These words in somber color I beheld
I finished Rifts: Deception’s Web by Adam Chilson today. The only good thing I can say about it is that it was marginally less excruciatingly terrible than the previous book in the series. In fact, that’s all I really want to say about it, and instead I am going to write a little bit about its setting, the Rifts universe.
I bought these books because I enjoyed, in my school days, playing the role-playing game they’re based on, Rifts. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a pretty immature RPG (as these things go), but it had an interesting and fairly unique back story, and lots of fun guide books to read and collect, and so I enjoyed it. I won’t apologize for that.
The story is that, at some point in the past (our future), there was a war, leading to a massive, unilateral nuclear assault. 90% of the world’s population was killed in just minutes. This just happened to happen at a time of great celestial alignment (or something), and so all of the spirits of the dead at that moment funneled into the ley lines (zones of mystical energy) that gird the planet. Usually these lines are just areas of slightly increased magical energy, and where they meet are only slightly more powerful. However, all of the magical energy of the spirits rushing into them causes them to flare hugely, pouring cast amounts of magical energy into the world. At the nexuses, the magical energy is sufficient to tear holes in reality, letting beings from other dimensions through and onto Earth. These are called rifts.
The RPG (and the books) take place about 200 years “post-rifts”, so things have settled down a bit since the tumultuous events. What they get from this setting is a really interesting melange of different genres — there’s futuristic weaponry, robots, vehicles and powered armor. There are mutants, psychics, aliens and being from other dimensions. There’s magic, wizards, witches, dragons, orcs and all the other things you’d expect in a fantasy setting. The great difference in setting also allowed for some varied genre concepts — there are giant cities run by totalitarian governments, small farmsteads living in a lush and magical realm and blasted desertscapes where people fight tooth and nail just for water to survive.
Anyways, this Chilson clown uses all of these settings, he just does so incredibly poorly. My book now is called Close Encounters of the Third Kind Diary, by Bob Balaban. It’s great.
I didn’t make the connection before. I almost played that game in high school, but didn’t get around to it.
Was the second book shorter? Based on what I’ve heard, that would be enough to make it better.
The second book was better for two reasons:
1) It was shorter.
ii) The cover didn’t fall off while I was reading it.
Yeah, the setting wasn’t bad. Pity they saddled it with such an awful, awkward RPG system.
All through middle and high school, me and my friends played various Palladium role playing games (mostly TMNT and Heros Unlimited) and we figured out a few things we could change around to make the combat system a lot more reasonable.
Anyways, it’s more about the story than the dice rolling.