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So, someone on another forum disliked that there was a deemphasis on playing Coalition troops in SR. My suggestion was to use the MARS classes to emulate Coalition troops, adding a Vow while giving them access to sweet CS gear.

Anyone have other suggestions?

My suggestion is: don't play CS troops. The Coalition is a fascist government that willingly embraces Nazi iconography and pursues a genocidal agenda. They shouldn't be player character fodder.

If you want to play a former Coalition soldier who's seen the error of his ways and is trying to redeem himself, then I'd recommend a MARS package and allow them to replace their starting gear with damaged or repurposed CS gear.

It's quite possible to tell compelling stories about sympathetic characters in service to a horrific regime. Watch Das Boot sometime if you don't believe me.

That said, it's essentially master-level storytelling at that point--and eventually, the characters should be forced to confront the evil that they are in service to, and make decisions accordingly. It absolutely should NOT be a happy-go-lucky "kill all the monsters and let the gods sort them out, then kill the gods too" campaign.

Hey, I agree. But, well, for those who just gotta get their SS on...



'Bout what I thought.

Almost none (less than .005% likely) of the CS citzens could tell you what a nazi was let alone what ww2 was or why and who went to war. The idea that earth is for humans is a distant ideology to, earth is for white christians.
Personally im so pro 2nd amendment I think your average citzen should be able to buy law rocket launcher at walmart for a labor day sale with no paperwork. But if your not on that level the idea of being anti-magic makes sense. A spell caster can be naked and throw the equivalent of a nuke out of thin air, while his demonic side kick irons his pants.

The cs feeds and clothes more people than any other group in the world, kills more xixtinics (im surely misspelling that), more truely evil demons ect. Than anyone else.
The CS at its leadership is fascist, the common trooper and citzen is a product of enviroment and upbringing and even then mostly good people.
To want to play as the not broke, largest military soldiers in the game makes alot of sense. To be able to actually call in back up or an airstrike is not strange. People have played rifts games as splugorth forces, blood thirsty mercs, thirsty-er vampires, TGE forces (a group far more evil than the CS).....and it goes on like that.
Its RIFTS you should play as the villians now and then, being the forces of ultra goodness and light is repetitive, and morally choosing to NOT blow up the orphanage is the easy choice.
That why RIFTS give you the classes for the bright, gray, and dark.....(fallen cosmo knights anyone?)
Id do M.A.R.S. with a pre-set skill/mos with human psi-stalkers only. Forced gear allotment too. Re-roll any magic stuff on the hero charts.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I am really tired of the goody two-shoes slant that SR has, but that is just my opinion.

P.S. I hate the Tomorrow Legion.

Its bad enough some think Nazis own the square swastika even though the Hakenzkreuz is rotated 45 degrees as a diamond, but do we really let them own the death's head? Own the bones that guard our minds?

Americans who fought Nazis in WW2 also used skulls. The 1952 film Ivanhoe had the eponymous hero during the tournament don the death's head when he jousted 4 of Prince John's knights. If the US was able to use this emblem during and immediately after Nazi Germany and make it their own, I don't accept that a group centuries later using it is necessarily celebrating Hitler's views. Carol Black stands as evidence to contrast.

Rifts Main Book, page 191



I mean, it's blatantly stated. Has been since the beginning of the setting. Unless you accuse Erin Tarn of making up the quotation, it's not even down to her interpretation of his actions (she makes that in the previous paragraph, and uses this quote to bolster her assertion). "Karl Prosek admires Hitler, and sees Hitler's mistakes as not being patient enough." He's not a white supremacist, but he is a human supremacist, using similar methods to attack other sophonts... he's just defined the "subhuman" as the "non-human"... non-persons are anyone who isn't human, instead of black or Jewish or other.

I'll go why play the CS in a bit, but for those who might be inclined, I offer this.

Very nice stuff. I have a dumb question: What's the difference between the helmets for the Tech Specialist and NCO?

This is why I love Chaos Earth. It's the Coalition perspective - the apocalypse is upon us and we must save humanity from the demons! In CE, there isn't whining about "what about the dee-bees?" since they are inhuman monsters and the PCs are holding the line with maximum firepower.

There is no reason you can't run a Coalition campaign with Savage Rifts.

It's just about the perspective of the PCs. You can easily do Tolkeen vs. Coalition with Tolkeen as the evil nightmare that must be stopped.

http://savagerifts.com/sr/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=285

I play in an all CS PBP game

I just wanted to clarify that link is to a bunch of custom made M.A.R.S. packages for various CS soldier roles our GM came up with.

this is a good idea for Savage Rifts.

This is a dead link now. Do you have it posted anywhere else?

