Palladium has a lot of interesting features. It comes with a
campaign setting which looks fun and full of variety. The alignment
system is really great; it captures the way people act a lot better
than the AD&D system does.
The book describes about five different magic systems; they're all
pretty interesting, though most of them seem not to be very
powerful. The main one (generic RPG wizard/priest magic) looks really
well designed, and the instructions indulge in some great bashing of
the annoying AD&D magic system:
Most of my complaints have to do with the book itself rather than
the game system. The sections are organized haphazardly, as though the
book were written as hypertext and then the hypertext were
automatically traversed to create a book.
The writing style is florid, sometimes, hilariously so, as in this
masterpiece of redundancy:
And the Tonight's Episode-y:
There's a new edition of the Palladium rulebook out, which
allegedly fixes the stylistic problems; if that's so then my main
complaints would be the paucity of supplied monsters and the seeming
weakness of most of the magic systems. But no one's making you play a
diabolist.
Thu Feb 07 2002 21:44:
Another Texas-related entry. At Half Price Books in Houston, I made
quite a find: a copy of an old 1983 manual for Palladium, a
role-playing game I'd vaguely heard of. It cost $10, which is a lot
for a Half Price Book, but it was in good condition so I bought it.
Nor does the wizard forget a spell upon casting it. This is his
life, spell magic and study... To forget a spell could mena his death
and is a fairly ludicrous idea. This is his occupation, his
livelihood, he is no longer an apprentice... To suggest that he would
forget a spell is like saying a soldier might forget how to use his
sword.
"Generally, dwarves and elves treat each other with an air that is so
cold that it could freeze an iceberg."
"The assassin, like the mercenary fighter, is a sword for hire; their
specialty: death."