Rifts Never Asked to Be Balanced. Palladium Agreed.
Mr. Tall, Chrome, and Weaponized is back and better than ever. Palladium is celebrating 45 years and they’re giving us one hell of a treat. The Glitter Boy Codex. For those of you who aren’t familiar, if you like guns, power armor, America, or shiny things—you’ll love Glitter Boys. That’s right, they’re about to get their own 128-page sourcebook.
For the uninitiated, Rifts is Palladium Books’ gloriously over-the-top science-fantasy role-playing game, where magic, technology, monsters, dimensional travelers, and post-apocalyptic civilizations collide. Just imagine SAC pilots and Top Gun aviators engineered the perfect baby and gave it a nuclear-powered suit of power armor with a rail gun on their 16th birthday.
Tabletop RPGs and I go way back (like Metallica’s Black Album back). But Rifts was the only one I played and never GM’d. I wanted to maintain the wonder.
Rifts’ complexity, granularity, options, and disregard for conventional notions of game balance were as much a part of the attraction as was the game world itself. It didn’t ask whether a gunslinger, a dragon, and a walking rail-gun platform belonged in the same adventuring party. Palladium just gave you the tools and let you figure it out.
That creative attitude has always defined Palladium Books.
While Dungeons & Dragons has marched through more editions than they’ve had numbers for, Palladium has largely continued doing what Palladium does. There have been revisions, yes, but it has never seemed particularly interested in becoming somebody else’s idea of what a role-playing game should be.
Kevin Siembieda and crew have spent more than four decades creating worlds, artwork, and games with soul. Trends have come and gone. Palladium remains.
The Codex promises new Glitter Boy history, legendary suits, famous pilots, weapons, modifications, and adventures—the kind of unapologetic excess that makes Rifts, well, Rifts.
A good-looking sourcebook and a little nostalgia might not deserve your money on their own. But creators who spend decades building imaginative worlds on their own terms are worth keeping around—and rewarding.
In all my years of playing Rifts, I’ve never played a Glitter Boy. But I was sure as hell backer #25 for the Codex.
Palladium is the kind of creative company that deserves support for what they've already given us and what is yet to come.
If you’ve been waiting for a reason to return to Rifts or you just love chrome—click the link below. Back the Glitter Boy Codex on BackerKit.
Explore and support: Rifts Glitter Boy Codex on BackerKit • Palladium Books
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