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?

Re:Palladium

[HunterZ]

Same here. First pen-and-paper RPG I played was Heroes Unlimited. I found their rule system impossible to grasp as a first RPG, however, and even more frustrating was that they simply copied-and-pasted the core rules into every book they published, instead of revising them to be more coherent with each new book. Even better would have been to publish an independent core rule manual that would be required as a base for use with the individual setting books (Robotech, Rifts, TMNT, etc.), which they then could have revised over time.

Alternatively, they could/should have jumped on the d20 system when it became popular.

Rifts

[labcoat]

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.

Palladium...

[aapold]

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...

Re:Palladium

[jeffasselin]

ICE (http://www.ironcrown.com/ [ironcrown.com]), makers of the Rolemaster system, started understanding this a while ago and have been selling PDF versions of their books online, with great success from what I've seen. I've bought a few myself.

The first "real" RPG I ever played was Palladium's RIFTS and Palladium worlds, I had most of their books. I agree that the system was somewhat unyieldy mostly due to the lack of clear-cut classifications and categories. Rolemaster is a lot more complex, yet has an inherent structure and standards applied throughout the system that make it elegant.

Re:Palladium lawsuit-happy prehistory.

[Martin Blank]

They still are like this. They have a good crew, and the writing overall is good (though everytime I bought a book I felt like getting a red pen to tag all of the errors and sending it to them for corrections in the next printing), but Kevin's insistence on keeping 100% control over everything really hurt. Want to make a character generator? Sorry. Can't do that. Want to mention core characters (Erin Tarn, Emperor Prosek, etc)? You're treading a fine line. Want to even discuss a method to port to another system (D20, GURPS, Interlock)? Expect a nasty letter. Meanwhile, the one character generator that they did release was crappy and limited (based on Microsoft Access), and while they did eventually kick it out to the public, releasing new files for it was a risky business at best, IIRC. Their website has always been a storefront, with token game support at best.

The Palladium combat system was his baby, and it worked well enough in the SDC/AR days, but when it came to MDC, it started to lose something. (Mind you, I continued playing Rifts up until a couple of years ago, when player schedules just got too inconsistent, but it was hard to run a game and keep it balanced and fun.) But he couldn't let it go and modernize the system. It took more than a decade just to get a "final" and unified set of combat rules out the door.

If it comes to it, Palladium will need to do what Talsorian Games did -- pack everything into boxes, rent some storage/warehouse space, and continue as a mom and pop shop until they can get something better together. There's no sense, in my mind, of Kevin sacrificing everything he owns in order to stave off what may be inevitable. I realize that this has been his dream for the better part of three decades, but it doesn't often make sense to have a dream kill you.

Re:Palladium

[cpt kangarooski]

The first RPG I played seriously was some early version of D&D. All we had was 3d or 4th generation xeroxes of about half of a couple of the books, so we added our own ideas and rules as needed, and played in a very freeform style. Eventually, though, I got into Palladium Robotech, and a couple of years later, GURPS. I've pretty much stuck with GURPS since then, though I still really haven't bothered with 4th ed. The 3d ed. works well enough if you trim out some of the slower rules (I hate combat in any system, since it just slows things down and is a lot of boring dice rolls; combat, when it happens, should be fast fast fast), avoid areas where it's weak (GURPS Cyberpunk is a joke), and I have a lot of the setting books for it already.

Haven't played Rolemaster. I'll have to look into it in my copious free time. Hopefully the PDFs are cheap, given the very low marginal cost.

Re:Don't Harsh on KSiembieda

[Bieeanda]

Okay, I'll harsh on him for being a martinet, an incorrigible asshole, and being absolutely unsuited to the industry that he's been a limpet on for years.

Take a good look at the core rules-- you know, the ones that change with every book, despite the claims that all of them use the same rulebase. Compare it to the D&D rewrites that you did when you were fifteen (everyone did it, so don't deny it). Notice any similarities? How about the sidelong rants about 'neutral alignments are stupid!' or the two page rant about people complaining that the obtuse magic system in the Federation of Magic sourcebook.

Consider multiple reports from people that have had the misfortune of working with or under KS: he can't take criticism and simply cannot abide the idea that someone has done something better than he has. Just look at the insane rants that preface half the Palladium library, and spatter the rest like gobbets of Elder Geek spit.

And last but not least, let's take a long, hard look at his idiotic attempts to go multimedia. Long, long ago, there was a piece of software that purported to be a RIFTS game master's assistant. It was officially sanctioned, praised and all the rest... and was a godawful pile of dung. It was entirely possible to accidentally remove entries for equipment, spells or the like from the program's internal database... but utterly impossible to actually add new data. The interface was abysmal, and support was nonexistent from the coders or from Palladium; inquiries regarding fan-patches were rebuffed very coldly. And now, look at this: a video game, on the Ngage. The platform was dead in the water from the beginning, and they still went ahead with development. Did Siembieda expect the RIFTS name to draw the thousands that still buy his cut and paste crap out of their basements and out to their local cellular stores, to buy a shitty title and an even worse device to run it on?

So now he's resorted to 'buy my prints!' Not that he had anything to do with the prints, unless he's returned to awkwardly aping Kevin Long's art style. Why doesn't he just do what he usually does, and copy and paste whole sections of rulebooks into new source, instead?

Re:Bad Things about Paladium Products.

[tatonca]

If your trying to look cool buying RPG, your going to have to try a lot harder, no matter how nicely illustrated the book's cover is...

I grew up role playing with TMNT - the rules were pretty complicated to the point that we had no idea what we were doing. In one instance we had characters where the stat bonuses were added directly to the stat to acheive some ugly numbers (80 STR on a first lvl character!!) But we figured out enough to make characters, resolve conflicts, use skills and have fun. The campaigns were vast and highly detailed, because coming across source material was fairly sketchy and we were left to our own devices. This isn't a negative - the rulebooks gave you a framework from which to evolve, leaving limitless possibilities. I came away a much better player and GM learning to rely on myself as interpretter and creative designer than by being a slave to the 800 book library that is DnD. I also was way more likely to embrace other types and genres of games than my strictly DnD compatriots. All in all it is a phase of my life I look back on fondly, and I credit those beginnings for the number of RP awards myself and my gaming crew won over the years at DnD tourneys in our area...

Personally I have found that the Paladium games had more intrinsically in common with modern d20 games than even the originally DnD. All joking aside, main stream gamers obviously require a little glitz to get them out of their comfort zone. I would like to see them embrace d20 completely and reissue the games with a beefed up marketing plan - add some hardcovers and pretty pictures for the easily distracted. That's what will save the company if indeed it needs saving. I own almost all the games and and most source material. I've gone through 3 copies of TMNT and Heroes Unlimited myself. I'd pay for some hardcover books to put up beside my 800 DnD books...

In the meantime, I'll pay 50$ to keep them around a little longer...