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Palladium Books Going Out of Business
kainewynd2 writes to mention a public plea put out in the Palladium books forums by the company owner Kevin Siembada. He bemoans the Rifts publisher's poor financial outlook, and asks people to buy a $50 print to save the company. From the post: "The truly wonderful Rifts® videogame - Rifts® Promise of Power - was stillborn. The N-Gage platform never took off in North America. That meant the N-Gage and Rifts® Promise of Power would NOT be available on the mass market in the USA and Canada. Finding it anywhere in North America required an act of God. There would be no Nokia royalty-based revenue stream. Nor would there be a Nokia videogame sequel and the money that might come from it. Nokia treated me nothing short of GREAT. They lost truckloads of money on this venture. We're both the victims of marketing fallout. Please don't blame these wonderful people for Palladium's woes - circumstance just didn't make them part of our solution." Wow, they made a game for the N-Gage and then lost a bunch of money. Who ever could have forseen that?
Palladium made interesting and rich game worlds. Unfortunately, their game system is much to be desired, IMNSHO. Book formatting, editing and quality were always under par (I had trouble looking up most things in any of their books). Great ideas and poor execution. I'm personally suprised they lasted this long.
Great settings, horrible game mechanics.
I am a huge fan of the Rifts setting and I love the Robotech material, but the character and combat systems are unwieldy. If they had better game mechanics, I'd start buying and playing their stuff again.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
They are NOT going out of business. RTFA, submitter! (You too, Zonk!)
Yet. Kevin is asking for help to keep them afloat. Signed & numbered prints. Your name in a book.
Read the article.
My stupid web site
If your company is resorting to pleading with people on the Internet to buy $50 prints in order to save the company, the company is already doomed. Sorry you had to hear about it this way, Kevin.
And then I moved cross country twice and lost all my gamer buddies. :(
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I have a couple of the books from the mid-90s when a group of college friends and I started playing it. The sessions didn't really last long though and most of us had switched back to D&D. I think the reason it never took off for us was that we didn't really have a good DM (forget what the Rifts version of this role is) to keep everyone interested.
Rifts is a fantastic setting for an MMO. As other people have said, the game mechanics are attrocious. When making it into a computer game, however, all those mechanics can be trashed and just the world setting used. If they got a deal going, I would definitely be paying attention. I bought the Rifts rule book when it first came out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_Books
Honestly, I thought myself an avid RPer, being a fan of cyberpunk and D&D for the past few years. I've been to many a game store, but somehow never noticed *any* of their books:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_Books
^Information on who they are, and what they sell^
"If your company is resorting to pleading with people on the Internet to buy $50 prints in order to save the company, the company is already doomed. Sorry you had to hear about it this way, Kevin."
It worked for the BSD guys. Anyway MMORG's is were it's at. Print games are dying, Netcraft confirms it.
I don't know if anyone has ever seen a dream die before their eyes due to a mistake, my suggestion is to not be negative about his request for help. Asking for help is very very difficult, but at least he's visibly trying not to close shop vs. some game companies that just close doors and we never hear from them again.
I never played Rifts, but I did play the earliest version of Mechanoids and their fantasy RPG (the first refreshing view of kobolds and orcs, pre-Blizzard).
Anyways, it's a good deed to do if you have the money.
I never got into Rifts because what I saw of it just seemed a bit like a watered-down TORG with bad mechanics, but back in the day I played quite a bit of Palladium Fantasy RPG, which was a lot like D&D but just different enough to attract me to it. In retrospect it really was just a cheap knock-off, but at the time I really enjoyed it.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
I've got a fairly large number of Heroes Unlimited books sitting next to me at the moment. It seems like a decent enough game, from the times I've played (difficulty in getting a GM and finding time when everyone is available).
That said, I do have some qualms with the system, and find that much more discusion with other players is needed when designing your character due to how wildly divergent the ability scores can be.
