Roleplaying the Apocalypse

[Captain_Nibbz]

To all the GMs out there,

I'm ruminating on an idea to smash all of the Palladium settings and worlds together and I'm looking for advice. The basic idea was stolen from another poster on the forums when talking about the Rifts setting in particular. They mentioned that there was the idea that when the coming of the rifts occurred, it wasn't just the nuclear war, or planets aligning, or other things that cause the rifts or any conflicting information as such. Rather, it was everything all at once. All realities smashed together into one cosmic event that led the world to becoming a single, horrifying, cohesive hellscape.

This got me thinking, a lot of Palladium's settings involve some kind of world ending threat or apocalyptic event, so what if all of these events actually occurred, and what would the result of smashing all of Palladium's settings together look like? This is obviously going to require me to do quite a bit of rewriting of the settings in question, which is what I intend on doing.

So far, I've come up with the following rules for this project (and myself):

This is the map that will be used for the setting

The majority of rifts earth canon as far as locations and factions and all that will remain as such, as I want it to be the basis for the setting. That being said, where would you folks incorporate the locations from Palladium Fantasy? How would you go about integrating all this together? I was thinking of turning the LoB into the New York Library, or maybe something like the Library of Alexandria returned to the earth or something.

Also, how would you suggest blending the apocalypses together?

Looking forward to any input or advice that the rest of you might have.

[Curbludgeon]

To what degree do you want to incorporate the settings with each other, versus just having them all on the same globe? Is it like Marvel Comics 2015 Secret Wars, where the people of the Valley of the Pharoahs in Antartica fight off the dead reign zombies in Australia? Or is everything shoved together, where Tolkeen has to not only deal with the Nightlands version of itself, but the seeming do-gooders of nearby Century City? How much do you want to incorporate outer space stuff (Mechanoids/Robotech/MiO/Aliens Unlimited/Phase World)? Can different areas have different dimensional energy matrices (or whatever db7 calls them), so that high tech stuff doesn't globally dominate?

I've only really ever drawn from Palladium Fantasy for monsters and magic, and would be interested to hear what specific parts of the setting interest people the most. Their apocalypse was the elf-dwarf wars, right? I'd maybe consider just using that, making the near-end of the Time of a Thousand Magics the precipitous event. That easily ties enough with the Rifts Cataclysm, After the Bomb's Event, the Y2K of Systems Failure, and whatever else. As far as event pacing, I'd ask what things should precede this Great Crunch. Should Nightbane's dark day have already happened? When did superpowers develop in the original HU-world?

Going with a Pangea map makes certain things wacky. This might not be a bad thing, but it aguably removes Rifts China and Australia as settings. There could be an interesting combination of the Chinese dead and damned with Palladium Ice demons and Frostborn, though. I could see the Great Arctic Lake being a focus for Lemurians while the Tethys Sea is the focus for Lord of the deep-style stuff. I mentioned once that I thought Rifts Australia's shallow inland sea would be a great place for the System Failure Bugs to try to string electrical lines so as to dominate a continent without much opposition, but I don't know much about the depths of prehistoric oceans off-hand.

[Captain_Nibbz]

I'm wanting to incorporate things as best as I can. A few different things are going to need to be addressed down the line (mainly SDC and MDC), but I think that the idea of Tolkeen dealing with both the Nightlands AND possible negotiations with Century City is more or less what I'm aiming for. I'm thinking for the space stuff that I want to take all those listed and adapt them to fill in the gaps in Rifts Space (which is a bit lackluster as is . . . in my opinion at least). Some of that will obviously need to be scaled down from a galaxy level to something that would be easier to accommodate in the reaches of of the solar system. I'm thinking that I might implement something like what is found in BtS 2e with the regions and their effect on how much PPE people have in reserve. So for instance, the Magic Zone would be drenched in it and you might get a x4 multiplier to your PPE reserves or the like. Other areas might end up being complete and total dead zones to help emulate games like Dead Reign (maybe the zombies are animated by their ability to absorb the ambient magical energies as well as needing to feed? Effectively creating dangerous no magic zones?)

I personally think that Dark Day would have been a more significant event, with that being the event that lines up with the Cataclysm. So a bunch of people find out that they're actually nightbane and then they are thrown into an apocalyptic world where the other side is actively trying to break through and subverting the governments of the new world. Maybe the emperor (or whatever he is) of the Western Kingdom is actually working in league with the nightlords? I think that superpowers in the HU world have been around since maybe the Civil War (as per another thread about the topic on those boards), and maybe thats why places like Century City made the transition better than some others, becoming a light in the darkness. Maybe even shift the location of CC to be Tolkeen to help flesh out the gaps of that place?

I'm still digging through books to figure out how to piece this together, so I have to ask why that would invalidate those two settings? Also, LOVE the idea of the Lemurians and those being in the Great Arctic Lake. That sounds really awesome to me. Also love the idea of using Australia for the Systems Failure material as well. I also like the idea of using some of the ideas from Madhaven and combining that together with investigative psychic research teams from BtS looking into the area and doing some kind of Ghostbusters style missions where they go in after samples and to catch specimens for research back in Tolkeen or the like.

I also like the idea of introducing a lot more powers to the world in closer proximity so that the CS has more competition in their drives and what not. Any thoughts on this?

[Sohisohi]

I'm ruminating on an idea to smash all of the Palladium settings and worlds together and I'm looking for advice.

I was going to link the Megaversal Super Campaign thread, but I realised you made it. Obviously, some ideas can be reused; but this is almost a completely different monster all together. It's not just world books, but all content...

This is the map that will be used for the setting

I will say, I've been thinking about running a Neo-Pangea campaign for a while now- but never got around to doing it as I've yet to find a map worth building from, at least until today.


