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Reading my Rifter #50's Chaos Earth introduction to Psychic Storm, Psychics for Chaos Earth.
Pretty good i must say. We only get two types previewed to us though. The Teke-Freak PCC is great, and extremely powerful i must say, which is great IMHO.

So Jason, how much of this book is finished ?
Cause I really want more Psychic material for Chaos Earth to use
Most to just fish up the Trio. Tech, magic, Psychic for the setting.

To be honest, my group does not want to play Technology characters in Chaos Earth for some reason. They instead want magics and psychics for characters. We have been putting off playing Chaos Earth for Years now, cause they want Chaos Earth unique psychic PCCs to use instead of Psyscape/Rifts PCCs. I can not blame them one bit though. We found the CE-core book to be kinda boring and it felt completely uncomplete as written. Rise of Magic helped cover Magics for CE, but we still wanted psychics for CE.

So WHY was Chaos Earth written to be uncomplete ?
Shouldn't have Chaos Earth did what Rifts did. Instroduce to us the most basic of the setting. Give us Tech Characters, Magic characters, psychic characters to start playing in the world right off. Then expand on the basic characters in later books, fleshing out the setting more with each book. That is what i would have done to be honest. Basics first, broad characters to play, rules, go play. Then release more later on.

Could You imagine if RIFTS had done it as Chaos Earth did, very narrow characters (NEMA), Some backstory, leave out major rules for magics, psychics, etc.. I bet RIFTS would have flopped as a rpg. Chaos Earth just feels Uncomplete to everyone i know who even knows about it IRL.

CHAOS EARTH needs a Second Edition, asap. Combining the best aspects like Rifts did years ago. Tech Users, Magic Users, Psychics. So groups can grab the mainbook, and play right off the bat characters they want to play.

We need a psionics book in any event, for CE and for Rifts!

It has long irked me the way that it seems like every other Rifts book that gets put out introduces more magic stuff, but fans of psychic characters have to live most on the table scraps from the core game book. Don't even get me started on the atrocity that was RWB13: Psyscape. Hands down it was the most disappointing book that has ever come out in the Rifts line!

I assume that CE was "incomplete" because of the fact that it focuses on NEMA, and there were very few active practitioners of magic or psychics working (openly anyway) in government. Really, people who had undergone M.O.M. enhancement made up the bulk of them, at least in America. Although I do find it odd that Lindsay Sawyer finds psionics so perplexing. According the the RSB3 Mindwerks book, the insanity caused by M.O.M. implants led to major scandal and lawsuits that nearly wiped out Mindwerks. One would think that given Sawyer's position, she would have been full aware that psychic powers were real and that they were one of the leading selling points of M.O.M technology in the first place!

Also, I would like to see something about what happened to the Lazlo Agency. Mindwerks also mentions that they still existed in the Golden Age. So what happened to them during the Great Cataclysm and afterward? My bet is that they made up the bulk of the original founders of Psyscape.

Yes alot more psychic PCCs are needed.
I liked Psyscape, ...but..., it needed more space for Psyscape itself. The City Psyscape detailed somewhat with a simple map and what can be found there.

Please! Psi-Cola got almost the same amount of page space as Psyscape - in a book that was supposed to be about Psyscape!

The rest was a lot of reprints. Seriously, did we need existing classes like the Burster and the Mind Melter, both of home are in the main game book, reprinted? They didn't reprint the Ley Line Walker, Shifter, etc...in Federation of Magic! Then there were all the monsters, some of which were not even psychic at all or had minimal psychic abilities. They were just filler. Really, the book was just a mess!

We definitely need something better!

Because the line of thought was that you can use the existing Rifts books for the missing elements. I don't agree with the reasoning, esp since it states that is a "Complete" RPG on the cover of the book.

yeppers. It was far from being a complete game.
As for Psyscape, yeah, the monsters, psi-cola, etc..wasted space.
However i liked the reprinting and updating of of the Burster and Mind Melter, and placed them in the PCC book with the other PCCs for our ease of use.
What i liked about the book was the Third-Eye opening bonuses.
But yeah, we needed more PCCs in general, more info on Psyscape itself. Less useless monsters.

Heck, i would have like to see Fantasy Mind Mages updated for Rifts. They are even badderass than Mind Melters, and i like the name better to be honest. Would have been great to see Burster-styled psychics which focused on say ... Telekinesis ... Hydrokinesis ... Electrokinesis ... Geokinesis ... just so we could have Psychic "Elemental" types.

Am I the only one to dislike the Psi-Ghosts ? Their mutant power is not even psychic in nature, its a mutant power.

Chaos Earth is an incomplete game and does need a 2nd edition. However, you don't need to wait for any supplements. Just rip stuff out of Rifts, N&SS and System Failure for whatever you want and launch the campaign.