The link is dead because the that's the old forums, which had to be relocated (I think it was because the old server went down, or something along those lines at the very least). The site can be found here at http://savagerifts.com/sr/, with the rules to play a CS soldier for the only CS group (of which I am a player) here at http://savagerifts.com/sr/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=285. (Make note that these characters are MEANT to be underpowered because the story we are involved in is an origins story, where every advance is given life though playing though those advances that a normal MARS character would otherwise get.)

As the admin of the site, yeah the link moved from the root of the folder to a subfolder. It's for future expansion in order to do a front page and/or blog or something like that.

Sorry about that, IT backend stuff. I updated my link above and the one quoted in this post.

Also, I made it all available in a google doc here

I mentioned before, I would go into more why I play and run CS Games.

That is certainly one view, and you're welcome to it in fact. Many people feel that way, and it is wholly valid. I don't agree in the slightest, but it is wholly valid. It's also wholly simplistic. The Coalition is not some monolith. It is a nation with an active media, enough humans to have a wide variety of views, and enough D-bees so that not every citizen, let alone every soldier, is a clone of the rest. Some are decent people, some are quiet specieists, and others are just buttholes with a wide variety of issues. There is only one trait most soldiers in the CS have in common - patriotism and probably a good dose of nationalism. The CS doesn't really go after any particular religion as long as they are not espousing magical beliefs, but they don't promote it either. Some take that as a condemnation, but rather it is merely they want a focus on all things human and all things C.S. A human religion that doesn't espouse magic is just fine, but it is not what the current regime wants to base their soldier's faith on. And they also are loath to have that worship turned towards one person. Reverence is not the same as worship, and the Emperor, as the heart and soul of the Coalition, is worthy of reverence and respect. But it is the state itself that the ultimate loyalty of the common man should be placed in. And the common soldier. Of course anyone who makes up in the ranks past Major comes to the stark realization that that only holds true for the masses, not the elite. But that's not who we are talking about here. The common soldier wants a few things universally: Safety (for themselves and their families if possible), Prosperity (for themselves and the State, and their families if possible), and a sense of belonging. They offer their service and possibly their lives for the very same reason soldiers have for the entire history of humanity - their belief in their own way of life.

Combine this with a media that demonizes and dramatises the inhuman and demonic. "Psychics are barely controlled, unless it is in service to the State (that caveat being a change Col. Black has managed). Magic is a force that will corrupt and enslave humanity. The inhuman are invaders from other dimensions, taking HUMAN land from what our ancestors gave us. The NEMANS didn't die to give it to the d-bees, they died to protect it. and the Coalition States, their successors and the successors of the great American Empire, are the ones who will eventually retake our world and kick their alien butts off our world!"

If you see yourself as the ultimate underdog, constantly at odds with those around you, constantly under attack by zealots from the Federation of Magic (and they are, terrorist style), and dealing with an alien refugee crisis that is not your problem, the CS first policies of the CS Military only make sense. Combine that with actual atrocities perpetrated on the outlying towns, played up for the benefit of the home audience, and you have the recipe for a very motivated military willing to do what it takes to protect humanity. Some take it too far, and those are the antagonists we use in our games. But there is a place in the middle between traitor and monster where you can effectively run the CS not as some monstrous organization, but as a human organization, with all the flaws that entails, bent on the defense of humanity and their homeland. Not at any cost, but nearly so.

My squads are full of the everyday heroes we see when we play soldiers in RPGs. Not monsters, but farm boys turned soldiers, educated mama's boys turned technicians, sons of power brokers turned military specialist, and grizzled veterans turned cyborgs. All of them are broken, having multiple insanities from the horrors of nearly unending conflict from any of a few major conflict zones (more on that later) that create an army of experienced and blooded soldiers ready to do what it takes to win.

As for those conflict zones, we have the control zone around the St. Louis Arch, the quagmire that is Old Chicago where the Federation of Magic is an a near constant state of war with the CS in a battle of inches. Cataclysmic spells are ended by cataclysmic displays of munitions by artillery and missile, followed up by infantry to scour the ruins. Whole companies see injury and casualty rates in the 60% range, but between the excellent medical and cybernetic technology available, they are usually put right back out there after recovery.

So all that taken into account, why are the only missions that can be run for them ones where they must make impossible moral choices? Why can't they fight the Federation of Magic? Why can't they hunt demons or vampires? Why can't they provide aid to towns during natural disasters? Why does it have to be the worst the CS has to show. Why can't they be heroes? I say why not, and I run two games where they are heroes. One in the pressure cooker of Old Chicago, and one as a special ops team running at the edges of propaganda and political reality. And the players enjoy them. In the past I ran a Brown Water Navy and Marine squad based out of a Barracuda. Someday I'll have to reboot or restart that. I've also run an ISS game - CS Cops basically.

