FrankTrollman wrote:Rifts has a surplus of ogres and giants.
I don't think that's actually a thing. I mean, you could have a hundred kinds of giants in a kitchen sink game, and have that be OK.
Okay, yeah, you can't have too many of anything,
but, Rifts has a
relative surplus of:
[*] basically ogres (although few are cyborgs?).
[*] basically lizardmen.
[*] basically elves.
[*] basically gargoyles.
[*] dog people (although most Rifts furries lack free choice of OCC).
So if the war-thralls of either the Arkhons or the Dakir had been something other than a "big muscly mega-damage guy", that would be more value added for the kitchen sink setting.
They could be... crystal aliens, bird aliens, insect aliens, fish aliens, shapeshifters... whatever gnolams are?
They could be robots that look like Kermit the Frog, for some reason?
and it would have been less redundant.
Koumei wrote:
So if you're appealing to people who want "Dino Riders vs Power Rangers" and everything, the Ojahee Borg is the kind of awesome you want. Meanwhile, if you just want to be "a cyborg" and powerful, I imagine there's something better somewhere. Hell, the Naruni Repo-Bot looks like a cyborg (being a robot), and is pretty powerful.
Rifts mechanics are a dumpster fire, so the Ojahee Borg would be your
best option if the artwork of the viking ogre cyborg appealed to you. There aren't a lot of
cool pictures of ogre cyborgs, so the Ojahee Cyborg is value added. There are some pictures of ogre ninjas in other books, so the Fallam Blademaster is less value.
Since we're talking about that, I'm going to review the OCCs and RCCs in the balance of the book, and then talk about the places they live, if we still care. It's all downhill after the Mastodon Robot... although there are some bits of insanity still to go through.
Common O.C.C.s pp. 127-137
R.C.C.s & O.C.C.s pp. 141-151
New Babylon pp. 154-158 **
The Lardhold Barbarians pp. 152-158 **
** Both of these section headings contain a page or two of loose schpeal as well as the O.C.C. and R.C.C. entries.
So, as I pointed out in the entries for Sun Priests and Line Drawers, Rifts makes
no attempt whatever to keep fluff content in fluff sections and crunch content in crunch sections, or to otherwise structure the entries for their alphabet soup of playable types.
But I'm going to structure my review. In this part, I'm going to answer three questions for each entry:
[*] Would you want to play one of these?
[*] Is it any good? Do the rules make sense?
[*] Does it make an interesting antagonist, Mr. Johnson or sympathetic victim?
and in the next part of the review, if my fortitude holds out, I'll talk about whether this book gives you enough information to play as (people or monsters or whatever) who are from these places, the quality of story seeds, whether or not the setting makes a lick of sense (it doesn't) and so on.
Common O.C.C.s
We open with a list of what O.C.C.s and R.C.C.s from other books live in post-apocalypse Argentina.
Paladiumogy I: in various Rifts sourcebooks, Technowizards are said to be a North-America-specific phenomenon;
and yet, every sourcebook has technowizards: in Japan, in Argentina,
in a multi-galactic civilization of trillions. (I had a longer rant about this but I've deleted it for length.)
Paladiumology II: we're about to talk about classes that heavily focus on horseback riding, but the horseback riding rules aren't really developed until 5 books later
http://rifts.wikia.com/wiki/New_West.
Gaucho
[*] As a
character conception, yes, you might want to play an argentine cowboy. But you'd take some Rifts power option instead of using this O.C.C.. Also, something about this O.C.C. seems racist? I'm not sure what it is.
[*] You get some endurance bonuses, some mounted combat bonuses, and combat bonuses when fighting with paired vibroknives. You can start with a robot horse, if that's something you care about. You get a few minor cybernetics but Rifts cybernetics were written in the early 1990s and it shows (I have a 64kBaud modem in my head! It required them to surgically remove a quarter of my brain!)
You might very well want to fight mounted, but the bonuses are otherwise not-compelling. So this turns into another "dude with rifle" O.C.C. The mounted combat bonuses and minor cybernetics are better than nothing but you won't care.
You get some of the energy bolas that I mentioned previously in the review; and those are kinda broken.
[*] I suppose some antagonists or allies might be gauchos, and you could give them fiddly bonuses with knives or mounted combat but the PCs wouldn't even notice.
