Your favorite Palladium RPG!

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jdrakeh

jdrakeh

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There are a lot of threads dedicated to kvetching about Palladium products. This is not such a thread! Instead, let us talk about our favorite Palladium RPGs here. I'll start!

My favorite Palladium RPG is Valley of the Pharaohs. It's simple, compact, and displays the Palladium house system in its purest form. It's a complete RPG in less than 50 pages, plus it covers a time period that isn't very common in RPGs.

I looooove this game.

I've run it out of the box and hacked it to run a basic medieval fantasy game (I like Palladium Fantasy, too, but sometimes you want something light). It is, for me, the most straightforward presentation of the Palladium system (that said, it still doesn't actually tell you how to use skills).

So, what's your favorite Palladium RPG?
 
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RIFTS. I do like kitchen sink settings. We had some fun with Robotech, and I would have liked to try a game of TMNT or Ninjas and Superspies as well but we never got to them.
 
RIFTS, of course ! Even if I do not like the direction where Siembieda went with the Tolkeen War. I am also partial to Nightbane.
 
- Palladium Fantasy 1st edition. Before it changed to an SDC system and the spellsystem changed.
- We had tons of fun playing TMNT and Heroes Unlimited.
- I think I was the go-to guy when Rifts was concerned, and I admit owning a lot of books for it.
 
I willl admit to a fondness for Rifts played out of the limited edition hardcover (the black leatherette one with the silver foil) and with Vampire Kingodms and Spirit West.
 
Rifts!!
Great concept to allow players to just go nuts. I never had a problem with the game imbalance. I liked that the players ranged from a vagabond, juicer, roque scientist, and demigod. LOL Some of the best roleplaying I've been a part of.

I also like MDC vs. SDC. I would always describe the effect missed shots had on the environment. A MDC pistol shoot-out could end in "The forest is completely engulfed in fire, now. Trees are crashing all around you!"
 
Robotech for setting reasons, though I never liked the Palladium system.
 
I spent hours making characters for TMNT, though I suspect that rifts is my favorite. Of course, I was a proponent for combining things - mutant weasel juicers in cyclone armor and what not.
 
TMNT was the only Palladium Rpg that I had any real exposure to. I enjoyed reading it and thought about running it back in the 80s, but it never happened. I'm not sure if I'd have the same appreciation for it now that I did 33 years ago.
 
I'd go with a tie between TMNT/HU and PFPRPG. Please note that TMNT and HU were always different books for the same game in my mind, so I can't really separate them. PFRPG is probably the better game, but TMNT and HU were just so much fun when I was at the age where rolling up characters for my RPGs was a fun activity all on its own.
 
Another tossup between TMNT and Fantasy 1e. Both spoke to me as a teenager in a way few other games managed.
 
TMNT plus Ninjas & Superspies. It can almost be said that my biggest hope for any new RPG is for it to be a better TMNT plus Ninjas & Superspies. Somehow for me Street Fighter at least gets somewhere in the zone, but nothing has quite made it all of the way there.
 
Palladium Fantasy 1E, Rifts, TMNT, and Dead Reign. Beyond the Supernatural would be listed when they finish it.
 
Mechanoids HomeWorld.
 
I'm with Baulterstone. TMNT and HU were in my mind part of the same thing, and were both awesome! The comic TMNT had supers in their universe, and I used HU for that.
 
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Also, the Heroes Unlimited GM Guide has a lot of good material in it as well even if you aren't playing HU. Mystic China is a fun sourcebook for N&SS. HU and N&SS go together like chocolate and peanut butter. If Valley of the Pharaohs were in print I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
 
Rifts is a game I have a lot of history with and probably takes the cake. It is also the only Palladium game I have ever played.

Ninjas & Superspies is my favorite game, Palladium or otherwise, that I've never played. I will run it. Eventually. Any time now.

Nightbane looks like a ton of fun — I wonder what WW-esque urban fantasy with the crazy old Palladium engine would look like! Such great art, too.

Heroes Unlimited... you know, I think this game would get laughed out of at least two of the three groups that I've gamed with. But I have long been tempted to get it, and run it, warts and all, and see how it turns out.
 
Isn't Valley of the Pharohs a free PDF from Palladium these days? I swear he was giving it away at one point.
 