I should note that I use shows like Generation Kill (an HBO original) and Valor (its on Netflix) as inspiration for the types of stories I run. Character development and bad ass action are on the menu.

Yo! I'll vouch for this CS version. I decided to play a character in one of Mr Man's games with a character who is a minority in today's world who completely buys into the CS hype. It's fun to try and figure out how a highly intelligent person can buy the totalitarian ******** and still try and convince himself that it's okay. What happens as he is confronted with the horrors (and compassions) of the Rifts world? So far he is going crazy.

You don't have to play a gun toting ******* to play a CS character. It can be WAY more than that.

So, you can play a non-horrible CS soldier, provided you completely avoid any situations in which the ethics of belonging to a genocidal, human-supremacist, regime are called into question?

I mean, sure, there's no doubt plenty of CS soldiers who love their mommas, love Jesus, and their boyfriends, too... but they still might receive orders to burn a village to the ground because the people there have pointy ears and something the CS wants, even if it's an officer with a hankering to have fewer pointy-eared people nearby. You can certainly run a campaign where that isn't the case... but you could also run a campaign working for Splynncrth where you're out questing for new symbiotes that can be ruthlessly modified so they make better biowizardry slave collars. "We're just out exploring, looking for new life-forms!"... that will be turned into Bio-wizard slave collars. "We're going to expand the map!" ...that will be followed by slavers who will farm the people for slave stock.

That is too broad a brush. They don't randomly kill villages for the sake of killing villages of d-bees. They do so to fulfill objectives. Sometimes the objective is to terrorize one village so the rest in the area will leave, opening up prime farming land to support the food needs of the cities, or to open up other natural resources such as oil, ore, or other resources. Is it right? Nah, but you might take a good hard look at western history before you start tossing stones too hard. The things we've done to the native population of the Americas, to say nothing of what was done in other parts of the world, provide plenty of fodder for examining ethics of nation states. And yet not every game that puts players behind soldiers in the 1700s and 1800s deals with the destruction of the native populations.

As for not playing the genocidal aspect of the CS. Why not?! I don't particularly care to constantly play Custer's regiments, thanks. There are plenty of forces out there that are as brutal or worse. Shall we talk about Doc Reid? Or maybe Archie? Or Kingsdale, while we're chatting, tbh. As for the splugorth, they are a race of interdimensional slavers with no regard for any life: all beings are resources to be exploited. The CS are a bunch of scared humans run by a family of exploiters who know how to manipulate the media to get what they want. In fact, to take this to another lens, the difference between the CS and the Southern Cross era UEG government in Robotech is that the CS use skull motifs and psychics and the UEG holds rigged elections instead of declaring themselves rulers for life. Yet plenty of folks play heroic Southern Cross games where humans and their chosen near human allies fight against the alien (d-bee) invader for the very survival of their way of life. Wiping them off the map is a good thing. Why is it suddenly so bad that someone could do the same for the CS. There are plenty of choices of bad guys for the CS without delving into that black area of attacking innocents. Why should a GM be limited to only that?

Beyond that, there is canon examples of non-regular army unit such as scouts and special forces teams, having non-antagonistic contact with all sorts of people, as one of my groups, a SF team, did when they interacted with a village of Papago when said village wanted them to come take away a major artifact they did not want in the hands of the Splugorth or Federation of Magic.Their village is too small. The team made it clear they did not agree with the magical way of life the tribe had chosen, but they also acknowledged that it wasn't necessary to go after the tribe of humans, even if they were magic using techno-savages. The CS has no plans for Arizona, so they just focused on what they needed to focus on - getting the artifact. And they did, and then dropped it off at the Black Vault, where it would harm no one. And so yet another blow is dealt against the Federation of Magic group that wants to destroy all the food production capability of the Coalition, never mind what they would do to the entire region, or how many other powers that would affect. The CS hardly has the monopoly on doing horrible things.

It's too broad of a brush to say "Being a member of the CS military means being part of an openly genocidal military"?

You bring up Custer's Regiments... that's pretty much the official CS stance. They may pick and choose their battles, but...



(Coalition War Campaign, page 9; emphasis added, but probably there when Karl said it)

I mean, it's not subtle. It's not a fringe position within the Coalition; "We kill non-humans" isn't a mission statement, it's the mission statement.