Plains Borg
The title of this image is: "Gaucho Steampunk"
[*] Now we're cooking with gas. These guys are formerly gauchos who gave up their humanity to become badass robots: they trade a skill, the horsemanship and knife fighting bonuses for being a cyborg.
[*] It's a default borg with some misc. bonuses and skills moved around. There are much better borgs in other books, and the bionic conversion rules have changed a bunch since this came out.
In spite of being a former gaucho, and of the cool picture above being the best thing about this O.C.C.,
you do not start with a robot horse. Fuck that noise. You do start with some of the energy bolas.
[*] Meh. If I were going to have the PCs fight/team up with a cadre of robot-horse riding gauchos, I'd make them full-conversion borgs rather than have them wield (expletive deleted) vibro-knives, but for that we could dispense with the entry and just keep the picture.
Ultra-Crazy O.C.C.
Paladiumology III: I'll try to brief. Rifts has fishmalks, but they're psychic supersoldiers with lumps of metal sticking out of their heads. The Gary Oldman with pistons stuck in your brain part is kinda cool, otherwise it's another dumpster fire. They get crazier as they
gain levels and the bonuses for gaining levels are mediocre, so basically you don't want to gain levels. It doesn't end well and both juicers and the better flavors of borg get bigger/better bonuses, so it's a non-power option that explodes during play (instead of a power option that explodes in some theoretical future after the game ends.)
[*] No you don't want to play one. You may
think you do, but you're forced to interact with Palladium insanity rules that will make you an NPC or worse
within the reasonable lifetime of a campaign.
[*] Game-mechanically, pretty similar to the basic book crazy (Rifts Ultimate gets some more/different skills but it's comparable), except you get more psionic powers and you're MDC. So it's an upgrade on the default crazy, but crazies aren't a power option (their biggest bonus is just +1 attack per round!) even before you consider that they're unplayable.
[*] As allies,
wacky combat cyborgs are not good. If the insanity isn't played for laughs they can be pretty terrifying, as frighteningly deranged enemies
or allies - again, the pitch, "furniture chewing villain/anti-hero with pistons in his brain" is not a bad one.
Blood Rider O.C.C.
Master Blood Rider R.C.C.
Blood Lizard
No, really, this is the actual picture from the book:
Psst! Hey, mister! You look stupid!
Haha. No, not that kind of blood lizard.
[*] Fire your costume designer. These guys are supposed to wear black tights reinforced with mega damage monster claw bones, which is: 1) insulting, in that it's supposed to bounce anti-tank weapons and 2) looks really stupid. I suppose it's funny as a criticism of the entire Rifts MDC schpeal, but it's not something you'd want to play. On the other hand, you get to ride a telepathic carnasaur! The Blood Lizard is telepathically bonded and loves you, but has a cynical disdain for everyone not in your clan - not a bad conceit. In theory you could play one of the Blood Lizards but since you get one as a sidekick for taking these O.C.C.s, you wouldn't.
[*] You're a guy with a rifle, and you have a telepathic dinosaur and some small combat bonuses while mounted. It's not a power option even after you take off the eyesore bone armor.
Is the Master Blood Rider R.C.C. really an R.C.C. or is it - as the internal header claims - an O.C.C.? The Master Blood Rider gets a below-cost telepathic force field and is a master level psionic although you have to wait until level 2 to take some of the better psi powers. The Master Blood Rider is obviously better than the base Blood Rider: trades a couple skills (including exotic horsemanship: blood lizard, which I think is a typo) for psi powers including a decent force field. If you can also be a space elf or something, this is a pretty powerful option.
[*] Well, how about the blood lizards themselves? As mentioned earlier in the thread -
yes we want to be friends with Jurassic Park Velociraptors, who like it when we ride them into battle, so that's good. Mechanically, they're a bit too fragile (~130 MDC) especially given they're outdoors-only and thus have to tangle with giant robots.
R.C.C.s & O.C.C.s of Achilles
So Achilles is a utopia of engineered human/animal hybrids who are variously described as "mutants". If you want to play some mutant or mutant animal from another book, and be from South America, they're represented in various numbers and you are given license to do that.