Actually if you read what they said, they were doing pretty well in spite of some set backs, they just ran into one big problem with a legal issue. I was one of those people buying those books and I was always a big fan of the series. I'll admit that the character creation and such were always a tad too complex and time consuming, and the game mechanics had issues. In spite of that though it was a pretty rich universe that they put together.
I haven't been able to play the game in a very long time, but that's because of how time consuming RPG's are in general. I can't play for 4-8 hours in a sitting these days as I have too much other stuff to do. But I really hope they can stay afloat and get some licensing deals for a movie or MMO. This stuff would be awesome on the big screen.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Wow, they made a game for the N-Gage and then lost a bunch of money. Who ever could have forseen that?
I'm glad you found the time to write this useful and insightful commentary, Zonk.
It's just such a shame you couldn't be bothered to read the article.
Palladium bet on the wrong horse. I would have to guess that the company was doomed at about the point it became dependent upon a royalty revenue stream from a video game for its survival. This is a company with, what, 20+ years as an RPG publisher -- and incredibly prolific years, as well -- if you can't cut it with your primary business, which is publishing RPGs, then you're sunk.
I played Rifts for a few years after it came out. True, the mechanics were fairly complicated, but that was half of the fun. The setting is something that would fit great in a MMORPG: a post-apocalyptic, dystopian, cyberpunk, western, fantasy setting.
BTW: Jerry Bruckheimer was also in talks to make a movie set in the Rifts universe at one point.
Two things we needed to see in the post that make this Slashdot post misleading, all important items in the full article, are that:
1.) Palladium is close to going out of business, but not out just yet.
2.) Their primary reason for being on the brink appears to be embezzlement, or some related crime. Their real business isn't enough to overcome the loss incurred due to that legal trouble.
I'm not a big RIFTS fan, but I'm all for responsible reporting.
1. They are cheap and ugly. They are not hardcover bound books with full color pages. Look at a Paladium book, then look at a new D&D book, or at a White Wolf book, or whatever. The non-Paladium books are cool even if you don't play the game. If I am going to buy a product, I want the product to be high quality, and have an instant "cool" value. Printing a web page on your printer will give you as good production values as Paladium books. They didn't even lay out the books on computer. They used the old fashion past things to cardboard, take a photograph, make a plate from the photograph method of printing.
2. The books would reprint lots of information. At least a third of the info in any book you could find in just about every other book. They definitly liked to recycle as much content as possible.
3. All the settings were lame. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Yeah, OK. Rifts? "It is like D&D, but with Cyberpunk thrown in, but with Cthulhu thrown in, but with Vampires thrown in, but with Sci-Fi thrown in.."... no thank you. Ninjas and Super Spys? Uh.
4. They had a terrible, hard to use game system.
Sorry, a company making products that no-one likes will go out of buisness. Role playing games are already an extremly small niche product as it is... so there is no longer any room in the industry for people making crappy product. They could cut it in the 1980s, when expectations weren't that hight, and we were all 9 years old and didn't know any better. But the market is more competitive today, the expectations and production values are higher, and no-one is going to pay for that crap.
Why don't they port this mysterious N-Gage game to another system? Depending on how it was written, this might be more than a small task, but if it means the difference between going under or staying afloat as a company, its got to be worth it. I mean they seem to indicate a major reason their going under is that this game was a flop, and that it was only a flop because the N-Gage was a flop. If the game is so great, they should port it to PSP, DS, or even a console or PC. Or why not just sell this "great" game and let someone else do the port, if its so great, then i'm sure they'll be able to get takers. Selling $50 prints doesn't make much sense to me, how many could they possibly sell? Even if they sold near a thousand is that even to pay the costs of a single employee?
