First impressions. The cover has what appears to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of green vampires amassed apparently for the million man march for dental rights of the undead or something. They're green, presumably to denote that it is nightvision and that drawings with actual night lighting are impossible to see. But fuck that, there's a horde of vampires ready to mosh, and even the photobombing guy with his tongue out can't take that away from it all. This book is about fucking vampires.
Warning![size=medium]
First page is disclaimers about supernatural and violent themes. Relics of a special era. Short bus special. Roleplaying games are emerging from the of the tainted spectre of Mazes & Monsters and Skullduggery. A time when during family reunions my brother and I had to be clandestine in our D&D interests since my aunt thought that it was Satanic.
The table of contents is a bit of a cluster fuck. Why? Well I direct you kind readers to chapter one. There is no fucking chapter one. There is a list of things in sequential page order- well, except when there are numerical typo fuck-ups… yes, we don't get past the fucking table of contents before the editing errors are already starting to amass. And the layout… well, fuck. To get the page numbers all right justified with the topic left justified, they used a string of periods to do their justify dirty work. Except even then they don't manage to get the numbers lined up 100%. These mostly sequentially ordered things are sometimes in bold-type. What determines bold-type status is a bit nebulous. What determines the order of things is an even greater mystery. In the middle of a series of Vampires vs. Etc that takes up pages 34-37, we have other random shit thrown in the middle. And apparently when they have to give topics out of order in the table of contents this still was not a sufficient wake-up call that hey, maybe our layout needs some polish.
After a page and… maybe 1/6th of the next of a table of contents, there rest of the second page has a 'Quick Find Table' which I'm pretty sure is just an Index, but since there is nobody with any editing skills on this project, they probably thought they'd invented something new. They sort of organize things here so you can at least find the page numbers of some racial character class options except for the NPCs that are special Steve's whose rules for being PC options are not included… yet they are still listed with new options. Also some optional races are listed multiple times under new creatures and new options. I don't fuckin know man. I don't know. What I do know is that half the shit in this index isn't shit you'll ever have to look up more than once.
Also in the Quick Find Table we will see NPCs grouped by their organization. Or grouped by their race. Weird thing is that the NPC list is not exhaustive, and in fact mostly features a bunch of NPCs which are already all grouped together. Do I really need a look-up table to know that dumbfuck #5 is one page after dumbfuck #4 when they are part of the same organization. *sigh*
If it seems like I'm just jumping from random shit to random crap in this review, that's because I am. That's how Rifts rolls muthafuckas.
And now a word from our megalomaniac owner/writer/artist.
After wiping my tears off the table of contents and index I roll on into the introduction by Kevin Siembieda. It takes three sentences before the typographical errors reveal themselves in all their glory. I should note that we are have the dual editorial might of Alex Marciniszyn and Thomas Bartold, assuming that is the correct spelling of their names- which is something I am not prepared to assume given the expected quality of Rifts editing. The typoes will continue unabated for another 169 pages. It's a Rifts book. Expect an utter disregard for balance, combat rounds that resolve in hours, and production values just a bit better than your school newspaper.
The majority of the foreword consists of disclaimers, complaints about customers, complaints about the disclaimers, and a little horn tooting. Siembieda does finally get to something relevant by the end of the page, as he finally mentions what this book is about.
K.S. wrote:Nobody, to our knowledge has ever addressed the concept of an entire civilization of vampires. Yet if vampires did exist unchecked, there would be thousands of the horrible fiends; tens of thousands. How would a vampire society be structured? What kind of different vampire societies might exist? How would they affect human society? Could they be stopped? Even nuclear bombardment could not destroy vampires! Yet a silver bullet or shard of wood piercing the heart will incapacitate them.
Okay, I've got the 3rd printing from 1993, the first was in 1991. Technically 1991 is the first year Vampire: The Masquerade came out, so maybe I'll give this to him especially since he hedged it. If he didn't want to give attention to his competition by updating his foreword in 1993, that's sensible. However! That nuclear bombardment could not destroy vampires. That's something interesting to be taking as common knowledge. I have no clue where that came from. Nuke-proof vampires as inspiration for Rifts Vampires. Oy. Why not?
Oh well, time to pinch our noses and onward we go to the actual setting.
For the uninitiated, Rifts is a post-apocalyptic future world where around 2098 we started developing cool genetic, robotic and other tech, establishing bases on Mars, and shit hit the fan with a nuclear world war 3 with a magical armageddon being triggered on top of it fueled by the deaths of billions which causes the world to burst forth with tons of magical energy and eruptions of magical rifts to countless other dimensions. Earth becomes a sexy magical hotspot for all manner of horrors to come on over and enjoy the atmosphere and in fact they are supercharged to be even more powerful thanks to the new magical abundance. Bad times roll for a couple hundred years and pockets of survivors begin reclaiming their awesome technology to beat back the supernatural dimensional invaders. We are now at about 300 years out from armageddon. Power Armored Nazi's, Dragons, Wizards, and Mad Max all in a colorful mosh-pit of incomprehensibility.
In the U.S. the main human force is a xenophobic collection of city-states called the Coalition States, and they basically take the Nazi wardrobe theme and set the dial to 11. Skulls and spikes on every fucking thing. They hate aliens, they hate magic, and they're humanity's only hope at this point (other world books not having been printed yet… where we later find out that for a devastated world with few survivors there is precious little territory not already claimed by some powerful group). From the core book all we know about Mexico is "Thar be vampires!"
And so it begins. After the page plus of disclaimers and intro-whinery we get Vampires
There's three kinds of vampire castes. On top you got your Master Vampire, who is just what you expect from said title, mock-Draculas who are granted their power from a pact with the Vamp Intelligence and are fairly badass with pants full of powers, stats and evil. . You got your secondary Vampires who are essentially Master Vampire 'Lite' spawned from being slow-killed by another vampire, and lastly yer Wild Vampires who are weaker vamp-conversions by non-Master vampires, slightly better than feral beasts who obey their betters.
The big twist for Rifts vampires is that atop that caste system sits a Vampire Intelligence. For those not in the know, Supernatural Intelligences are Old Ones that are absurdly powerful and in fact the most ridonkulous piles of stats you're likely to find in Rifts, which is saying something. In Rifts an "Old One" pretty much means outrageously powerful big pile of tentacles, magic, psionics and more MegaDamage than you can shake a boomgun at. Don't expect any Lovecraft hat-tips or allusions. Supernatural Intelligences are just big piles of stats. Vampire Intelligences are apparently lesser versions of the Old Ones, so they are not in a deep slumber like their more powerful cousins. The Master Vampires are only created by being eeeevil mortals who make a pact with the Vampire Intelligence that turns them into a Master Vampire. As a Master Vampire they are supposed to go about creating enough secondary vampires to reach a critical mass of vampires where the Vamp Intelligence can be summoned to that planet. Apparently 2500+ vampires will get er done.
After some brief descriptions of the various vampire flavors we get to the crunch. We get stats on Vampire Intelligences and their stats while huge, are within a magnitude of what players can potential be messing with. They also have a giant bat demon familiar thing. Anyway they have stats. They can be killed. And it is kind of encouraging that you are expected to kill these fuckers given that rules are presented for what happens when the manifestation of a Vamp Intelligence gets killed! It is heartening that we are abiding by the rule of "if you stat it, they will kill it" rather than any sort of GM wankery. This is about the first good sign so far.