Serpentoid R.C.C.
[*] Meh. There's no picture. You're a (by default honorable and evil) lizard man with mediocre psionic powers.
[*] The force field is nice (strength varies tremendously with your M.E. roll), the
psychic venom is insulting (it does a moderate amount of damage but involves savings throws
and you have to bite the monster to inflict it.)
[*]
Coooooobraaaaaa! Well, it's a mostly-written-up evil
psychic serpent man, so if for some reason the serpent men in every other Rifts supplement don't do it for you, you could fight this one.
Mutant Capybara R.C.C.
Clairvoyant capybaras have deep World Cup insight
[*] The... capybara-human hybrid in the book is wearing platemail and a cape, looking heroic. As a natural extension of capybara physiology (they're giant swimming rats), the capybara has psychic mastery of time and space. If you want to be a furry, and also have
psychic as opposed to
magical mastery of spacetime, this is your only option.
[*] The
Haste power is probably straight-up broken (you spend some ISP to give someone +3 attacks / round for a while and some other bonuses), so there's that.
Otherwise you get a grab-bag of teleportation powers that various magicians get but don't care about?
[*] They're intrinsically-good, so probably they don't show up as opposition. A whole group of them would presumably spam
Slow (which they also get; it's not a power-option as far as save-or-debuff powers go, but being slowed is still pretty bad) as well as
Haste and things would go poorly.
Equinoid R.C.C.
[*] It's a centaur with an adequate picture. Do you want to be a centaur? You can if you want.
[*] Mechanically, you are lame. You can fly, you get a below-average force-field, and a psychically-created energy bow that is inferior to any rifle you would bother owning. You get a few other mediocre psychic powers.
[*] Meh. The backstory is that these were the result of forbidden experiments
on humans, so I guess that's a story seed or something?
Condoroid R.C.C.
[*] It's a vulture-man with a pretty decent picture where he's turning invisible.
[*] Mechanically, you are lame. You can fly, you get a quite-weak force-field, and a psychically created shield. You get psionic invisibility which would be a big deal except that mages get invisibility for free just by asking. You get a psi-sword at first level, because they'd forgotten that's supposed to be forbidden! But it doesn't matter because psi-sword isn't actually good just because Rifts makes a huge deal about not letting you have it.
[*] You might want to fight some invisible mutant bird-men assassins (or team up with them on a commando raid), but the stealth rules in Rifts are such magical tea-party that I cringe at the thought.
Falconoid R.C.C.
This is another picture from the book
[*] I like the picture, anyway. I kinda do want to play a falcon-headed guy with grenades, chilling with my power-armor rakishingly partway removed.
[*] Mechanically, you are better than the previous two options, because your force field is bigger and you get stat bonuses large enough to provide Rifts combat bonuses. You also get psi-blasts that you... don't use. Hardly a power option but with an adequate force field and large enough bonuses to important die rolls, playable if that's what you wanted to do.
[*] A bunch of falcon knights show up encased in glowing force fields? That would work, sure, and the picture is good.
Achilles Neo-Human R.C.C.
This writeup includes a lot of fluff that I will need to review if I'm going to finish the gazeteer portions of the book.
[*] So as I mentioned, Rifts has a lot of things that are basically elves. The picture for the neo-human has pointed ears, even. Do you want your elf do be a... genetically engineered, psychic, 80s glam rocker who transforms into a super-hero?
You very well may, and that is now an option.
[*] You get between +6 and +12 to all of your stats, you get the ability to psionically transform your SDC+hp into MDC, which makes you about as tough as a Cyborg (250 MDC or so), you get a pretty good save or die power that explicitly sends people on acid trips, and then you get the same psionics as a Mind Melter, more or less.
This is probably a
power option; you'd get comparable powers by starting as some kind of superhuman alien and then choosing the Mind Melter as your O.C.C, for example.
[*] These guys are pretty powerful straight out of the box, and some of them are explicitly evil, so that works. They've got a Magneto-esque "the humans hate us for being superior" thing which they can deliver while dressed like David Bowie; I'm liking these guys as a major antagonist.
New Babylon
The Amaki Stone Men are living marble statues that dig human women. Yes, really.
... I'm going to put these last few O.C.C.s in a different post, though.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek