Prysus wrote:[Edit:: Oh darn ... he posted before I did.
And by qutie a bit. Though I started typing before then.
And I might as well NOT have posted- you have it covered pretty well!
One thing that you and I both left out, though, is that Rifts Japan- as isolated as it is- does not exist in a vacuum.
It's a part of the world of Rifts Earth that Palladium fleshed out specifically.
Which isn't a bad thing in of itself, but it IS a bad thing given the fact that
we still don't know what Chi-Town is like.
Rifts: Chi-Town SHOULD have been WB2. Or 3. Or freakin' FOUR, although that would have been putting it a bit late in the game.
But it wasn't any of those, or any of the next couple dozen World Books, or any of the Source books, or any of the generic books.
It simply never, ever, happened.
It's one of many gaping holes in the landscape of Rifts North America... the region where the bulk of the game takes place.
And we know that's where the bulk of the game takes place, because that's what's described in the main book.
It'd be one thing if Palladium filled in the holes in North America, THEN started moving out and filling in the blank spaces around the globe.
But they didn't- they left VAST and KEY regions of North America virtually untouched and undetailed.
And I'm not talking about crap like the "New West" area. Like Japan, that could have (and should have) been left as the essentially empty territory that it was originally described as.
(Although with the New West, they don't have the excuse of "Tarn was wrong," because I'm referring to the official material in SB1, NOT to anything that Kevin wrote in the voice of Tarn).
(But that's another issue)
What I'm talking about can perhaps be best illustrated by flipping to p. 73 of the RMB, where the City Rat OCC is described.
Read the OCC description, and pay attention to bits like...
Most have never been beyond the city walls...
... Those who live in the lower levels of a city are generally nicknamed "Down Siders"...
he may be a computer hacker...And so forth.
Now ask yourself, WHERE is this character supposed to be adventuring?
In the wilderness of North America?
In frickin' JAPAN?
In the Dinosaur Swamps?
In Tolkeen?
No.
This OCC, this core OCC from the main book, this fundamental character class that serves as one of the main prototypes for the kind of people in Rifts Earth... it's designed for city adventures.
Not just cities in general, but the kind of high-tech, multi-level city that the CS has... well, a certain number of.
And their habitat has STILL never been fleshed out- they are a core class that is STILL missing a setting where they can be truly utilized.
Because Palladium has spent more time and energy putting out world books about Cyber-Ninjas in Japan, or rehashing the King Arthur legend in England, than they have spent filling in the obvious blank spaces that the main book didn't cover, stuff that's actually important to game play unless the GM wants to play every single City Rat as a fish-out-of-water adventurer, and have everything take place out in the wilderness or in the magical cities of the Federation of Magic.
(Okay, there's Juarez. But that's not a multi-level city, nor the kind of high-tech environment that a City Rat was built for. That's like trying to play Case or Hiro Protagonist in Mos Eisley- you CAN do it... but it'll be a bit of a stretch.)
Erin Tarn's World Overview gives us a guide to the interesting places on Rifts Earth, and many of these places are in North America.
And Palladium ignored these places in favor of places that were specifically mentioned as being uninteresting, like Japan.
That's like setting up a Table of Contents for a book, then having the chapters inside cover entirely different material.
That's like giving a tour of the Empire State Building... only the tour spends quite a bit of time in San Francisco, and never gets around to the Observation Deck.
That's like setting a RPG in North America... then skipping over all of the most populated regions, while publishing entire books on places across the planet from the main setting, where nobody in the main setting has any real reason to go, and no real means to get there short of deus ex machina teleportation tricks.
Hell, as I've said before, if Rifts Japan had been a DIMENSION BOOK, I wouldn't have anywhere near as much outrage about it. It's far, far more likely that my characters in North America might stumble through a rift and end up in a completely different dimension than that they'd ever go to Japan.
And it'd be less of a stretch to have sent a Japanese city off to another dimension during the time of the Rifts than to have one disappear... and come back right about where it was to start with.
And it'd be more interesting as well.
