I don't want anybody playing something. They don't want to play. Yeah. Oh Yeah, we're here to we're here to have fun. Yeah, it's fun. Why are you against me? Yeah. Yeah, so So yeah, but anyway long long segue That was that was one of the big differences that that many

Second generation role-playing games introduced with some way to make wizards suck less at low levels Mm-hmm, and that's the way palladium handled it now alignment Changed really dramatically They still had alignment as a thing in the game and There was still good and evil and

There were circumstances in which good and evil had What's we're looking for material effect on yeah on the world right? for material effect on yeah on the world right but and in terms of played alignments good and evil were defined very broadly but the whole idea of neutrality got tossed out because Neutrality as it was written in Dungeons and Dragons Could be kind of kind of hard to to figure out or kind of hard to justify sure Because like unless you're a stoic philosopher or something like the idea of new Some member of some esoteric, you know

Philosophical tradition which stoicism is an esoteric but you get what I'm trying to say Yeah, you know the idea of well, you know, there's got to be a balance between good and evil like Nobody actually is motivated by that in real life, right? At least in in Kevin's Chambier has had nobody is and So instead of nine alignments there were seven Okay, and So there was principled and scrupulous were good alignments, okay principled is

Captain America sure scrupulous is Is Captain America? Sure. Scrupulous is... Oh, who'd be scrupulous in the Marvel universe? Basically scrupulous is you're a good guy, but like the niceties of always following the rules is not something you're necessarily going to do. In AD&&D term scrupulous would be like neutral good Okay You know if there's a bad guy on the other side of this door

I'm kicking the fucking door down like I don't I'm not evil you know yeah there you go. Yeah, yeah and then there were selfish alignments unprincipled and anarchist Unprincipled characters are still Ironman sickly yes, yes yes, Tony Stark is unprincipled Tony Stark is basically like he wants to be a good guy But he is selfishly motivated right he is he is self-centered Like he he looks at situations. He's like no I'm doing this for everybody else

But it's like no you're doing this because of your own fucking trauma Right like you as you are you are self-centered and not particularly well self-regulated, right? So that's unprincipled anarchist would be rocket raccoon Okay, I'm I'm I'm not evil, but I'm going to do what I want. Right. Right. No, I want, I want that guy's leg. What do we use the leg for? I just thought it was funny. Are you kidding? It's hysterical.

Right. That's that's anarchist right there. And then evil had three alignments. There's a barrent, which is lawful evil. Basically a barrent is is lawful evil basically a Barrett is the villain who has a compelling motive and a code of behavior so dr. Doom Dr. Doom yes, dr. Doom is a great example of a barren Trying to remember what the other examples they used were but yeah dr. Doom is perfect

miscreant Would be Loki Okay, I'm I'm going to do stuff because I think hurting people is funny. Yeah, I Get a kick out of it and and More I don't care if this hurts people. This is funny. Yeah, I don't care if this hurts people is funny and yeah And then diabolic it's okay Yes, I am I am entirely motivated by

not only my own power and my own everything but Beyond just domination I seek out an opportunity to be cruel Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. Okay like Like hang King no, that's not King. He's not he's not cruel. He's he is unyielding. He is Hang King is a different brand of a barren. I yeah, you're right Diabolic would be like saber-tooth might be diabolic. Yeah like you know.

I could do this or I could do this with cruelty. I'm gonna do it with cruelty. I'm gonna choose cruelty. And like palpatine would be, would be diabolic. Right, right. You know. And so those are the evil alignments. There's more nuance involved in this alignment system

Mm-hmm, it's an interesting move away from the very heavily more cock influence You know everything is on a spectrum from you know lawful through chaotic to or lawful through neutral to chaotic And then a D&D goes well, there's actually two axes and we're gonna you know, triangulate everything on that. This is a bit more humanistic. Okay. I don't know if that's exactly the right word, but that's the one that comes to mind. This is a little bit more grounded maybe. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, this is a bit more based on this is actually how people behave. Like if we're going to broadly define people's alignment somehow morally this this is more ways that you can look at how people actually Behave in the real world. This is descriptive not prescriptive. Yes. Yeah. Yes very much very much If you act these ways you are these alignments not if you're this alignment you act this way. This is yeah and It's not if you're this alignment you act this way. This is yeah and What really makes platinum fantasy stand out beyond these kind of mechanical changes Is the setting?

It's a it's a pastiche setting that relies a lot more heavily on Lovecraft more cock and aspirin I'm sorry what? aspirin Mentioned him I mentioned him no I'm forgetting his first name, but I Mentioned him in the episodes about more cock when we talked about categories of fantasy low low fantasy, thieves world. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shit.