The Butcher said:
Ninjas & Superspies is my favorite game, Palladium or otherwise, that I've never played. I will run it. Eventually. Any time now.
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And you will have a blast! Palladium combat and the martial arts you can give your characters make it a lot of fun back-and-forth. I would love to play it more. I like to pair it with Mystic China and play old-style Chinese martial arts action, the kind where one school of kung fu insults another and kills their master and the insulted students must get revenge and prove their style is superior!

The Butcher said:
Heroes Unlimited... you know, I think this game would get laughed out of at least two of the three groups that I've gamed with. But I have long been tempted to get it, and run it, warts and all, and see how it turns out.
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Also a fun game as long as everyone is on board with the quirks that make it what it is!
 
Dumarest said:
And you will have a blast! Palladium combat and the martial arts you can give your characters make it a lot of fun back-and-forth. I would love to play it more. I like to pair it with Mystic China and play old-style Chinese martial arts action, the kind where one school of kung fu insults another and kills their master and the insulted students must get revenge and prove their style is superior!
Click to expand...

The campaign I want to run with it is Bloodsport meets Casino Royale meets Street Fighter II.
 
Bunch said:
Isn't Valley of the Pharohs a free PDF from Palladium these days? I swear he was giving it away at one point.
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He was giving it away at one point. Now he's selling it on RPGNow.
 
I fondly remember TMNT but would need to revisit it today. Love the wacko setting of Rifts. Never got into Robotech although I loved the cartoon, from what I saw in the RPG club at my high school they approached it strictly as a minis wargame.
 
K_Peterson said:
TMNT was the only Palladium Rpg that I had any real exposure to. I enjoyed reading it and thought about running it back in the 80s, but it never happened. I'm not sure if I'd have the same appreciation for it now that I did 33 years ago.
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My answer, almost verbatim.
 
Nightbane/spawn A dream RPG of mine would be to see this setting re-released using the Witchcraft rules.
 
K_Peterson said:
TMNT was the only Palladium Rpg that I had any real exposure to. I enjoyed reading it and thought about running it back in the 80s, but it never happened. I'm not sure if I'd have the same appreciation for it now that I did 33 years ago.
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You probably would. You don't really notice what's wrong until you try to run it and notice that rules you need do not exist.

TMNT is hands down my favorite. I'm still dying to make it work-- with HU and NS.
 
Put me for Mechanoid Invasion Book III Homeworld. Great, tight, open ended little game.
 
Heroes unlimited with ninjas and superspies is my combination. Prefer sdc, and although I like rifts, I don't like being beholden to a published setting. At less than a dozen books its niether too tiny nor too dense for my taste.
 
RIFTS, though it's almost unfair to compare it to the other games.

Palladium Fantasy 2E or 1E Revised I dig almost equally, with a slight edge towards 2E. Robotech and Dead Reign for how well the Megaversal system is explained. After the Bomb, Ninjas & Superspies, Systems Failure, Nightbane, Splicers, and Beyond the Supernatural, for the ideas and setting.

Too much good stuff from those guys. I could play 20 lifetimes using the Palladium section on my shelf alone.
 
K_Peterson said:
TMNT was the only Palladium Rpg that I had any real exposure to. I enjoyed reading it and thought about running it back in the 80s, but it never happened. I'm not sure if I'd have the same appreciation for it now that I did 33 years ago.
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I did really enjoy TMNT in the mid-late 90s. Tried to get back into it a few years ago and it didn’t click for me, but it was easily my favorite Palladium RPG.
 
I'm not sure I could play TMNT again either. I had fun playing it, but even then there were things that bothered me. It had the classic problem when you mix classes and skills of beginning characters being bad about just everything, even within what should be their main shtick. I remember having a ninja tiger character with a 45% Stealth skill. That made it real hard to act like a ninja.

I don't remember it being the same kind of issue in Palladium Fantasy though.
 
I ran TMNT once for more than a dozen people, including character generation. that was stupid of me :smile: I was pretty passionate about it though.

it's one of those games that definitely could use a reboot.
I'd prefer it in another system. there is a cortex plus hack called The Breed in the Hacker's Guide. I'd probably do it a touch different, but it's a good choice.
 
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