What a shame that all this attention goes to D&D. There are so many other good tabletop games with exquisite worldbuilding, languishing for attention... Vampire: The Masquerade, RIFTS (my personal fav)
I mean, in a casual discussion I'd frequently say that I "play D&D all the time" even though I have never in my life played Dungeons and Dragons - we usually play derivatives of DnD and other roleplaying games. But DnD is something that most people at least recognize so for me it became a generic term for roleplaying game, just like hoover became a generic term for a vacuum cleaner.
I know. I ran a campaign of RIFTs and globetrotting in that setting was awesome... But the rules were so very boring.
Palladium crashed catastrophically, sadly. There was some kind of theft problem, and then they had a disastrous Kickstarter.... Such a shame they couldn't find a way to modernize.
What was it about the rules you found to be boring? Rifts was my first RPG and I remember the rules being complicated AF but I think we all sort of accepted that as the price of entry or something
They didn't die. Kevin Siembieda sold a bunch of art prints and asked fans to buy books direct from the web store, and they got back in the black. That was 12 years ago and they're still alive.
Siembieda has a habit of going all-in on bad ideas and then blaming everyone but himself afterwards. E.G., there was interest in a Rifts video game, so he licensed a studio to make one...for the Nokia N-Gage, despite all his fans urgently telling him that it was a dumpster fire. Then when the game flopped like everything associated with the N-Gage, he announced that no one could have seen this coming and clearly video games weren't a good avenue for Palladium. More than once he's commissioned a book, talked up the author in a big way, then by the time the manuscript is half-completed he's decided to cancel the book and tell everyone that it's because the author just didn't get it.
And apparently a lot of the losses to the crooked accountant happened because Palladium had no inventory control system, so no one realized stuff was vanishing.
All of which is to say, I suspect that anyone but Siembieda wouldn't have fallen victim to that guy in the first place.
(Oh, and there was a $1.5 million Kickstarter that somehow crashed and burned with 90% of the promised materials undelivered, even though all the tooling was ready and they were actually printing books.)
They recently(ish) released vampire: the masquerade 5th edition and it’s great! Gone is the “requiem” stuff and gothic punk is back. The storyline finally continues post-ghenna too.
In the 90s these were the #2 and #3 RPGs after D&D and they're both still around and have new books released. If Rifts had evolved in the same way D&D had and Siembieda wasn't so controlling maybe it would be as big or bigger than D&D now. See comments below about why Rifts/Palladium aren't as popular as D&D.