And I, for a moment, his name flashed across my brain and it disappeared from my frontal cortex and I lost it again. But so anyway, this setting relies a lot more on those influences than it does on Vanance or on Tolkien, which are the two major influences on D&D. So in Shambhiyatis setting, the incredibly ancient, unfathomably evil Old Ones were the first beings in the universe. They in turn fashioned the gods and directed the gods to create the world. Their cruelty and tyranny was so great that the gods then created the mortal races to form armies to fight against the old ones

The old ones could not be destroyed without undoing the universe, but they could be locked away So at the end of that war the old ones were imprisoned. Okay, this is Titans and Gods, yeah. Very much, yeah. But it's instead of the Titans of Greek mythology, it's relying on the old ones who are very explicitly these Lovecraftian star god kind of figures. Sure. So it's a little norse a little greek A little norse a little greek a lot lovecraft

um, and so Powerful magics were placed over the old ones to put them to sleep And lock them away, right? Now the elves who were the first mortal race Then rose to fill the power vacuum who were the first mortal race then rose to fill the power vacuum, formed their own vast kingdom and empire, which then enslaved the dwarves and other races and grew in its own tyranny and corruption until it destroyed itself, leaving room for the rise of humanity. In the present of the setting, humanity's largest kingdoms now find themselves facing

a rising power in the form of another race called the wolfen who are Essentially lawful evil wolf men with an aesthetic very strongly reminiscent of ancient Rome. Okay Huge portions of the old world are desolate demon haunted wastelands owing to the cataclysmic events of the world's history Pillars of virtue are almost non-existent like there's there's very very few like shining examples of good guys anywhere in this in this world The biggest human power the biggest human Empire Is decidedly evil leaning with many of its nobles actively worshiping gods like set Anubis and Amit I

Already mentioned the part about Alignments being being different right the book is never quite self-referential enough to call itself gritty But it's definitely a lot darker than a D&D The basic setting for a D&D is the world of Greyhawk Okay, very Hawk felt very old and lived in Like there was it was it was difficult to feel like you were going to you know carve out a new kingdom or doing it because like the whole continent has basically

been settled by one group or another and like this is, you know, very, very ancient and we have all this history. Then after Greyhawk D&D moved to focusing on the Forgotten Realms and Faerun. Faerun felt very bright and very heroic It was it was very much as opposed to grimdark it was very much what's shining shining bright The old world of palladium fantasy felt doomed Like eventually the old ones were gonna wake up yeah I mean you don't Unless you have the threat of them waking up

Yeah, and and eventually they're gonna wake up and they're gonna cash everybody's checks out and we're all we're all doomed right the world is we're always on the precipice of Like not merely an apocalypse, but the unraveling of everything right? This is very very Michael Moorcock Without interestingly without the Moral or ethical or ideological baggage that that is involved in the there is an eternal war between law and chaos There's none of that okay It's just the old ones are just fucking cruel and evil and when they show up. We're all dead like

There's there's no and of course the game is set when? That is beginning to happen Because why I'm doing interesting yeah The setting is post post apocalypse like there's been multiple apocalypses. We're living we're living in the ashes of like a third apocalypse okay, and You know know, it was, it was just, it thematically and every time we played it, um, like the choices we all wound up making as players just because of the way the setting was constructed and the, and the feeling of the books and the character of, of kind of the art, we always wound up playing much, much less, you know, shiny, happy captain

America kind of kind of heroic characters, right? Because, because it was, it was this different kind of, there was just this very different kind of tone to it so then in 1985 a Freelancer mentioned to shimby a that he had an idea for a game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shambita went okay cool. He went to Eastman and Laird. He got the rights But then he wasn't happy with the draft that the freelancer wrote. What a pin in that. We're going to come back to some of that later. Yeah, please.

Broadly not in specifically regarding this game. But anyway, so he had Eric and I've never figured out how to pronounce this last name. W J C I K. I want to say Wojcik, so he had Eric Wojcik design a rule set Three letters that we don't have in Latin And Latin Jehovah begins with an eye yeah

So Wojcik designed a rule set and the game got published in September of 85 Including artwork and original comic strips done by Eastman and layered themselves Because at that point it was still a new enough property that it was like they were still working on it They were still working on it. Yeah The rules included so the rules still combats a d20 system you have armor rating Which is kind of somewhat a little bit less important or works a little bit differently because now we're dealing with people who might have guns Which is one of the places where the playdome system starts getting a little clunky Because we got firearms here, and you're trying to deal with armor class system and right

They're gonna be some issues with that. But yeah bullets go right through things y'all. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we're well Again put a pin in that too, right? It's stuck with SDC and hit points introduced several different martial arts forms as Manners of hand-to-hand combat that your characters could learn or usually know from first level and then develop as you go up in level. And it included ways to design your own mutant animal hero using a mutation points system. So at the beginning of your game Everybody involved the game master would say okay, you're gonna have this many mutation points