Anyway, I guess to really start things off (so I have a sense of scale); how much will you incorporate 3Galaxies, Dimensions, & Phase World?

I only ask because you could get a very crowded Earth once you start inserting something for each potential faction. Will "Space Stuff" be considered separate or are we going full hog, cation be damned?

It can be done, you just need to pick a place for the 4 Rifts Space factions to crash, that's how the aliens from SA book got settled. You can even have a piece of the moon fall to Earth, so Moon Base is now on a mountain somewhere in the ocean.


On a side note, since it was mentioned:
I would have placed PFRPG-land next to the UK, because the England book is already that setting.
I would have placed Atlantis next to Africa considering their connections with Phoenix.

Obviously, as you can see from the map, Fantasy and Atlantis would end up next to each other... Obviously that's not ideal (power scale wise)... But the reality is that there are two permanent portals to two different hells in PFRPG. Unironically, pushing Atlantis & Palladium together would be a great way to deal with all the demons/devil.

Palladium is the place demons and devils openly fight each other for sport. Now that the minion war is going on, Rifts Earth is prime realestate as a Nexus Point. Palladium is now on Rifts Earth, of all places. Point is, both sides are going to jump into high gear; so you kind of need a powerful faction to deal with them (i.e. Atlantis).

I would recommend this mess be placed in the Tethys Sea, but attached to the land because it would also make Trax/NGR uber paranoid.

[Captain_Nibbz]

I'm ruminating on an idea to smash all of the Palladium settings and worlds together and I'm looking for advice.

I was going to link the Megaversal Super Campaign thread, but I realised you made it. Obviously, some ideas can be reused; but this is almost a completely different monster all together. It's not just world books, but all content...

I will openly admit that this is an evolution of that idea. Originally it started as an idea for just a campaign that traveled from one setting to another as something interesting to do, but then I got to thinking "what would all of these look like if they were just smashed together instead? The Megaverse already allows for that, what's stopping me?". And thus this idea was born

Also helps that I finished my Rifts collection with the last big sale, so now I can dig through whatever I want.

This is the map that will be used for the setting

I will say, I've been thinking about running a Neo-Pangea campaign for a while now- but never got around to doing it as I've yet to find a map worth building from, at least until today.


Anyway, I guess to really start things off (so I have a sense of scale); how much will you incorporate 3Galaxies, Dimensions, & Phase World?

I only ask because you could get a very crowded Earth once you start inserting something for each potential faction. Will "Space Stuff" be considered separate or are we going full hog, cation be damned?

It can be done, you just need to pick a place for the 4 Rifts Space factions to crash, that's how the aliens from SA book got settled. You can even have a piece of the moon fall to Earth, so Moon Base is now on a mountain somewhere in the ocean.

I'm working on this as we speak to be honest. I've never had much chance to read through more than Mutants in Orbit (which I found . . . lacking). So my idea is to downscale the stuff from Phase World, Three Galaxies, etc down a bit and use it to populate Rifts Space and have those factions operating within the solar system. That being said though, I am still vastly unfamiliar with those aspects of the setting and I haven't gotten far enough in my reading to make many assumptions yet. This is one of the areas that I could really use advice on to be honest.

One thing I was thinking of stealing was the idea of Spelljammers from the old 2e D&D setting. Basically living ships that sail through space using magic and all that. This would help for me to explain why some of the high-tech/low-magic civilizations haven't latched onto mining space for resources as they don't like the d-bees (the ships) and they don't like that you need magic or psionics to pilot things (therefore the Coalition still remains grounded on earth).

On a side note, since it was mentioned:
I would have placed PFRPG-land next to the UK, because the England book is already that setting.
I would have placed Atlantis next to Africa considering their connections with Phoenix.

Obviously, as you can see from the map, Fantasy and Atlantis would end up next to each other... Obviously that's not ideal (power scale wise)... But the reality is that there are two permanent portals to two different hells in PFRPG. Unironically, pushing Atlantis & Palladium together would be a great way to deal with all the demons/devil.

Palladium is the place demons and devils openly fight each other for sport. Now that the minion war is going on, Rifts Earth is prime realestate as a Nexus Point. Palladium is now on Rifts Earth, of all places. Point is, both sides are going to jump into high gear; so you kind of need a powerful faction to deal with them (i.e. Atlantis).

I would recommend this mess be placed in the Tethys Sea, but attached to the land because it would also make Trax/NGR uber paranoid.

I actually really like all of these ideas. One of the things that I was hoping to better evolve and develop out of this was events like the Minion War. Rather than wondering how the numbers were being spread across so many dimensions and how they were possibly waging a war like this, suddenly (to me at least) it becomes a lot more feasable because they are only really attacking on solid setting. I also like the idea of Atlantis being used as a powerhouse of the region and interacting with the NGR and Triax. Seems like a good place for that.

Also I like the possible tie-in of using the gargoyles that are laying siege to the NGR as a buffer zone between Fantasy-Land and the high tech areas, meaning that there might not be a lot of trade back and forth between them.

[Sohisohi]

Off the top of my head, you should definitely confederate 1~3 hives together from the Xlixit, as the bugs would immediately seek upward expansion now that they are no longer trapped by so may world super powers.

It could be a good use of the Northern Rangers and Free Quebec, who would be forced to work together if they want to stop the bugs from claiming Greenland. Maybe even bring in the Pirates Kingdom as a privateer force under Quebec.

I don't know much about the asian setting, except that demons have kingdoms there. I guess the biggest decision is if all of these factions knows about each other. The whole point of the Africa book is that literally no one knows what's going on there, as such the whole world is mostly oblivious to the pending apocalypse. Africa is ALOT closer, maybe the CS and Arch3 send some forces. Same applies to the South American factions.