News — Palladium

Ah, what can I say about Palladium Books Ninjas & Superspies? Well, that in a broken system like Palladium, it is still pretty freaking cool to get all kinds of special combat training, and the book is simply chock full of them. I played this a lot back in my late high school and early college run, along with TMNT, and I still get a ‘kick’ out of taking a look at it from time to time.Still, the artwork in the book never really did it for me. Sure, there is a piece by Kevin Long, which always adds some...

I love Robotech, plain and simple, but there is certainly a special place in my heart for the 2nd Robotech War, or Southern Cross.  Now certainly this isn’t because it is the ‘best’ of the Robotech series, and arguably it is the weakest of the three [or four if you count Sentinels] but I love Southern Cross because it was my first Robotech campaign that I got to run as Gamemaster. My old DM Mark ran both Macross and Invid Invasion, but this one was all for me, and I took great pride in making it something special.  In fact,...

In 1985 Kevin Siembieda was still relatively new to the RPG field, but he still had the vision to begin licensing various IP such as Robotech, and to a lesser impact, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The brainchild of Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman had become something of an underground comic sensation by this period, but it would take a couple more years until it exploded into the mass market success we still consider it today, so Siembieda managed to wrangle a license to produce the RPG with his standard Palladium mechanic. Now I know that mechanic is tired, and old,...

There is no shame in my admission that I have an unabashed love of Robotech.  I love the animation, I love the RPG, I love the fiction, and heck, I even love the toys!  Still, the Robotech RPG has to be one of the most impactful pieces of gaming literature I’ve ever used in my years as both a player and a DM. Released as a licensed product by Palladium in 1986, Book One: Macross was something that jumped off the gaming store shelves as an opportunity for something completely different; that being a quickly resolved mecha combat rules set....

In 1996 Palladium’s real bread and butter had stopped being Robotech and its fantasy RPG and turned into Rifts.  By the mid-90s the company had produced ten Rifts supplements in the line, the tenth being The Juicer Uprising and I have to say I was pretty taken with it.  Not necessarily because of the broken game mechanic that were Juicers, but the fact that the book itself was a very fine piece of artistic creation. Written by C.J Carella, the Juicer history involved in the supplement is strong, and even with the horrors that are inherent to the Palladium system...