You know we're gonna have a game. That's this this crazy go nuts, right? And you start with your base whatever your base animal was like you know what I'm gonna start with a house cat Or I'm gonna start you know what I want to play rocket raccoon. I'm gonna start with a raccoon I want to you know and then you'd spend mutation points to, uh, make your appearance more human so you can fit into society better. You could spend mutation points to be like, okay, one of the things that, uh, like the example that always, that always comes to mind for me is if you wanted to play a mutant weasel One of the things that you could spin mutation points was you could keep your weasel metabolism Yeah, because weasels are

crazy hyper right So if you spent something like 10 mutation points you could keep your weasel metabolism which meant you got bonuses to initiative roles and I don't remember whether you got an extra attack a turn or what but you got all these all these bonuses that had to do With no, no, you're you're hyperactive free slinky, right? Right and You know the downside was you need to consume like 6,000 calories a day, right? Because you're burning all of them. Right. Um, and so, but you could spend your points to figure out, you know, how, how much of an animal and how much of a person was your character, you know,

what, what animal traits or special abilities did you still hold onto? Like all this kind of stuff. It was really cool. Um, and palladium spun off the TMNT universe using these rules to create another post-apocalypse game after the bomb in January of 86. And the, and the conceit of that was, well, okay. Um, the balloon went up, uh, there was a nuclear exchange and there are, you could in, in after the bomb, you could play a regular human or you could play a nuclear

mutated animal. Sure. You know? Um, and so now this all happened before the turtles really took off as a property and the game had significant success at first as the franchise gained fame, but then at a certain point it kind of, it kind of tailed off. And Sanbieta kind of in kind of a little bit of a boomer diatribe complained that as the cartoon series and other media in the franchise developed the turtles got kiddified and Thus the cool factor for the game's target demographic dropped as he put it No, self-respecting teenager would want to would want to be playing a game associated with

With that the turtles with that with that cartoon, right? Now despite that palladium held on to the license for it until 2000 Going back to our commentary at the end of last episode right yep, so now running tally We have a sci-fi alien invasion game right of a traditional fantasy role-playing game right heavy post-apocalypse overtones and a license property That morphed into a post nuclear apocalypse game Yeah, just sensing a theme here a little bit all three. Yeah a little bit so then in 1985 Kevin Shambierda saw Robotech for the first time and

Kevin Shambietta saw Robotech for the first time and was blown away and immediately knew he had to get the license to make a game based on it. He, in one of the Robotech rule books, I don't know if it was an introduction or somewhere, he said, no, as soon as I saw Robotech, I knew that I had to do the game for it. Like I needed this property, this like property this like oh my god blew me away Which like same right you know it was awesome Lucky for him the property was owned by Harmony Gold who were more than happy to take a cut of his money Sorry I mentioned harmony cold so I had to spit The Robotech RPG came out in 1986 mm-hmm and just as

Palladium had added a mutation system to their basic rule set for TMNT They now had to come up with a way to make giant Mecca work for this game to make giant Mecha work for this game. And it's in the pages of Robo Tech that the concept of mega damage capacity, or MDC, first appears. I remember that phrase. Yes. That collection of letters. Yes.

MDC is still a hit point system. Right. It's ablative. When you hit zero, the mech component is destroyed in every functional way it's hit points, right? The difference is simply one of scale. Right. A mega damage structure can only be damaged

by a mega damage weapon. If you shoot a hand gun at a tank or try to smash it with a baseball bat, the tank is going to care. It won't do a lot of damage, right. Yeah. Because otherwise I could just send in a full army of 1200 guys armed with baseball bats. Yeah. And take down your giant walking tank. Yeah. Yeah. But if you hit it with a missile or an anti-tank gun That's gonna do something right? In the classical sense it is an elegant kind of solution

It's like okay. We'll give him take this idea We already have we're just gonna kind of find a twist on it to make it work right right We don't have to do anything to too crazy complicated whatever In the context of Robotech it works fine There wasn't a hit location context of Robotech, it works fine. There wasn't a hit location system in Robotech, which did kind of cause a bit of a problem because it's like, okay, well, a VF1J Veritech has 85, call it, I don't remember the actual stat MDC In its center torso, okay the torso section the robot has 85 MDC the head has 25 The arms have 40 the legs have 50 each right right so I'm gonna aim at the leg so that it topples blah blah blah

Sorry, you can't actually call where you're shooting it Basically yeah, or you can make a cold shot, but you're going to have, you're going to have penalties if you're trying to make a cold shot. The thing is in regular combat, you're, you're shooting most of the time and all hits, unless you do a cold shot are allocated to the center torso. So it's still basically a hit point system because all you ever wind up really paying attention to unless you house rule

Some kind of a hit location table All you're ever paying attention to is one set of MDC points So no hit chart Meant that despite yeah despite of Alcarina's and trotty battle pod having MDC numbers for all their components You only look at that one spot, right? Which wound up making your Mac feel like just a really big player character and less like a stompy zoom II robot Yeah, it's it's not translating well into this system where you have to track damage in this way Yeah, and at that time there's not really other systems that exist because you know the thing about games like this is

That everybody how to put when when they came out with Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes whatever the the MM or EG was no Star Wars Galaxies. There was no Jedi. And then there was, well you could be a Jedi if you do certain things that unlock the secret quest and stuff like that. Well somebody finally figured it out.

And they became the Jedi. The only Jedi in the whole fucking thing and Other people quite rightly were like I paid as much money as the next person Mm-hmm, if there's an experience available ought I not have it? It's a reasonable argument. It really is and so Then they were like, okay. Well, we you know, again, we can't just have everybody Jedi farming because that's what would happen and that's exactly what did happen. But like, you know, there's no good way to recreate that universe where one in a million people is force sensitive, one in a billion is a Jedi, and it's a universe of trillions.

Same thing with Robotech, right? Like there's no good way, given the systems that we have out there, given the limitations of our imagination, there's no good way in a hit point system to really do that, especially when one well-placed missile sent by Roy Fokker is going to blow up a Zentradi something or other. Yeah. Yep. How do you account for that? Like, it's, you know, very tough.

Yeah, and... Because you want game balance. Yeah, you want game balance. You wanna have the experience where, as a player character, you get to be heroic and do cool shit and not wind Up being you know one of the background mech pilots who gets blown up You know instantaneously right next to the other player character who is getting to do cool shit. Yeah

You know yeah, you you there's there's a balancing act involved and I'm going to say that there were other games that came along later that were not specifically attached to one property, but were, hey, if you want to play any kind of giant robot story, here's your game. By the way, that's Mekton and mekton's zeta from artel thorian games i remember those we played we played the most epic bucking campaign of mekton oh man i have such fond memories um but anyway with with robotech it's clunky and it's not a great translation but like when i first saw the book at 12, I was like, I don't care. I don't care. I get to be a Veritek pilot. I don't care. I'm,

I'm willing, I'm willing to suck up the clunky rule system because it's Robotech. Right. I'm okay with that. Like the power of the, of the franchise compelled me and I was fine with that. Like the power of the franchise compelled me and I was fine with that. Even better when the Sentinels, the Robotech of the Sentinels book came out in 1987, I was like, take my money. You mean to tell me I get to ride a cyclone and be a cyclone riding marine in the Robotech Expeditionary Force like dude

Here's my allowance for the next six weeks. I'm done. Here we are like cool So and and we we had some fun Specifically with sentinels we we did a lot of stuff in the in the sentinels offshoot universe of Robotech because Cyclones cyclone motorcycles and the power armor they turned into were just way too awesome And and it was that we all thought that was way too cool so now in 1987 Palladium came out with two other games Beyond the Supernatural and ninjas and super spies

Okay, now both games worked on the same system framework But they had wildly different focuses as One might guess from the title ninjas and super spies is an action adventure game that focused very heavily on martial arts and spy action stories. Sure. It introduced over 40 different martial arts styles using the same kind of rules and level advancement kind of template that had originally been in teenage mutant Ninja turtles. It also introduced a gadgetry like high tech spy gadgets like like James Bond movies it also introduced cybernetics and bionics which like cool like if you want to have a

character who's the six million dollar man that's awesome but it didn't entirely mesh with the super spy sneaky ninja kind of kind of genre But you know it was there cool, all right, yeah and Very notably the book also included because it's focused on you know martial arts movies and martial arts characters and and that genre It included a it was at least a page long kind of digression, kind of essay of the attitudes that different Asian groups had toward other Asian groups. Like kind of a, kind of a cultural primer for, for hey if you're playing a character who is Korean understand that you know

Japanese people are gonna treat you this way So would you say this is? This is in some ways a Not even a conscious attempt but an attempt to explain how to properly roleplay racism Yeah, yeah, yeah, um and of course it's all being written by a polish american midwesterner Right Who? I don't know. I guess did demographically not known as a group for being the most

