Rifts Magic Items

[ZetaRidley]

Hey all, do any of the books describe magic items? I know that England book has some from glancing at my copy, is there any other books that have magic items for Rifts?

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

just straight up "magic items" are pretty rare and few and far between. (Like, D&D or Palladium-Fantasy style "its just enchanted and is magic")

Techno Wizard items abound; Federation of Magic, Arzno, Merc Ops, SA 1&2, CS Navy, and the two Dino Swamp books all have decent amounts of TW items. (Book of Magic has all the ones published prior to its publishing in it). There are a few other TW items scattered across lots of books, but usually just one or two per book (Black Market has a few TW power armors, Canada has a few TW Bionics, etc).

Atlantis has lots of Bio-wizard magic items and Rune Weapons (which are the king daddies of magic weapons), Lemuria has lots of Biomancy items, and the various Phase World/Three Galaxies books have a lot of highly advanced TW items (far ahead of Rifts Earth they basically just look and act like regular technological items but are powered by PPE/Magic). Madhaven has a selection of TW magic items that are unique to the Mystic Knights of the White Rose.

But if you're looking for "its just an enchanted weapon that does X damage and/or has +y to hit and damage", or items that just have spells in them you can cast a certain number of times per day... those are pretty rare.

The Mystic Kuznya from Mystic Russia can make enchanted weapons and armor.... and there are a few sources of unique-ish magic items, but they are all usually "the GM will make up stats".

[ShadowLogan]

Hey all, do any of the books describe magic items? I know that England book has some from glancing at my copy, is there any other books that have magic items for Rifts?

Well what do you consider "Magic Items"?

Rifts Book of Magic compiles a lot of stuff into one place, though there are still gaps in coverage (post BoM printing, NPC unique items, etc). Assuming you don't want Techno-Wizardry or its like (Eco-Wizardry):
-Rifts WB8 Japan has some magic items (some are Rune, some are TW types)
-WB20 Cananda and WB15 Spirit West have more conventional magic items
-Necomancy magic has several magic items that can be created (found easily in BoM, the list is combined from WB5 Africa and WB19 Mystic Russia)
-Biomancy in WB6 has magic items
-several monster races have magic items associated with them scattered across various books.

One of the best places to probably find "magic items" is to review various NPCs equipment listing. Ex. SoT4 describes 4 magic items and 2 magic weapons for Lord Coake. IIRC SoT6 and Mercenaries and MercOps SBs, WB14, SB3 and/or SB4 have other NPC examples like this with magic items.

[Mlp7029]

Rifts® Adventure Sourcebook 3: The Black Vault™ has quite a few magic items.

[Nekira Sudacne]

Yea. Magic Items do exist scattered around here and there, but Techno-Wizards are one of Rift's primary gimmicks and while Magitech is somewhat more common in fantasy tropes nowadays it's still one of Rifts primary draws, the fact that it is so easy and broad and even a first level character can build some truely fantastical devises. ((The only thing stopping a level 1 player Technowizard from making a machine gun that shoots 30 Spheres of Annilation a second is the GM, they don't even need to learn the spell themselves, just get someone who does to help)).

Sinse TW stuff is one of Rifts main attractions, it stands to reason that Palladium highlights TW items over other magic options in routine course. To the extent that other magic items exist, it's mostly in the form of giving stats to some traditional magic legends and practices of various revived ancient cultures like the Japanese magic items or the druid magic items. Another one of Palladium's Gimmicks.

The only kind of Vanilla magic items given any kind of real prominence in Rifts is Rune Magic, which is again, not unique but is iconic to Palladium in the variety of such items discribed in the books, the detail of locations where they might be purchased or aquired, and very often woven into the lore of the setting itself, making such items seem both rare and legendary and yet still within reach for an ambitious party to aquire with some work. Heck, a few OCC's can legally start with minor ones.

tl:dr - Magic items are so rare because Palladium does better promoting TW's as one of it's primary draws, They can make high end gear for a lot cheeper than book price, and to the extent other forms of magic items exist, they're in service to promoting secondary gimmicks.