Yep, I questioned myself too back in my gamer days: Who buys Palladium stuff anyway? Good game worlds and ideas, but their lawyer-happy attitude back in the early 90's caught a sour note with many gamers. Funny to think that back in the pre-Magic days, Wizards of the Coast were almost shut down because of a lawsuit from Palladium Games. They also sent a lawyergram to White Wolf because of articles they were writing that included stats and thoughts about Palladium material. In short - Palladium wanted complete control over who wrote material concerning their gameworlds, and this came as a rude surprise to the gamer press and the community at that time. Me and many other gamers thought this was a lowpoint and did not do the company much good, and now see where the industry is - Wizards(of the Coast) is the mothership while Palladium is a mere footnote in the history of gaming.
Did you really not at least *think* this would be the outcome? Seriously, I can't see how anyone would put all of their eggs in one basket all riding on the N-Gauge. I feel bad that in business there are winners and losers, and that more often than not the losers have some of the best ideas and creativity... but that is life. If the talent is there and the desire, pick yourself up by the bootstraps and re-invent yourself, not by selling overpriced prints to hang on by a unraveling thread. No sense in chasing good money after bad.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
I played Rifts in college. Got to be one of the first 'real' RPGs I played. I will admit that the game mechanics were and still are very flawed-- and resisting the change to simplify the rules via a d20-system-like reboot certainly didn't help much-- but the setting, by its very nature, was completely open-ended in an unparallelled way. Couple of my favorite characters came out of those sessions and they were certainly nothing that could easily be done in traditional D&D or White Wolf. (case in point: multiple-personality Crazy whose quest was to find a psychic to heal his problem; naturally my first phobia earned was, you guessed it, psychic healing)
As to the quality of the books-- yes, they're not exactly top-of-the-line tomes, and they're not organized well. Knowing now that they were done without many modern contrivances like Pagemaker or the like, however, they are damn impressive and damn well done. (Surprisingly they also hold up well during campaigns-- I'll have to ask that buddy of mine how his books are doing, but with all the abuse they suffered they came through three years of gaming relatively unscathed.) Seeing this kinda makes me wish I'd picked up a few of the books; by the time I could afford to, though, I wasn't in a role-playing community anymore.
I probably ought to echo this sentiment to Kevin-- start looking into licensing the setting and other stuff as best as you can. Maybe you can't make another game or port it due to some Satanic exclusivity clause you made with Nokia. You can still get into talks with MacFarlane for figures, a publisher for fiction based on the setting, etc. Palladium has a HUGE amount of IP that can be leveraged into other uses, most of which will be quite lucrative (assuming good choices are made).
Worst-case scenario: talk to WotC or White Wolf about a buyout. Seriously. 'Tis better to have struggled, lost, and gotten away with a nice cashout to sit on (or, more likely, a cushy position as VP of their newly-acquired Rifts line) than to have struggled, lost, and gone irrevocably bankrupt fighting the good fight.
Part of that is because their glory days were quite a long time ago. It seems bizarre to remember it now, but in the mid-to-late 80s there were dozens and dozens of commercial RPGs around. Even as a seriously hardcore roleplayer it was perfectly possible to encounter a published system you'd never heard of.
Palladium made a pretty big impact back then by taking their truly awful system but applying it to some very well chosen material. Robotech was crying out for someone to do it. TMNT was at that time an extremely cool and cutting-edge comic (forget the later animated series). And then there was Chaos Earth, which ultimately became Rifts.
These days, the kinds of people who would once have played Palladium games are more likely to download free systems on the internet or simply make their own. If small RPG studios were ever viable businesses, they certainly aren't now.
Palladium earned their place in roleplaying's hall of fame. But it doesn't surprise me that even gamers haven't heard of them these days.
