Trivia / Rifts

• Fanwork Ban: One of the most notorious ones in the RPG industry. KS forbids people from converting RIFTS to other settings and publishing the rules anywhere, and makes legal threats against people who do publish them. (Fortunately, Palladium doesn't have the resources to follow through.)
  • Despite Palladium's apparent dislike of conversions, as of 2016, they've licensed a Savage Worlds version of Rifts.
• Schedule Slip: Palladium is very, very bad about this. As an example, World Book 12: Psyscape ended up being released after World Books 13-16, about two years after its initially announced release date, and this is on the lower end of the schedule slip scale; on the upper end there is the Lemuria World Book, meant to be a companion to Rifts Underseas; while Underseas is World Book 7 and was released c. 1994, Lemuria is World Book 32 and was released c. 2012, almost 2 decades later. And this is without considering books like Mystic Japan and Mystic Australia, which so far haven't materialized (in Japan's case the wait has been even longer than for Lemuria) and are pretty much the TTRPG equivalent of vaporware.
  • Dimension Book 9: United Worlds of Warlock was advertised and even has a cover published, but was last talked about in 2008 by the writer, who claimed that Kevin S had accepted his pitch. The book has never materialized, and instead the line went right to Dimension Book 10: Hades: Pits of Hell and then to 11 and higher without ever touching on the ninth book again.
• Technology Marches On: In the first edition of Rifts published in 1991 and taking place about 300 years in the future, the hand-held computer listed in the equipment section is described as having a "dual drive system, 150 megabytes hard drive with 4 megabytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) and uses one inch disk." Later reprints removed specific capabilities on the computers and had it state that they are simply a lot better than the ones that are used currently.
  • The Boom Gun railgun of the famous Glitterboy shoots projectiles at Mach 5, around 1700 meters per second. The Main Gun on the M1A2 Abrams has a muzzle velocity of 1,580 to 1,750 meters/second. Real Life railguns in testing have a muzzle velocity of 5700 meters per second. This is, however, much better than the performance of the weapon in the earliest editions of the game, which clocked the Boom Gun's muzzle velocity at Mach 2.
• Word of God: System creator Kevin Siembeda enjoys his ability to state what is and isn't canon. He isn't like a lot of other RPG authors who suggest the GM should do whatever they please: the books contain notes and pointers on what to do as footnotes.