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Front cover of Rifts Role-Playing Game, Ultimate Edition, illustrated by Scott Johnson
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| Designer(s) | Kevin Siembieda, C. J. Carella, Kevin Long, Patrick Nowak, Julius Rosenstein, et al. |
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| Publisher(s) | Palladium Books |
| Publication date | August 1990 (1st edition) August 2005 (Ultimate edition) |
| Years active | 1990–present |
| Genre(s) | Post-apocalyptic science fiction |
| Language(s) | English |
| System(s) | Megaversal |
| Website | palladiumbooks |
Rifts is a multi-genre role-playing game created by Kevin Siembieda in August 1990 and published continuously by Palladium Books since then. Rifts takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, deriving elements from cyberpunk, science fiction, fantasy, horror, western, mythology and many other genres.
Rifts serves as a cross-over environment for a variety of other Palladium games with different universes connected through "rifts" on Earth that lead to different spaces, times, and realities that Palladium calls the "Rifts Megaverse". Rifts describes itself as an "advanced" role-playing game and not an introduction for those new to the concept.
Palladium continues to publish books for the Rifts series, with about 80 books published between 1990 and 2011. Rifts Ultimate Edition was released in August 2005 and designed to update the game with Palladium's incremental changes to its system, changes in the game world, and additional information and character types. The web site is quick to point out that this is not a second edition but an improvement and expansion of the original role playing game.
The RPG had the tentative title Boomers, named after the original name for the Glitter Boy power armor until Kevin Siembieda changed the name after finding out it was in use for Bubblegum Crisis.
The foundations for the Rifts world were originally developed in the Palladium game Beyond the Supernatural (first released in 1987), which uses Lovecraftian storytelling techniques for a role-playing experience based on horror fiction.
The Rifts world is Earth, but hundreds of years into the future. Ley lines, lines of magic energy, criss-cross the earth forming supernatural geographic areas such as the Bermuda Triangle. Points where Ley Lines intersect, called a nexus, are places of powerful magic, such as the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge. If a Ley Line nexus grows strong, the very fabric of space and time can be torn, creating a rift, or a hole in space-time leading to another place, time, or a new/parallel dimension. Ley Lines are normally invisible, but in the magic-saturated world of Rifts Earth, they become visible at night as massive bands of blue-white energy half a mile wide in some places, and stretching for many miles. When extremely strong, Ley Lines can be seen during the day.
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