Accepting tolerant and open to other cultures Yeah, yeah So, you know nothing about that is it in any way problematic, you know at all? and and As so much media from the 80s Created in the United States relating to any kind of Asian culture, there was so much exotification and fetishization of stuff going on. You know, a lot of the stuff in regards to the martial arts styles was rooted in, Hey, you know, I watched, I watched, you know, a kickboxing movie and this is the way this looks. So this is how this is going to work

in the game. And like, you know, you can learn mystical martial arts powers like dim mock, you know, the death touch and, and just, you know, like, I'm just going to take all of these tropes out of Asian cinema without looking at the actual cultural context of any of them. And I'm going to throw them into my game, you know, yeah. And of course me and my friends at a time being middle-class white teenage boys, we just, we didn't, we didn't examine any of it and we were just like, this is so cool. Right? Right. Right. You know, so now I kind of want to go back

to one of our game nights and like look across the table at all of us and go, all right. No, like just stop for half a second no Roll up roll up the game book and just smack it head with it But you know it was it was the time that it was right I mean you got to keep in mind palladium They they've sold a sticker since then to cover up one of the things that they did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, if you remember. Yeah, I do. I don't remember what specifically it was, but I

do remember it had to do with mental illness. And yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're we're establishing there's there's a there's a pattern here. So yeah, you know, ninjas, the rule set for ninjas and super spies could probably be used to play a not problematic game, but you'd have to really exert a very heavy hand

as a game master or an editor. Like you'd really have to go through it and go like, okay, that's bullshit. No, you know, and okay, we can, we can hold onto that, but we've got to be very careful about the way we, we do that in joy, you know? Um, but there, there was also a lot of other stuff, um, that not tied to like the stuff not tied to the martial arts and Asian culture aspects, the, the martial arts and Asian culture aspects

the the action movie and and straight-up just like spy movie stuff Was all pretty cool, and and if you took away the you know fetishization of Asian culture stuff It'd be you could you could totally run like a James Bond style spy game. Oh, yeah Like yeah, you know now Beyond the Supernatural was a horror game and It focused very heavily on psychic phenomena extra terrestrials and extra dimensional monsters It felt very much like a thematic throwback again to the 70s and the psychic craze

On a personal note it was the first time I ever saw anyone consider playing an urban fantasy style wizard Which was totally something that you could do in the game It was me. I I was the one I did that magic per se Worked in Beyond the Supernatural Exactly the same way it didn't play Palladium fantasy Although spells were harder to learn and the level of PPE available to a spellcaster was a lot lower. Mm-hmm So it was much more a you know, you're gonna you're gonna pull this out when

When you really need to but you're not just gonna be randomly throwing spells around right Or the really big thing you're gonna do is Kind of like a like a hammer Hammer films horror movie you know the the old man who knows who is a wizard You know is is gonna draw the ritual It's gonna be based around a ritual circle of protection and you're gonna have to hold off the bad guys by making sure they don't Cross the circle or that kind of stuff because that's how you maintain your PPE to do it that kind of thing, right? Right? Just real quick yeah what you said it introduced an urban wizard what the fuck is the difference between that and any other wizard well just the

archetypes were all crow of having so I like it just the idea of having a you know I am a wizard but I'm operating in the in the modern world you know I am a wizard, but I'm operating in the modern world You know I know I'm a I'm a Like the the Harry Dresden novels kind of that archetype of wizard character Wasn't something you saw in role-playing games until gotcha here You know because wizards were something you did in a fantasy game, and you know in a horror game. You're a survivor Or you know your whole job is to try to hold out you know against against the zombies or whoever and in Call of Cthulhu You could have somebody who knew magic But if you

Cast too many spells you were gonna go crazy because every time you did you had to make a sand check because you were dealing with horses you know it's it's lovecraftian so anytime you're using magic you're engaging with with the you know the star gods and the immensity of the of the universe and that's gonna that's gonna break your brain okay so Okay So But here it was no if you if you have the PPE you can you can You know cast a spell to fling the monster against the against the back wall to give the other members of the party time To reload their shotguns with you know silver slugs Kind of thing. Yeah there was a lot more focus though on

Psychics and there were like five or six different brands of psychic You know physical psychics were like your pyrokinetics your psychokinetics Okay, and then you could have a character who was a latent psychic, which was, you don't have, you know, a mystical weird, you know, a new age powers of your mind, but you have taken your psychic potential and you have turned it into some other talent. So like you are a supernaturally good athlete because you're a latent psychic, but you've taken all of that and focused it into your body. Right. Right. Okay. Uh, and then, and, and one of my favorite bits was

the game also introduced the idea of a nega psychic who's a character whose inherent psychic potential was focused on the denial of the existence of supernatural phenomena So as a nega psychic it is as you know a high enough level nega psychic you could go into a haunted house And as long as you were in the house, nothing weird was gonna fucking happen Nice because like no, right ghosts are bullshit This doesn't exist and you're putting out waves of this doesn't exist and the ghost meanwhile is like Fuck I can't do anything right, you know

And and so, you know it inhibited magic and psychic phenomena when they were around Which you know on the one hand is awesome But on the other hand the psychic or or you know magic using members of your own party Or like can you fuck off for a minute? Yeah, dude. Can you hang out in the parlor? Yeah, like Like the jokes always get made about hey, we need to put hey Paladin. Can you? Can you go back to check on the horses for a minute? Well, right do this shady as fuck thing over right, right? Magic can you can you get five feet away from me? Can you can you go back out of the car and check on shit? You know

So now because of the unity of the palladium system across all of these games You could cross pollinate. Yeah, you could play a mutant house cat psychic working for uncle Which I say that and I'm like I want to play that I want to play that game Yeah, I want to do like That's awesome as a GM You could introduce vampire intelligences Which were you know out of Beyond the Supernatural into your fantasy game? You could go nuts and play a horror game with elves and gnomes living in the modern world.