I bought a lot of their stuff over the years. I ran a palladium fantasy RPG game in the early 90s, then Rifts later on, as well as some Robotech, TMNT and so on. The settings were cool. The differnt types of magic (especially circles and wards) were very cool. HOwever, as many have noted, the mechanics were not. They were on par with 2nd edition D&D, but 3rd edition was clearly superior. I did like their XP system, and still use some facets of that in other games i run. At some point the Rifts world books (of which there are a ton) seemed like each one was trying to top the previous, to the point of extremes. I think when Atlantis came out they described a creature that lives at the bottom of the sea in the Pacific with tentatcles long enough to reach around south america, up the atlantic, and slap someone in england, I knew it was getting out of control. I haven't bought one of their books in half a dozen years, but didn't see anything to suggest that trend hadn't continued... In just about every case I found other game systems and mechanics I preferred to Palladium's, and have moved on. Still, I have some fondness for the good times I had with their games, and hope they pull through. I still remember their sourcebook that had homosexuality as a possible result on the "insanity" chart. (that's right, due to a failed saving throw, you are now....) Later prints had a sticker covering that up and replacing it with another insanity, and later reprintings finally changed it. sigh... can't help but chuckle...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
While I retired from gaming a long time ago, so much of my early teens were spent playing Palladium games (almost all of them, with Ninjas and Superspies being my favorite)
I can remember spending hours reading the books, because the stories were so good - intriguing, with engaging stories, varied themes, etc.
It would be nice to see a company with a well-developed game system like White Wolf take over the company and adapt the worlds to their game system.
On the other hand, if it weren't for Palladium, I probably would have gotten out more as a kid - so I guess I blame Palladium for making me into such a geek.
DM (forget what the Rifts version of this role is)
In almost every system other than D&D, the term is Game Master (or GM). Sometimes you see 'referee' or very game specific terms, e.g. Toon used 'animator,' IIRC. But really, DM or GM, everyone knows what you mean.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Just changing their name to NGSCB
(which stands for N-Gage Sucks C*ck Books)
http://n-gage.letstalk.com/brands/n-gage/new_landi ngpage.htm?depId=1&pgId=154
has the Rifts game for the N-Gage for $24.99 last I looked.
I actually have the N-gage game (at least the demo), and it is definitely one of the best N-gage games out. Like the N-gage itself though, it was too little, too late. The setting is perfect for a video game, and I have no idea why they chose the N-gage as a platform. Two sinking ships going down together I guess. A PC release, especially with a good multiplayer, could have easily pulled them into the black. The dev team was obviously talented, but it was doomed from the start by its platform. Perhaps they'll be able to port it to the GBA or DS and at least make up a little lost profit. They have so much promise, but some bad management decisions are killing them.
It doesn't help that the role-playing game industry is in a slump and going through a transitional phase.
.4a - Men will get an erection. No, I don't know when, exactly. I really didn't feel like calling up the local mortuary and asking this. And there's people on my mailing list I could have asked, I bet, but it's kind of weird popping up and asking that. No pun intended. I'm not sure my parents know what erections are, so I can't ask them. I did read that this was one of the reasons hangings were so well attended by women, back in the old.days. Big Laffs, seeing the Hung, hung.
Hmm, 'transitional phase'?
* Moment of Death:
1} The heart stops
2} The skin gets tight and grey in color
3} All the muscles relax
4} The bladder and bowels empty
. . .
5} The body's temperature will typically drop 1.5 degrees F. per hour unless outside environment is a factor. The liver is the organ that stays warmest the longest, and this temperature is used to establish time of death if the body is found within that time frame.
* After 30 minutes:
6} The skin gets purple and waxy
7} The lips, finger- and toe nails fade to a pale color or turn white as the blood leaves.
8} Blood pools at the lowest parts of the body leaving a dark purple-black stain called lividity
9} The hands and feet turn blue
10} The eyes start to sink into the skull
* After 4 hours:
11} Rigor mortis starts to set in
12} The purpling of the skin and pooling of blood continue
13} Rigor Mortis begins to tighten the muscles for about another 24 hours, then will reverse and the body will return to a limp state.
* After 12 hours:
14} The body is in full rigor mortis.
* After 24 hours:
15} The body is now the temperature of the surrounding environment
16} In males, the semen dies
17} The head and neck are now a greenish-blue color
18} The greenish-blue color continues to spread to the rest of the body
19} There is the strong smell of rotting meat
20} The face of the person is essentially no longer recognizable
* After 3 days:
21} The gases in the body tissues form large blisters on the skin
22} The whole body begins to bloat and swell grotesquely. This process is speeded up if victim is in a hot environment, or in water
23} Fluids leak from the mouth, nose, eyes, ears and rectum and urinary opening
* After 3 weeks:
24} The skin, hair, and nails are so loose they can be easily pulled off the corpse
25} The skin cracks and bursts open in many places because of the pressure of Internal gases and the breakdown of the skin itself
26} Decomposition will continue until body is nothing b
-Styopa
Considering that they're liable to shut their doors permanent-like if they don't get a cash injection from somewhere in short term, ostensibly due to a recently ongoing embezzelment of funds from out of the company.
He laid it all on the table as best as he could, because of litigation demands preventing the whole story from being told (Which I believe is higly possible...).
It doesn't matter WHERE the money comes from, they just need a serious cash influx to keep them afloat for the longer-term cashflow items to start generating revenue. I am intimately familiar with this concept, having lived with a similar painful business situation for the last FIVE years (Fortunately, it looks like we're going to make it through that rough period and come out on top after all...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It's probably in the publishing deal that Nokia had sole rights to the title- and they might be eying publishing it for a slightly better thought out smartphone model (It appears they're toying with this thinking with newer phone models...) and won't let them out of the contract to republish it elsewhere on other consoles. Even IF they did repackage it for a new phone model, it's not going to happen QUITE in a timeframe that Palladium could immediately benefit from it- and it sounds like they need help NOW, not in 6-12+ months from now.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Character creation is the most important part of the game for me, I don't know why people do not understand this.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
My friends and I used to play both Rifts and Shadowrun. Shadowrun was for serious-ish play, Rifts for epic slaughterfests.
One of my favorite things about it is the books never go out of date, they don't rewrite the same stuff over and over with a couple tweaks so they can resell it to you. That's also a big problem, because over the 10+ years since the first book was written, new rules have come out that clash with old, restrictions detailed in older books are broken in newer ones, and no corrections are ever made to clarify the confusion.
If they ever went through and made a book of corretions and clarifications, I'd start looking into the series again.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
It appears that they were just the victim of theft of some inventory and a lot of collectables, like someone robbed a warehouse or their offices. Insurance? I guess not.
I'm a veteran Rifts GM and I'd welcome a Rifts MMORPG. The gmae is awesome, has fantastical interdimensional settings, anime-style mecha, magic, demons, aliens, vampires, insane psychics, and mutants! Perhaps they should start opening a dialogue with Wizards of the Coast.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I still own 10 or 12 of their books (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and supplements, Heroes Unlimited, A slew of Robotech books, a few of their firearms source books, etc.) from when I was playing PnP RPGs back in the '80s. Can't say that I disagree with the comments about their unwieldy and overly ambitious game mechanics, but all in all I still had some pretty enjoyable Robotech and TMNT campaigns back in Jr. High once we tweaked some of the core rules. They also served as good source material for conversion to GURPS. They actually seemed to sell relatively well back in the day (not as good as the TSR products, but there seemed to be a decent amount of Palladium stock turnover at the hobby shops I frequented).
It's sad to hear that they're having financial troubles, but not all that surprising considering the downward spiral of RPGs in general over the past couple of decades. Also, as the summary states, tieing the future of your company to the N-Gage platform proved to be a very bad move for more than just Palladium I'm sure.
According to a press release, the theft was only part of the picture.
h tml
" Palladium suffered a crippling blow last year involving employee theft and embezzlement. We thought we could weather the storm, but the damage was deeper and more severe than we ever imagined.
Estimated damage and losses are at least one million dollars. It has been a struggle to stay afloat. "
This from http://www.palladiumbooks.com/press/press2006-04.
