The Gaming Den

Rifts World Book One Vampire Kingdoms



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.

We go right along from the Vampire Intelligence to the Vampire Minions, that is to say, the 3 castes of vampires. Layout is a bit shitty with stats and about 1/2 page of text for each vampire type with references to their powers which will follow in another section. Most notable bits from the crunch here is that in Rifts there is already a system in place for two types of damage SDC (structural damage capacity)/HP which is what most critters measure their health by, and MDC (mega-damage capacity) which is essentially 1 MDC:100 SDC ('mega' being the future's metric measurement for 100) and if you can't deal more than 100 SDC in a single attack you don't even damage something with MDC. This would have been a fairly simple thing to apply to vampires in the magically-superpowered realm of Rifts where just about everything magical turns into a MDC creature. Not vampires though, instead they have HP, deal MDC with melee attacks except to other vampires where it becomes HP damage. It's a weird inversion and avoidance of their already extant supernatural damage system. Vamps are immune to just about everything that would normally deal megadamage, and the few megadamage attacks that would hurt em instead will deal hit point damage to them as we will find out in the next section, Vampire Powers.

Vampire Powers. We pretty much get the whole kitchen sink here.
• Supernatural strength
• Blood draining
• Spawning new vamps
• Mind control of humans, mind control of vampires, a stack of psionic powers, including more mind control of course
• Shapechanging into a bat, wolf or mist
• Summoning vermin, canines or fog
• Invulnerability to I quote, "energy weapons, electricity, explosives, bullets, blades of steel, acid, radiation, disease, etc." So yeah, vampires are not MDC creatures but immune to just about everything that is a MegaDamage weapon.
• Rapid healing
• Oh yeah, Eternal Life
• And about 15 more powers piled into the miscellany bin "Abilities Natural to Vampires" including Flight, Night vision, Immunity to Fire and Cold, Glowy eyes when angry or awesome. No diamond sparkly skin though.

Next up: To Kill a Vampire
Vampire Weaknesses! A.K.A. Vampires can't wear plaid.

We've got your wooden/silver stakes, a called shot to the heart will instantly turn em into a lifeless skeleton, not quite as bad as the dusting that happens to Buffy/Angel vampires. Removing the stake though will cause them to regrow flesh and be healed and hungry after 15 seconds flat. Creepy. Bonus points to artist Kevin Long for drawing a 6 panel depiction of the re-fleshing of a vampire post-stake extraction. Thank god Kevin Siembieda didn't try his hand at drawing that. Unfortunately by this point we're already 3 Siembieda drawings in with what is quite possibly his best work to date and still awful.

Vamps can be destroyed by sunlight, running water (including rain!), or the complicated method of staking the vamp separating the skeletal head and body to burn in separate piles and then scattering the ashes… as if anyone would do this rather than just leaving the skeleton out in the rain or just pissing on it with your running water.

So vampires fear all water in motion. This is going to lead to some stupidity no doubt. But that's not all. Of course vampires fear the crucifix and cross, whether it is wielded by a believer or even if it is just laying on the couch. In fact to demonstrate this even cross-shaped shadows will harm them. Yes, any t-shaped shadows or objects are bad-news for vampires.


Vampire proof bridge! Fucking look out Vlad! And for fuck's sake avoid chain link fences!

There's the good old sunlight instant death and immersion in running water and needing to sleep with soil from their native land, and having to avoid certain herbs as well, but cross shadows and essentially all water… that's new to me.

So we start with nuke-proof vampires that can shrug off railgun fire and particle beams that could tear down sky scrapers in seconds. There's a picture of a vampire just ignoring a laser shot to the face that would take about 3 shots to turn a modern day tank into slag. But my toddlers can take one down with a squirt gun and a flashlight with an X covering on the lens. Now you'd think perhaps this is a stupid oversight that they didn't see coming since it turns their scary monsters into well, a stupid joke. Nope. This apparently was the intent as next up is the equipment for our aspiring vampire hunters.

We have wood and silver rounds for rail guns, wood and silver weapons, and yes, fucking cross flashlights and squirt guns. We even have a fucking magic sprinkler hat which essentially you can pump magical energy into to effectively tap into a decanter of endless water. Jesus. If this were a drinking review I'd be getting my next liver right now just so I could keep up with Siembieda, as he must've been shit-faced when he wrote this.

