Getting Back to Rifts (Soon, I Hope)

After several months of playing nothing but Warhammer 40K, I'm looking forward to beginning our Rifts game through Google Wave, but the setup is slow going. The last time I started a Rifts campaign, I used pregenerated characters so we just picked them up and played. This time, just getting the ball rolling has been a challenge in and of itself.

First of all, everyone is creating characters from scratch, and one of the quirks of the Palladium RPG system is really shining through: very involved and very time consuming (for new players, at least) character generation. The detail is nice in actual play, but seems tedious when you're setting up. Second, Google Wave is still in beta for a reason. One of my players has had difficulties getting it to work correctly, and it seemed to take forever just to get the invites to go through. Once we get all of the characters rolled up and sort out the software issues, we'll actually get to play a bit!

In the meantime, I'm reading more and more of MercTown... which I'm beginning to believe will be a commonly recurring location in my future Rifts campaigns. I love this book... so much that I might try to get my hands on a copy of Merc Ops as well. With literally hundreds of locations, MercTown is the best fantasy (well, sci-fi) setting book I think I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The best part, though, is that it doesn't go overboard on the detail. There's a sweet spot somewhere between leaving the GM with so much empty space that the PCs test his improvisational skills on a regular basis and providing so much detail that the GM is overwhelmed with setting info. The location descriptions in MercTown have just enough detail to fuel a plot hook but not so much that a creative GM can't spin the story into something interesting... just the way I like it.

Here's hoping I get to write about the beginning of our Rifts campaign soon...

Alternate Missions for 40K

I followed a link from The Back 40k a few moments ago and found a gold mine. Apparently, Dice Like Thunder has an excellent collection of alternate missions for Warhammer 40K. You can find it by clicking on the image below:

Like Sandwyrm (of The Back 40K), I haven't played any of these either. Come to think of it, I haven't played at all in several weeks... I need to remedy that soon. Reading the document, however, has left me highly impressed. These are just as simple as the standard missions in the 5th edition rulebook (except for Objective Two: Recovery, but it might be a lot simpler in practice than it seems on paper). However, there are twice as many mission objectives, twice as many deployment options, and a bunch of army-specific missions in the back.

The new options are great, but the part about this pdf that intrigues me the most is its subtle tweak to the kill points rule. Not only do you get KPs for killing your opponent's units... this tweak gives you KPs for protecting your own units as well. I'm not completely sure I like it, in part because I'm already dreaming of ways to exploit it, but it might be a viable option for people who aren't satisfied with the current system.

As I said before, I'm impressed. I would encourage anyone who plays 40K to check it out. I'm looking forward to giving it a spin.