Then they could re-release all those great books / worlds to be compatable with 3rd edition AD&D thus giving us the best of both worlds. :D
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
[nt] = no text.
A well developed game system from White Wolf? Hell, I must have missed something big since the last time I played Vampire: The Masquerade (about six months ago). And don't bugger me with the latest edition's rules. They're better than V:TM's, but still lame nevertheless, hence the emphasis put on that it's a narrative game (any Vampire fanboy -the equivalent of gamers who discovered computer gaming with Quake, and there is an infestation of both specimens where I live- will use that magic buzzword profusely). My point is that White Wolf having a good market share doesn't mean that their games have balanced systems.
OTOH, the Silhouette system (e.g.: Heavy Gear) is fairly balanced, and so is the Anima one (Anima is a Spanish roleplaying game which is surprisingly good, taking into account that the last good Spanish RPG I played, Mutantes en la Sombra is from the late 80s or early 90s, with an updated edition in the late 90s), its rules resembling somewhat the Rolemaster ones but in a more manageable way. Paranoia, too, has a great game system (and it's a great game!)
About Palladium, I can't say I didn't see this coming. I never bought any of their books, but I read some and their aesthetics were okay for the mid 80s. The first impression is always important and unless you write books in braille, looking like a 2nd edition AD&D manual or a MERP one nowadays is a very bad thing.
It is a good gaming system and is awesome to play. The main reason it survived as long as it has is because it's books are way more interesting and way cheaper than D&D or the other hard back rpg games ever were or could be. I've got a LOT of the books. I got in to the system back in high school and college. It was the best system around until Vampire the Masquarade came out. Being raised on Palladium's SDC system, I get a little clueless with D&D and D20 stuff... what the heck is thaco and this junk about being automatically hit from behind if you retreat?
Yes, Palladium rules were complex, but not that complex... and as far as the long amount of time it took to play battles - it's no longer than traditional D&D stuff... and the rules are almost but not quite identical in a lot of ways - roll a d20 and add a modifier, etc. The environment for Rifts was awesome. It allowed you to do any sort of role playing, not just dark ages stuff like D&D mostly did... untl D20 modern, future, etc. came along. A lot of people compare Palladium to GURPS... it's true, they are somewhat similar.
I read a long while back a Rifts movie was in the making with Jerry Bruckheimer as Director. Hope it is still coming along, but it sounds like with the money problems it may not be.
Paper RPGs are unfortunately a dying breed... D20 was made because the company that owns D&D realized this and that they needed to make it open and rely on the open source and gaming community to keep their future somewhat stable. Unfortunately, Kevin Sembedia is a bit of jerk and has yet to allow that to happen - leaving the community to only work on stuff in the Rifters mag....
As others have said the settings were often very inventive but the actual underlying game system was just horrible. I was a big fan of Heroes Unlimited and Nightbane myself. Really enjoyed both especially Nightbane. I guess it doesn't matter to me right now though since I don't even have a gaming group since moving.
I totally agree Karma Farmer. They had money embezzled last time I checked.
Why not just send them $5-$10... The hours of gaming and reading have been fun for me but I wonder will people join together to bail out a great product before it goes the way of the dodo?
"Zonk is a fucking loser."
Considering how many people whined about that "cunnilingus on a hardwood floor" article, I'm shocked that there's so little bitching about this misleading and flamebaiting article summary.
Rob
Call of Cthulhu == Keeper
Robert Anton Wilson
I was a major Palladium fan for a very long time. The first RPG I ever played wasn't D&D, but their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG.
The real problems came when they started throwing everything including the kitchen sink into their new sourcebooks for just about every game. Rifts was really a groundbreaking and thrilling RPG until it started ranging WAY farther afield, and the world started looking like a GURPS campaign where every single published sourcebook was part of the game world. Too much confusion, WAY too many character classes. Equipment lists were pedantic, with pages upon pages of vehicles, battle armor, and such that were only slightly different from ones listed on the last 10 pages you went through. What really made this clear to me was when I was fiddling around with making a Ritfs version of Angband just as a personal project, and browsing through the books to figure out what the character classes should be, et al, was a ridiculously monumental task. I started off trying to list every class, and that text file alone ended up being a few pages long.