This is bat-shit cray-zay. We are fucking cribbing If I Had Duck Feet for vampire fighting tech. How does any vampire fight not immediately devolve into a whimsy with the players just playing the most lethal game of flashlight tag and squirtgun fights? I don't know. The magic water cannons are brutal as they can deal 3d6x10 HP in one hit (6 shots per melee round) and vampires have 3d4x10 HP. Techno-magic rain flares which totally melt every vampire within 100' radius via rain that lasts 1d6 min.

*sigh*

I… I'm just gonna move forward.

We have the Vampire Kingdoms. This is the new-fangled vampire society never before conceived prior to 1991. Vampires have taken over the post-apocalyptic desert Mexico… which doesn't seem terribly different than pre-apocalyptic Mexico. Vampires have moved in to this area because it is an arid environment that nobody else apparently give two fucks about and they use their juju to make it even drier and even less fuckworthy to the outside world. Vampire Intelligences inhabit Aztec Pyramids that were built upon ley-line intersections as super-power-sources and they suck up the energy so that other interested parties don't get as much of it. We have multiple Intelligences that are competing for human stock and war against each other for territory and prey. Wild Vampires are sent up north to make it appear to the human forces to the north that there's nothing worth fighting further south. I've never seen a reason why the Coalition forces of the north cannot simply send some fast flight over Mexico to do proper surveillance, but whatever apparently their entire intel has come from ground expeditions despite having an abundance of flight capability. Apparently the stupid gambit of hoping that humanity north of the Rio Grande won't care to give a half-assed sortie pays off.

Hell, even the maps we have are shit.



I had to pencil in the locations for El Paso and Ciudad Juarez up by the compass since they weren't included… despite those two locations taking up 42 pages out of our 176 page assault upon print. Teenage Erik also drew in my imagined borders for the various vampire kingdoms because I thought that might be useful. I figured rivers would make natural borders since Rifts vampires are pussies when it comes to water. I also corrected a typo on a city name because that shit bugged me.

The big surprise is that even if there were a minimally competent scouting of Mexico by the Coalition forces, there's legitimately not much to find anyway.

There's a few small towns, and a couple oil refineries. Yes, in the year 2300, we are pumping oil out of Mexico's ground and that is the most important resource of note there. Mexico City the largest of all the towns, now having about 80,000 residents (including the 2,000 vamps) within a 30 mile radius. A big decline from today's 20 million, and Koresh-knows how many people were living there in 2098. Yes, it is terrible that humans are living in cities and being fed upon by vampires as their herd, but considering that there's nothing otherwise worthwhile here, the land has been converted into a complete desert after a nuclear and magical apocalypse, a sub 1% survival of humans seems pretty damned good for Mexico City. They can probably be thankful for the vampiric presence. If players actually wiped out the vampires somehow, it seems likely that the power vacuum would get filled with the dead bodies of the last remaining human survivors of Mexico. Whatever. It's a miserable place and PCs can go there to kill vampires. Game on.

The entirety of multiple warring vampire kingdoms, various villages and such comes to about a dozen pages. Including some full page drawings and that map. It's pretty thin on crunch and fluff. Just some population statistics and a brief paragraph here or there on most locations. We do get some NPC blocks and a non-vampire monster that is some Master Vamp's Renfield. Apparently we aren't supposed to care much about the actual vampire kingdoms and their society. They're just targets to be bomb-fucked during the day and rained upon at night.


Next up are The Strongholds of Man.
Basically towns just south of the Rio Grande which only have to fend off feral vampires rather than organized flying-mist mind-control brigades. This is where the players will probably have their fun.

We have good delivered with towns full of gangs and places to buy stuff. El Paso gets about 8 pages with rival gangs NPC personalities, and places to buy shit. There's a Dog-boy gang, a Cat-girl gang, a D-Bee (dimensional being, a.k.a. aliens) gang, and a human supremacist gang. The most notable thing about El Paso is that they sneak in rules for creating humanoid cats just like the humanoid dog-boys in the core rule book. In fact the leader of the cat gang, Donna the Dark Kitten, is a humanoid puma with big tits (no, I didn't scan that one for you fuckers) that they apparently need to note that she has a P.B. (Physical Beauty, a stat in Rifts) of 23, which is pretty fucking high. Furries, eat your fucking heart out, this one's for you.

