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Newbie rules question: is there any mechanical effect (minuses, etc.) — other than not being able to cast spells — to walking around with zero PPE? If so, can someone point me to where it’s discussed?

I'm not aware of any official penalty for having zero PPE. I would house rule that the person suffers the effects of being tired until "x%" of PPE is regained though.

The only effect is that you don't have any PPE.

Some years ago I played in a campaign that had players with a long history of playing Palldium Games dating back to the early 80's, and those players maintained that it was canon for a character who reaches 0 P.P.E. to die. I have never found a reference that supported their belief, but as one of them was the G.M. I elected not to perform an exhaustive search of all digitized Palladium products after a few quick searches turned up nothing for me.

I'm pretty sure it's just a Mandela Effect sort of thing.

A handful of other games have a similar mechanic in place where when your "source of magic" or similar mechanic hits 0, you perish. And most of those same games that also include cybernetics, they affect your source of magic, too. The biggest exaple would be Shadowrun, where if your Essence (which is lowered by implants, and affects your Magic attribute on a 1:1 ratio) drops to 0, you die outside of severely extraordinary scenarios such as being turned into a cyberzombie.

Palladium/Rifts doesn't have a mechanic like that in place. P.P.E. is just how much 'magic' you have in you, and temporarily having "none" is fine. Especially if it's just you running out of gas during the day rather than it being your permanent P.P.E. score, not that it matters much. It'd be a little silly if using up your P.P.E. to cast a spell would instantly kill you.

That was never, ever a thing in the real rules.

If you need a reference, here ya go:

Rifts 105
(under Psi-Stalkers)
To feed without killing, the predator must hunt down a psychic, pracitioner of magic, or supernatural creature, physically capture the prey, cut it, and psionically drain ALL its available PPE points. Other than the cut... [the victim] loses all PPE, a potentially dangerous situation for a magic user, but hardly life threatening.

At times, I have wanted to come up with some sort of "overcasting" system, mostly due to reading L. E. Modessit Jr.'s Order/Chaos Wars books. I haven't followed through so far, because the effects out of the novels... work well in the novels, but probably wouldn't in a game. I mean, the effects can be anything from short term unconsciousness to medium term loss of control of magic, permanent blindness, etc. Basically, they would work good for the end of a character's career when laying your all on the line to accomplish something, but would probably just result in "early retirement" otherwise.

You could get a simple version by combining the Life Source spell (allowing a caster to access more PPE than they have by taking physical HP damage) with the optional injuries table for taking HP damage. Concussions, injuries, ect. could all be a thing and easily flavored to what you like.

The real reason such mechanics are rare is because narratively they serve the purpose of allowing a character in fiction to do something that solves a problem, while also providing a cost as a reason for why they don't use this amazing ability more often, or used it sooner. The author also knows whether or not the characters going to be needed in the future.

With an RPG, it is rarely a situation where this is a useful feature. I've taken Life source with every mage I played and never used it once because with careful PPE management it shouldn't be necessary.

Yeah, I would see Life Source as an act of desperation, where you need that one final spell & you're all tapped out; no more personal PPE, no PPE stored in talismans, no PPE to draw from a TW device, no willing sacrifice to make, etc. But it's not like it gives you a lot (average mage will have maybe 20 SDC to convert to 10 PPE, & at low-level maybe another 15-20 HP for 15-20 PPE, so that's what, 25-30 PPE tops, enough for maybe one mid-level spell?).