Hi internet. How are you? Yeah, I know it’s been a while. Yup, been pretty busy, too. I’ll tell you what, I’ll try and make up for it. You that nifty PDF-fillable character sheet I put out a few years ago? Yeah, that one! Well guess what? I just put them back online. And just to be super nice, I even left the URL the same, just in case you had it bookmarked. Okay, yeah, I was hoping it’d make a difference for Google. Yeah I got that. Thanks.

Anyway, head on over to the new Megaverse Online project site (Rifters is now a Multisite WordPress installation) and check out the Downloads section. Your feedback is very much appreciated as I’d like to get everything tidied up before moving on to the next phase of the project.

I’ve always thought of Palladium RPGs as two different games within the system: the game you play in combat and the game you play when you aren’t. To help speed up combat and to facilitate switching between the two modes, I have basic information repeated (automatically when you fill it out in a PDF viewer) along the top above the line, outlined in red below:

Once you get how to use the sheet, I find it greatly speeds up combat, especially since along the top it also includes some quick calculations and attribute-based bonuses. I purposely did this so in those cases where you lose your attribute bonuses, you don’t have to figure out what to deduct. Again, I know it’s not for everyone but I’d love to see if I can make it more useful and bring some of the calculations and fields up-to-date, so please, comment away.

Uh, what happened to ______ ?

Yes, we know we’ve been down for almost a full week now and yes, I know we’ve got clear signs of this being a brand-new installation. We’re also keenly aware of the fact that all of our old posts, groups and even members are gone… really, we can’t miss it, so you can stop pointing it out now. It’s quite painful. Now, we would love to get all of that back, particularly because we had a good start on a great site with almost 300 Palladium Books (mostly Rifts) enthusiasts, the bulk of which were signed up through Facebook.

But thanks to our old system, the Facebook interface gave us nothing (that’s right, JomSocial, NOTHING) from Facebook that would even allow us to reach out and try to let these members know we were moving. So for now…

Out with the Old…

Some of you have been with us since pretty much the beginning. If you’re one of the faithful, you know there’s been a lot of change over the past couple of years. First, with a feverish pace we threw out a ton of features on our first incarnation of the site as we went from forums, to groups, to online gaming rooms, to video chat, to… JomSocial. And then our decline began.

Don’t get me wrong, JomSocial is a great system for the right community. Just not for us. Ever. JomSocial did a lot of things great in that it unified all of these neat social thingies we wanted into one system, but unfortunately it did none of them the way we wanted and did them all by themselves. As we dumped money into more addins and more features, our users got bored because one thing wasn’t happening anymore: people weren’t using it because the social elements felt very separate from the rest of the site. The blogs went unwritten. The forums all but dried up. The groups withered away… even if they were so nicely integrated into our private messaging system.

In with the two (point ‘o’)

Now enter buddypress. buddypress is a great platform all by itself for social networking, but Rifters can’t just be about online interactions, something we learned painfully on our previous Joomla/JomSocial platform. The point of Rifters in the first place was to help drive excitement for Palladium Books titles for the old fans and introduce a new generation of role-players to the infinite possibilities of the Megaverse®.

Our new strategy is simple: let’s get players together, either online or in town. How? First we’ll start with getting you a site that [gasp] has some good content. Next, get a few people talking. Now, we have absolutely no desire whatsoever to attempt to replace the Forums of the Megaverse® over at palladiumbooks.com. We love ‘em! Bless them that they’re stuck in 1992 technology, but you can’t beat the place for chatting it up with the Palladium faithful the world over.

But that’s just it: we need to do more than chat, players (and I suppose we can include you filthy, low-life, corrupt GMs as well), we need to play! Sorry, but post-gaming S-U-C-K-S. Real-time chat rooms are barely tolerable and we only do it because we’re all far more busy than in the days of yesteryear when Mom & Dad paid the bills and cleaned up after our all-night, Dorito-filled, Mountain Dew-fueled geek fests. So talk to people close by. If you’re going to game online, then let’s set something up here. Chatrooms are an okay start, but we have big plans for our new Rifters. Can’t give too much away at this point, but we’d love to have you along for the ride.

So pull up a sweat-stained chair, dust the nacho-cheese flavor from your fingertips and let’s help make Rifts™ and the rest of the Megaverse® a far more common place to game.

In the mean time, level up your user here at Rifters. By starting a group, a conversation or by inviting your gaming buddies, you’ll earn XP (that soon you’ll be able to spend like cash). Join today!