True enough. Some of the more "crude" O.C.C's are workable in Chaos Earth. The Burster and the Zapper, for example, would be fairly natural responses to the violent supernatural environment. Nega-Psychics and Psi-Nullifiers could potentially exist as well, although the former (which has roots in Beyond the Supernatural) might require some kind of delusional insanity. The class in BTS is based on a psychic with strong denial that the supernatural exists. In Rifts that kind of denial would require insanity. Plus there are the Charismatic, Reactionary and Teke Freak classes from Rifter #50.

More "refined" classes like the Mind Melter, Psi Druid & Psi-Tech would probably take a little more time to evolve. It would be quite a leap for most people to go from psionic powers being talked about in shadowy military projects to ordinary people being able to whip up Mega Damage Psi Swords at will. Basically, classes that require a more specific understanding of psionics would take more time to evolve. For comparison, Blue Line Wizards (the ancestors of Ley Line Walkers) are considerably less advanced than their descendents will. Finally, some classes like the Psi-Warrior have canonical origins further out, in this case having been developed after the founding of Psyscape.

Speaking of which, when is the Psynex going to arrive and start calling the psychics to gather in the Ohio Valley? I've always assumed that surviving members of the Lazlo Agency would end up there (the city named after their founder is still a few centuries away). It always made sense that the psionic crusaders of Pyscape, fighting against supernatural forces, are very similar to the Lazlo Agency folks. That being the case, it may be as simple as trotting out the BTS P.C.C's and pulling out the 20th Century restrictions. For example, post-Rifts there would no longer be any doubt about their powers, and abundant PPE feeding the development of psionics. So old rules like ISP scores being low except when supernatural beings are around (pretty much all the time now!), or the "performance anxiety" of using powers in a public place would go away. Characters would just have full ISP all the time, and no longer have any special difficulties using their powers regardless of audience or venue.

I'm actually hopeing to see "rough" version of Bursters for CE. They are a natural PCC to have a very Rough PCC origin version. Kinda like the Teke Freak but fire based...

I knew everyone would like the Teke Freak. Plus, it's my favorite character class name ever. A while ago a mathematical hiccup in one of the powers was pointed out, which I'll fix, but other than that I thought the classes all came out pretty well. Still, I knew the Teke Freak would be the fan fave.


I really want it to be done as well. To me, it was a tossup between which was needed more: psychics or expanding the character base beyond NEMA, and expanding the character base won out, hence my First Responders book.

As to how much is finished, not that much. Basically just notes beyond what is in Rifter 50. I'll pick it back up once First Responders goes to press. It will mostly be classes, powers, and some tech and D-Bees thrown in to round things out.



I can't speak to why CE was presented as it was. I just have to work with what's there. So, my approach has been the opposite of Rifts. Where in Rifts you tend to have each book contain a wide cross-section of gaming material, my approach has been to write material that is focused on one particular aspect or another. This allows players and GMs to pick and choose what they want to use in their game. We've all purchased a supplement for some game or other that we wish we could have only paid for half of the pages, right? This way if you don't want to use psychics in your game, just don't pick up Psychic Storm. If you don't care about playing non-NEMA characters, don't buy First Responders. But, if those things interest you, you have a whole small, inexpensive sourcebook dedicated to the topic.

I'm sure this will happen, but not from me. I think that gamers out there are more than capable of adapting existing classes like the Burster for use in CE. If you're going to pay for a supplement, don't you want new material? Let's face the fact that 95% of all CE players and GMs out there own the Rifts RPG. You're talking about a niche setting for a relatively niche game.

Mostly I think the low-hanging fruit of redressing existing stuff is just not fun to write. Should I eventually get to write Psychic Storm, you'll see none of that. No reskinned Bursters or early versions of Psi-Stalkers or the same 30 or so psychic powers repeated. Notice how none of the Rifter 50 psychics used any powers selected from a list a la Rifts? Not even the minor psychics? That's what I'm going for.

I'd be excited to get to work on it, so email/PM/Facebook/etc. Kevin and tell him how much you're looking forward to First Responders.

This upcoming "Psychic Scream" supplement by Taylor White has a pretty similar title...
http://palladium-store.com/1001/product ... cream.html

The opening sentences are even "A storm has rolled in. A psychic storm."

Rifter 50 pg 51 credits Jason Richards though which I assume is who Technogothic is...

I'm hoping they credit you as a co-writer or at least for coming up with phrase 'psychic scream' for CE since they're using it and pretty closely adapting the title from the title of your Rifter supplement...

I forgot Rifter 50 had so much canon stuff in it, wanting to play your new psychic OCCs though. I just wish I knew the legality of using CE content in Rifts or vice versa. I don't know if you can just easily hop back and forth between this and Rifts like you might Rifts and BTS