El Paso is run by King Wyatt Halloway. Just like every other location, this is a city-state ruled by an evil bad guy, but honestly it is one of the most civilized places you're likely to see. A not too subtle indicator of the teenage male target audience is at the tail end of King Halloway's stat block when his various family members are given very brief descriptions, his "cousins Thelma and Candice (both are babes and smart too)". These kind of random insertions are not uncommon in the book.

Other than kitty titty, I think the main raison d'être for El Paso is a place to gear up with anti-vampire crap before crossing the Rio Grande and going down to vampy town.

El Paso is just the warm-up. Bring on fucking Ciudad Juarez!



A typical Ciudad Juarez street.

An aside: Say what I will about this book, but the art, even the shitty art, often does a fantastic job of delivering the feel and theme of things, often in a coherent manner. I personally think the vampire intelligences are stupid, but fuck if there isn't a picture of a giant bitey-tentacled eyeball thing with some vampires milling about it, or a stupid looking giant bat thing walking around menacing the land. It evokes something appropriate. And Ciudad Juarez invokes mayhem and for some reason nostalgia for Paranoia.

From page 66 to 97 we have Ciudad Juarez. My RPG group's favorite of these towns was Ciudad Juarez. Itself a small town with 77,000 people but apparently an average transient population of 16,000 on top of that. So 1 in 5 people are just visiting this place. Either the desert wasteland full of feral vampires isn't such a bad place that you'd want to stay here, or C.J. isn't much better a place to live. Take your pick. Most major cities in this book get statted up with percentage breakdowns of humans, D-Bees, transients and vampires. I don't know if it was an error or what, but 2% of Ciudad Jarez is vampires. That's about 1500 vampires unliving in the city. For some perspective, that's almost exactly as many vampires as live in the most major of the vampire kingdom cities. Is this an error? I have no idea.

We have a corrupt government, uninvolved law enforcement, a psychic gang, a monster-hunting vigilante gang, a D-Bee gang, a body-chop-shop gang and a vampire gang.

There's a map with short summaries of over 150 city locations to go visit, including a blood-sport arena. Rifts vampires may be stupid, the system is horrible, but god bless this book for having a couple towns where you can do what Rifts does best: provide teenage boys with an endless bounty of entertaining places to trash devoid of adventure rails. I was able to draw interest into running a brand new Rifts campaign after we'd gotten tired of the game and left it to rot for a couple years simply by stating that they'd be going to Ciudad Juarez.

Other adventure opportunities are provided with an in-depth look at an NPC vampire hunter army with where the most prominent and successful band of vampire hunters are evil (or at least many of them are) because that's how Siembieda rolls. If there's anyone successful at fighting supernatural evil, it's evil humans. I don't know why this is, but it is his favorite twist that gets used so much it is pretty much expected.

After more than a dozen pages of NPC vampire hunters we get into Traveling Shows.

The next section is entirely about traveling shows in the post-apocalyptic supernatural and radioactive vampire-ridden desert wastelands of Mexico. Not much different than the traveling Heterodyne Show of Girl Genius I suppose. I wouldn't expect for this to be a thing meriting more than a set of NPCs full of adventure hooks like the vampire hunter army, but hey, sit back for 35 pages as we are given two fleshed out traveling carnivals (one 'good', one 'evil') and actual crunch mechanics and rules for creating your own traveling show, with 6 tiers of show:
• Side Show
• Freak Show
• Traveling Medicine Show
• Traveling Troubadors
• Small Circus or Carnival
• Large Circus
Complete with it's own point-buy system for getting vehicles, outfits, sponsorship, communications, criminal activity, internal security, alignment of personnel (yes, evil employes are free), military power, equipment, reputation/credentials, salary for employees… and the featured acts.

I shit you not. An A-through-L point buy list of building your own circus where the types of acts are letter 'H'.

You get a pool of points that you can spend on getting tons of incredibly expensive weapons, power armor and other equipment, or invest in whores and clowns. It really is hard to justify including acts into your circus when it comes at the cost of raw ultimate power. Really it is kind of like character creation at the onset, except there you just choose to have power or not.