Then came the era, about 5 years ago, when it seemed like half of Siembada's time was spent on yelling at the people on alt-binaries.e-book.rpg. I'm not sure if any legal proceedings were ever hatched from that, but it was a good year at least of solid argument threads on these topics, with posters taunting Palladium people, and Palladium people responding with righteous indignation. It was a hoot to watch, but it pretty much decided that I'd never obtain a Palladium book ever again in any way that sent a red cent to Palladium themselves. Plenty of Rifts stuff gets dropped into used book stores, and that's fine with me. It's not like any of the new crap they've put out has been worth downloading for free, let alone actually playing with.
Palladium was the first RPG system I ever played. TMNT, Ninjas and Superspies, Robotech, and Heros Unlimited were all great games. I may have drifted from it later on in favor of non-leveled systems that I thought were more "realistic", but I've since gone back to games like d20 and HackMaster, so I'll be visiting Palladium again real soon.
I also do an RPG webcomic called Fuzzy Knights ( http://www.fuzzyknights.com/ ), and this situation moved me enough that Friday's strip is going to be about the Palladium situation. I hope I can do my bit to spread the word about this unfortunate situation and help Palladium out.
Kevin's always been in it for the love of the game, so I think those who are part of the game should give him back a little love.
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Systemically, Palladium was in the stone age. As other posters have said, Kevin Siembieda (and also Eric Wuijck, creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Ninjas and Superspies) created some truly interesting worlds, particularly RIFTS. But his games were hobbled by mechanics that closely resembled those of 1st edition AD&D (which the Palladium (fantasy) RPG was a direct rip-off of) and never really improved much. The skill system was broken, the leveling system was broken, and combat was intermitably complicated and SLOW. Palladium really hasn't made an interesting product since Mystic China.
I tried to correct this several times by converting Palladium games to other systems, first my own (which sort of vaguely resembled Ars Magica), then GURPS, and then D20. Each time when I started to gather collaborators on the 'net Maryann Siembieda would get wind of it and threaten me. Apparently she was under the impression that converting to GURPS or D20 would result in the company's trademarks being transferred to Steve Jackson/Wizards of the Coast. Of course that was nonsense, but it did scare off my collaborators.
Don't get me wrong, Kevin is a nice guy. I've met him. I just think that he (like many in the gaming business) has never really had a great handle on the "business" side of things. I still think Palladium should have gotten into the (obviously lucrative) D20 market, as I told both Kevin and Maryann. Sinking tons of money into a N-GAGE game probabyl wasn't smart either. Does anyone know if it was any good?
So I for one WELCOME Palladium Books going out of business. It probably means I won't be threatened if I try to convert RIFTS or TMNT again. If I still have any interest.
To anyone who has suggested that Palladium Books should have gone to the D20 system: open your eyes! The only D20 material that sells worth a damn anymore is Wizards of the Coast books. D20 is about the worst thing to happen to the industry. It created a huge flood of worthless material and killed off the fan base of many a solid system. Palladium Books was one of the few companies to avoid it and I give them a lot of credit for sticking with their own system. I won't try to say that their system is perfect, far from it, but of a lot of what makes a game unique is a unique rules set. If you truly believe that having one single rules set is better, than tell me, why aren't all video games FPS? Why don't all cars use the same engine? Why isn't there just one single Linux distro? Variety! Uniqueness! Where is there room for competition if everyone makes the same damn thing? D20 is a damn plague on the market. What if you hate D20? What game are you going to play now that almost everyone out their jumped ship?
From TFA:
Palladium's writers and artists have been troopers, waiting months to get paid, but their generosity is not enough.
You didn't pay people and they stole shit from you Kevin? WTF did you expect?