If you wanted to and your GM agreed, you could play a Veritek pilot who knew Jujitsu or Thai kickboxing. By the way, if you're going to do that, go for Thai kickboxing. It gives you a ridiculous number of attacks per round at level one. Like, like we, there was actually a line at our, at our game table. Uh, one night he wasn't playing a Veritek pilot who knew it. It was a ninjas and super spice game. But, uh, one, one of the guys in the group, uh, uh, knew, uh, tie kickbox. He was a martial artist. Tie kickboxing was part of what he knew. And why tie? kickboxes he was a martial artist who tight kickboxing was part of winning New York and why tie and

Because the way the rule system worked It was okay. Make your first attack now and then take your other eight at the end of the round, right? Just roll all the dice at the end. Yeah, everybody else to do stuff. Yeah, and Everybody else the table looked over at him like, how many? Well, you know, the math, it's it maths like here it is like, holy shit. You know, um, at this point though, these kinds of things would need to be house ruled and cobbled together from separate books because cross genre is like, wasn't a thing in palladium or really anywhere else yet Now I mentioned GURPS before right which and they if I recall stands for like

Generic universal role-playing system perfect got it in one nice job And that that had a system that allowed for genre mashups, but they were possible They hadn't published anything that did that. Other things to note about Palladium Works up to this point. Real quick, is Palladium the ones that did GURPS or was that Steve Jackson? That's Steve Jackson games. Okay, because Steve Jackson obviously famous for Munchkin. Yes. Um, much, much later. And Munchkin absolutely has that crossover. You can, you can absolutely blend decks. Oh,

throw everything in there. Yeah. Um, the, the, the cards for the 40 K version of the game are actually just fucking hysterical. I, I, as, as, as a fan of the game, it makes fun of 40 K in just the perfect way. I so wish I could have stayed to play that with you. It's it's it's it's it's awesome. Yeah. So other other hallmarks of of palladiums works up to this point. Every game includes the same short essay about why we're using an experience point slash level system. Mm-hmm Like for whatever reason Kevin's Shambietta like felt he had to justify it. Mm-hmm

And that justification gets published in literally every basic rule book for every one of their games It like almost a broader world kinda yeah, yeah every basic rule book for every one of their games Like Kind of yeah, yeah Every game includes the same explanation of alignment just copy paste sure Every game is perfect bound softcover With with the exception of the original mechanoids, which was I want to call it tabloid bound Where it's like a zine kind of kind of okay, okay? and then almost every game

Has noticeable places where formatting typeface or editing is less than stellar and alongside the essays on XP and level system and alignment Different books contained random weird essays usually from champiata on Tangential topics like the above mentioned one on Asian groups opinions of one another And a lot of these showed up without any kind of warning in the text and you just kind of had to slog through them We're navigating around them Like like the first time you read through the book, you'd be like, how much longer are

you going to talk about this? And the second or third time you'd be like, okay, no, I just skipped to this paragraph and I don't need to worry about it. Now to be fair, the first edition DMG for AD and D included an awful lot of opinionating by guy gags on all kinds of stuff. Again, like Dr. Bronner. So, yeah, but the difference, the difference is that when, when this stuff shows up in a palladium book, It's a big long chunk of a rant. Mm-hmm. And when, when Gygax says something, it's like one sentence in the middle of a section.

And so it does, it's, it's, it's atmospheric. It's just kind of like, well, this is just the tone of how Gygax does stuff. Whereas it's, it's, it's actually a couple of places kind of jarring And in in games from from palladium to run into this kind of like old man shouts at cloud kind of rant in the middle of something So, you know, that's me opinionating there sure sure but At this point so we've now gotten up through 85 and kind of moved a little bit past that into 86 87 and

then As a side note, it's in 1987 and we get the original and in my opinion best Star Wars role-playing game from West End games Okay, and then in 1990, Palladium released rifts. And within the basic rule book, they took every one of these genres, they smashed them all together as hard as they could. Uh, and then added a massive shot of post-apocalypse sci-fi thrown in as the binder

So so this is like a genre fruit salad with with post apocalypse as the as the Mayo and sugar and whatever dressing in it Is the best kind of analogy and that's a little gross but you get what I'm saying. Yeah. No, I get it though Yeah, yeah, it's that's um, I believe you used to call it a dog's breakfast. Yes yeah, and Interestingly at the same time as palladium puts out rifts There's a very similar like thematically very similar game. That's it. That's a very similar, like thematically very similar game.

That's a, that's a apocalypse. It's not really post-apocalypse because you're busy fighting the, you're fighting against an apocalypse, but there's, there's this collision of dimensions theme that's also in rifts. Uh, and, and it's, it's also a genre mashup, uh, from game designers workshop,ers Workshop entitled Torg. Total open role. You know, it's Torg.

I never figured out what Torg actually meant, but it was the title of the game. And the idea of Torg was somehow Earth wound up being a nexus of multiple different realities. And as a player character, you are either an Earth native or native of our Earth, or you are an immigrant slash refugee from one of these other alternative Earths. Immigrant slash refugee from one of these other alternative Earth's and you are fighting to prevent One or more of these other universes from encroaching on and taking over this one. Oh um

What are they called like Storm fighters storm night Storm Knights. Yeah. It reminds me of actually somebody said that I was something like this as a teacher holding back the forces of ignorance and stupidity and knowing that I'm going to fail. But

we go out to the wall to do that anyway. Like it was some sort of like Grey Knights or something like that. I think it was Well in torg it was it wasn't in torg it right right right? It wasn't in torg that somebody referenced warhammer 40k is the gray knights who are the chapter of space marines who are dedicated to the fight against chaos Who maybe that was it called who are called in when like, okay? Who are called in when like okay you are the last ditch force before we actually have to virus bomb the planet and kill everything on it. No I don't think that was it then. Is there some sort of like Greyhawk setting or some sort of fantasy setting that they have guys who go out and do that shit too? I'll have to think about it I don't know. All right but anyway yeah so Storm Knights

that's right Storm Knights they they were basically beating back the forces of the pulp universe and yeah there was there was there was essentially a pulp universe there was a jungle trying to remember what this was like the living earth or something was one of the one of the dimensions it was everything was covered in jungles and like the natives were were dinosauroid humanoids. Right. And another one was a universe in which like the cyber papacy was a thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember there was like there were like, oh God, I almost yeah. Yeah. They were like priests. It reminded me of the that guy in Johnny mnemonic. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good comparison. Yeah. So, so that was, that was Torg's take on this. You know, we're going to, we're going to mash up every genre rifts basically said, we're, we're now just accepting that we have, we have created a system that encompasses all of these different universes. So we're just going to let you run, go wild, do,

do whatever you want to do with this stuff. But the, the rift setting was very specific and the, and the OCCs and RCCs are racial character classes that were introduced in rifts were very specific to their setting, OCCs and RCCs or racial character classes that were introduced in rifts were very specific to their setting, which was very specifically post a couple of hundred years post apocalypse. And the apocalypse came about not directly because of a nuclear exchange or anything like that. But there was some violent event that caused enough

psychic backlash to essentially reawaken the psychic potential of our planet. And it turns out that earth actually sits at a nexus point of multiple different dimensions. Oh, that's crisis on infinite earths. That's the Marvel MCU now. That's I mean, so many things that when what year was that? 90. Yeah, there's a lot of things that that was Yeah, that yeah, that is not necessarily the first nor nor is it the last So yeah, no for sure and so I think

Here is a good place to pause before I before I get into the specific lore of rifts earth and Kind of how everything branched out from there but but this is the moment where all of it coalesces and we have critical mass and we have the birth of Palladium actually starting to say, you know, you can play games in the palladium mega verse Becomes becomes a thing from this point, and we'll talk about that Maybe we can develop that further. Yeah going forward in the next episode, but you know at this point. What do you think I?

Think that this kind of shows that either I'm out of step with most people or Okay, better yet everyone Everyone's lost but me. Um No, it is the children who are wrong, right? I always think it was Indiana Jones when River Phoenix says that comes flying out of like the mountain He's like, you know, mr. So-and-so mr. So-and-so everyone's lost but me But Look if you could play in a game where Like the DM gets to pick what wave of bad guys is coming at you

Yeah, whether they're feudal Japanese warriors or mutants or or if there's you know cyberpunk people and your party is a monk a ranger a a an urban wizard who fell into this fantasy world through a rift and you know I don know, somebody who is a bard and y'all have to figure out how to beat cyber warriors, that sounds pretty cool. I like that, yeah.

You know, like, the potentials for, I mean, just genre bending and all that, like, you know what it reminds me of? I mean, obviously it's a multiverse thing, right? So it reminds me of that first obviously it's a multiverse thing right so it's it reminds me of that first miles morales episode or movie of of uh spider-man oh yeah okay where you know spider-man noir shows up and he doesn't understand how there's color that'd be such a oh my god, you know Yeah

Any kind of any kind of cross-dimensional kind of yes chicanery that you can know you can pull in these games Like I'm gonna have to share it here cuz like I can't wait One of the things one of the things Bishop O'Connell wound up doing in a rift game Mostly to troll our friend Gabe But but also because he realized he could do it and he was like, okay, you know fucking I'm doing it He created He used the mutation rules to create a mutant hedgehog Mm-hmm and and made him a

leyline Walker, which is a essentially a rift wizard And and he figured out how to how to play with everything to to play Sonic the Hedgehog as a rift character because He could and and why wouldn't you and he showed up like his character showed up and everybody the table was like what? wait

You're not and we actually played with the fact like one of the other characters knew enough about rift earth history to know about Sonic the Hedgehog I Was like no seriously that was actually like that was a thing No, it wasn't really a thing, but like they were right Like I'm here, so anyway, but yeah, you can you can I just I love that idea it does lend itself to such silliness as that but like You know if you if you have a good enough story Yeah, it makes sense and you I mean

fucking spider-ham showed up like and it worked like yeah you know I again I think there's so much but the the thing that I run into so often is nobody wants to do a genre outside of fantasy yeah Yeah. It's just so disappointing. I'm like, yo guys, we all love Star Wars or hey folks, we all love like superhero shit, but you know, and so it's like, okay, we'll keep your fantasy, but you're going to run into the Fantastic Four or the Incredibles. Yeah. And the bank robbers.

So go. Like run with it. Right. The Fantastic Four or the Incredibles. Yeah, and the bank robbers so go like Run with it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, that's that's kind of my takeaways is like it's a damn shame that people are so Dogmatic about the things that they love and and I get it you don't have that much time So you don't want to waste but like yeah Like if all I ever ordered was meatloaf, I would be perfectly happy Man I'd be missing out on some really good black bean soup, you know, yeah. Yeah, let's see what you're saying Anyway, yeah, that's my takeaway. All right what I'm looking very much forward to the next episode on this

What what are you recommending that people take in that is some sort of medium to read or to watch? Well, to read, I recommend, and it's, it's a bit grim, but to get an idea of kind of what the setting of Rifts kind of looks like. I very strongly recommend reading, not watching the movie, because there's a 1975 movie, but there's a book by Carlin Ellison, A Boy and His Dog, and It's about a teenage kid and his telepathic dog Fighting to survive in in a post-apocalyptic world

I'm not gonna say society. There is no society anymore And it is it is pretty bleak. Mm-hmm, but also darkly funny Like you won't like yourself for laughing, but it's there and and it is it is there are there are parts of it that are they're informative of kind of the The feeling of many parts of the Rift's Earth setting. Okay.

How about you? So this is a two-parter. I'm going to talk about a guy that I started following on TikTok recently called Token Black Guide. And the number one reason I followed him is because he just got his PhD and he filmed the the zoom meeting wherein he was told he successfully defended his dissertation and After he verified with them that in fact, yes, you will now get to be called doctor. Welcome to the Academy He reaches off screen and grabs a championship belt and puts it on

So, of course I followed him oh Yeah, I like him already. Yeah, he he's got links to the innocence project, which I which I like a lot and then He he is starting a book club And I'm just kind of shadow following the book club because I don't like to get involved in things Well, that's not true Yeah, I pick my battles. There you go. That's a better way of putting it. Yeah, anyway more to the point I'm probably I'm just going to lurk on this book club for a bit. Okay, but the book for it is a really short book

It's a memoir and it's called running a thousand miles for freedom And it is the story of William and Ellen Kraft. It's their escape from slavery Awesome, it's it's it's relatively short. I recommend it. I recommend you follow him and Read along so that's very cool It's relatively short. I recommend it. I recommend you follow him and read along. So that's very cool. So let's see, where can we be found? Collectively, we can be found on our website at wubba wubba wubba dot geek history time dot com.

We also can be found on either the Apple podcast app, the Amazon podcast app, or on Spotify. Wherever it is that you found us, take a minute to subscribe and to give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And where can you be found? Well, you can find me and the crew of Capital Punishment on the first Friday of every month, so October 4th, November 1st, December 6th, January 3rd, and February 7th, you can find us at Comedy Spot in Sacramento

at 9 p.m. on the first Friday of every month. We have four new contestants every time. Come to the live show, get tickets online, because they tend to sell out. But come to the live show, check it out. If you can't make it to the live show, get tickets online because they tend to sell out. But come to the live show, check it out. If you can't make it to the live show, or if you are one of our many listeners who lives not in the Sacramento area, then you can still stream it online and it translates very, very well to the screen. So yeah, go online to ComedySpot's website, click on the link for the calendar, pull up our show,

and you can buy online tickets or you could buy live tickets. So. Awesome. Yeah, well, thank you for this. For A Geek History of Time, I'm Damian Harmony. And I'm Ed Blalock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.