That a new MDC alien race of stupid looking beagle-eared spherically-rotund halflings called "Floopers" which make a "Floop" noise whenever they use their short range teleportation is introduced as gymnastic clowns for one of these carnivals, I don't even bat my eyes. This is Rifts. I never really figured out of the setting is supposed to be some dark post-apocalyptic horror, or a comedy combat engine. I don't know if Kevin Siembieda ever figured it out either.

If you think that from the starting set of bland warring vampire kingdoms and a rollicking Ciudad Juarez full of brutal entertainment, that the Traveling Shows are the climax of the Vampire Kingdoms sourcebook, then you would be correct.

There is another 20 pages of the Mysterious Yucatan that serves as a denouement or a very-skippable thick last page to the book. The Yucatan Peninsula after the Riftspocalypse turned into a coterminal dimension where Vampire Intelligences and ancient Mayan gods are have taken over. It's kind of hard to get to as you can pretty much only walk onto it. If you fly over it then you just see water… and I don't know why you'd want to go there anyway. It's a conundrum. The highlight of the entire section is where a robot mecha introduced in an earlier Rifts book is in back-to-back full page depictions by artist Gustovick doing his level best to try and hide the stupid tiny penis cannon that this 30 foot tall robot sports. Some of the best art in the book and the poor guy gets 2 full pages of the penis cannon robot. Poor bastard.

I'm sure he was made to draw this mech as punishment by Siembieda possibly for being a far better artist than K.S.


Now time for summary judgement:

Layout: One star.
Editing: I give this a spooky OoooooOOooo ghost noise since I am not certain whether anyone actually did any editing here.
Art: There's some crap and some gems. Overall it feels like things were done with intent and done fairly well. Without the art I would only wipe my ass with this book. With the art I only wipe my ass on certain parts.
Setting: You will get some use out of it. If anything there's probably too much in Ciudad Juarez since it is a bit of a clusterfuck to find locations out of 150+ location summaries, but it is easier to exclude than to include, so I say the goods are delivered here. I rate this at 4 tacos.
Antagonists: Well, there's a bunch of NPCs to beat up. Pity there's no such thing as a nice stat-block for NPCs in rifts. Most of them would be killed in the first round of combat and I don't care if they can operate radios at 93%.
Vampires: Glass cannons that will either fuck you up or be a total joke and about nothing between. A total disappointment.
Vampire Society: Goods not delivered.
Circuses: If you are playing Rifts without a circus you are missing out. Mostly missing out on free equipment.
Overall: Unfortunately this book really failed to deliver the oomph on vampires. Despite it being one of the first books in my collection, it never really saw use until the twilight of my group's Rifts playing days and that was largely entirely so they could go to Ciudad Juarez. Other than for C.J. you are best off ignoring this book entirely if you actually want to play Rifts. Make up your own vampire rules. You won't do worse than these.

If I ever run a Rifts game again*, they will totally have a circus.

I was hoping you'd cover the fucking stupid weaponry. You didn't disappoint. I look forward to other ones being taken out and beaten, and would be happy to review a few as well.

Edit: one of the Rifter books actually does a cooler thing for vampires: a disease/virus that targets psi-stalkers, which are already pseudovampires. It makes them take MD as SD (Ultimate Edition then made this standard for all psi-stalkers), buffs some stats, lets them spend PP to deal MD with attacks, gives them a weakness to sunlight (they take penalties and suffer psychosomatic damage - hilariously they seem to be aware of their actual number of hit points).

Also, and get this for a totally unique thing that has never been done before, do not steal. There are multiple "strains" of the virus, each one granting you different bonus Psi-powers. Yeah, you totally have Vampire Clans. And one of them is so much better than the others that it's a joke.

*Yes, that was a joke.

I looked up the catgirl with huge tits. I was disappointed, most of the women I know IRL have bigger tits than that.

I remember being pissed off by this book during my first look at Rifts in High School because of the stupid Vampire Hunter weapons and the fact that Vampires were controlled by really dippy looking aliens from another dimension. Granted, as I recall I got into Vampire: The Masquerade before Rifts and so I preferred my Vampires to be preening assholes who are Better Than You. Kinda still do, really.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:I got into Vampire: The Masquerade before Rifts and so I preferred my Vampires to be preening assholes who are Better Than You. Kinda still do, really.

Okay, there are going to be some problems. Them there? They's fightin' words.

I read an urban fantasy where vampirism is the result of a virus that burns out the higher brain functions and cause greater and greater physiological changes over the years. Your normal vampire will attempt to kill anything it sees alive, and if so profoundly brainless that if you lock one up in a room for long enough, it will cannibalize itself.

First, the skin pales, it loses a lot of the body fat--you normal vampire looks like something dipped a muscle-anatomy model in a thin layer of wax. The body is set to emergency-mode strength. Also, the genitals immediately begin deteriorating. It's totally possible to determine the age of a vampire by how shriveled-up the balls are.

Over year, the bone structure shifts. The face gets longer, the teeth bigger, the arms are longer, and it changes from being a biped to a quadruped. No one knows what the end result is, because vampires have only been really known about for about thirty years and vampires that old are still progressing.

Oh, and people will totally volunteer for the process. See, the necromancers play the long game and they'll pay huge amounts of money to terminally ill people, if they get to infect your body when you're reasonably close to the end and have a chance to set your affairs in order.

I approved of this treatment of vampires.

I actually started this review thinking that team nostalgia was going to win out. I mean the cover has a cover full of fuckin vampires, it felt like the goods were going to be delivered and I really didn't remember much about the book and was eager to stroll down memory lane.

But then as I went on I remembered how stupid the vampires were and that it turns out there's more vampires in that cover picture than there are on the entire planet in Rifts per their numbers given (something like maybe 10K total. Big whup). And the memories came flooding back about how this was one of my first Rifts books and I never wound up using it until we were pretty much done with Rifts. I mean we even used Rifts fucking Africa before touching Vampire Kingdoms.

I was rather wishing by the end of the review that I'd done this with another member of my olde gaming group to help remember stuff and also to keep me going. By the end I was running out of steam and just wanted to end it, grammar check be damned. I started making an animated gif of a nuke-explosion and Edward with sparkly skin, but it was be cut due to me wanting to be done. I decided leaving in most of my mistakes was a proper homage to the material (I don't even remember what I was correcting with my 2 edits on the last post before packing it in for the night, but it must have been crucial).

Also, one minor note:
The Great Old Ones are Cthulhu terrors and for the most part they are unstatted because they're too big or something. The exceptions are Nxla (Psyscape or Federation of Magic or whatever) and... one of them was reincarnated as Horus. But they have "the biggest stats".

Next is the gods. Generally. Complete with half the pantheons having impersonators. If they had done it once that'd be kind of cool, but as it is, nearly every god has a fake version of it.

Then come the Intelligences. You can actually roll a random Alien/Demonic Intelligence in the Dark Conversions book. True story, someone once said "I'm running a mega-powerful Rifts game! ANY thing from ANY book is allowed!" So I said "okay" and rolled an Alien Intelligence. They changed their mind.

The exception here is the Splugorth: they're thought to be splintered fragments from a Great Old One. So they're like individual sperm of it or its hair or something. And yet their power is bigger than that of many gods.

So it's actually okay that Vampire Intelligences are kind of weak (the group I'm in could certainly take one, though it could probably escape us). Because they're the bottom tier of SuperDuperPowerfulMegaStuff.

Yeah, I tend to rate SI's higher than gods since the strongest Supernatural Intelligence will be stronger than the strongest god, but they're often comparable.

I concur that Vamp Ints are at an acceptable challenge level. They aren't a joke and they aren't unkillable. I think my group ruined one of them by finding an Aztec pyramid and assaulting it during daylight hours. Their Burster crisped the place since ~17 year old GM-Erik out of pity for Bursters had previously green-lighted the stacking of their power to double the damage and size of a fire already started. Stacked doubling gets ridiculous quickly as it turns out. "1000 MDC walls? I'll burn that in a melee." I think the Vamp Intelligence fled.

I actually forgot about this brief foray into Mexico but it predated our Cuidad Juarez adventure. So I guess I did use Vamp Kingdoms twice! Of course, after that total pwnage of the nastiest Mexico had to offer during a day trip the players realized there was no awesome loot to steal. So they ignored the plight of the Mexican people and went on to other targets.

My vague memory of Rifts campaigns generally involves people trying to ignore the fact that this book ever existed. And that was pretty bad, as they happened relatively early in the Rift lifecycle- around the time Atlantis and England were printed, if I recall correctly. At least people wanted to play Tattooed Men and Temporal Wizards.

But there was generally a feeling that Rifts Mexico didn't exist because it was a silly place.