All I'm gonna say is that there are a lot of people who will play games like Dark Heresy and Deathwatch and the Imperium makes the CS look like a bunch of choir boys in comparison. This either means that players don't feel any issues with killin- I mean "policing" alien activity on Earth because it's hard to develop empathy for a non-existent or it means that our parents were right and these rpgs made us into dangerous people

I'm not saying not killing non-humans. We do that all the time. I'm saying, not killing non-combatants. There is a difference between taking out guys who are fighting you (aka the core of the action in both Robotech and my CS games) and taking out non-combatants. We're not talking touchy-feely here; just not committing atrocities. Fighting folks who fight back is war, not an atrocity or a crime. Now often the public relations side CALLS that a crime, but the CS doesn't care about any opposing press and the only opposing press in the CS is meant to help drive home the state's position.

Now as for the Tolkeen War that followed that speech, its interesting to note that even the CS found lines that were too far (re: General Drogue). But I don't have my people running the Tolkeen Occupation Zone. I really don't want to run the squad that has to dig through and decide which children to slaughter. Nor do I want to run a game set in Arkansas where the y stop refugees and try and kill them out of a sense of zealotry. But give me a mission in the magic zone to tack down the d-bag who bombed three blocks of the Burbs, or tracking down the hit squad that tried to kill a civilian administrator in Peoria, or the mission to stop the Federation of Magic forces in Old Chicago from taking the old Sear's Tower - aka their former headquarters. That's full throttle defense of the homeland.

And yeah having run and played in 40K games, I find the CS downright understandable. Maybe not defensible, but definitely understandable.

So, again, the only way to play them without being evil is to ignore their actual stated positions on things. There are never any non-combatants, because we don't want to have to deal with the fact that the CS is an explicitly genocidal organization?

Do I need to go into the horrors that the US military allegedly commits in places in order to play a unit of spec ops soldiers fighting the taliban in a game? Do I need to comment on the ills of the soviet system to have a group of players be Spetsnaz fighting off terrorists in the Ukraine? Not every blasted game has to address these issues. Do players HAVE TO BE genocidal maniacs? or can they just be patriots? Why is it ONLY one way?

As I said above, we have plenty of chances to use the genocidal maniacs as bad guys, why do I HAVE to use them as protagonists. PCs are supposed to be able to be the exception. Why would that change for the CS?

Because they're part of a genocidal system. With a genocidal ideology. If they're interacting with civilians who aren't CS approved in any fashion, they're either genocidal mad-men, "just following orders", or liable to be court-martialed.

I mean, there's other places out there. Why stan for the genocidal people?

I think for a lot of people it has to do with the lack of another military power in North America that is governed by reasonable folk and has it's own legion of tactical squads and power death laser armor (oh and that doesn't use "wimpy" magic, air strikes and rocket launchers only for this crowd). Now that section of fans who want milsim in the crazy future probably have a rough time with canon RIFTS at times (especially in North America) where the standard game is "you and a bunch of misfits have odd kill and fetch quests for loot and to defeat the one dimensional villains". So I think it leads people to look to the CS to fill the super sci-fi military role that the milsim crowd is looking for.

Mikel: I think you do a disservice to the setting when you craft a campaign that deliberately ignores everything the Coalition does that is morally reprehensible. No, that doesn't mean that it has to come up every mission. But eventually, Coalition troops should get put in a position where they have to make a choice, because that's how the Coalition operates on a macro scale. If you really want to avoid that, why not just advance the plot a couple years, have the Emperor croak, let Jo-Anna take over in a surprise coup, and have her moderate the views of the Coalition just enough to actually let them be the good guys, while still going on Bug Hunts in Minnesota, Old Chicago and against the True Federation of Magic forces, as well as ol' Splynny's raiders? If you're insistent on avoiding the themes of fascism and oppression that are very obviously there, why not excise them completely, rather than just leave them hanging in the background and ignoring them?

Or use the NGR, where the policy *is* "We kinda allow D-Bees, though we're still pretty racist as a society."

'Cause, really, saying "We're playing the CS, but we're ignoring the fascism and racism" is like saying "We're the True Federation of Magic, but we're ignoring the demons and the blood sacrifice."

I've always run the Coalition the same way one runs the Imperium in Warhammer 40k. In any other setting, the Imperium are the badguys, but in their home setting, they are simply the arguably least worst to deal with.

In Rifts, while the Coalition is nowhere near the same level of "screwed" as the Imperium is, they act like it is. They see what they are doing as good, even though in reality is it very much the opposite; just like the Imperium considers committing Exterminatus, and blowing an entire planet apart, with its population, PDF, Imperial Guard, and even a few Space Marines all still fighting on the ground, a better choice than to give a single planet to the enemy. Given the enemies the Imperium faces (Chaos, Tyranids, Orks, Necrons, etc) it's a bit justified.

On the other hand the Coalition, despite its power, is fairly small, so the danger isn't quite negligent as it appears. And to be fair, there are a ton of evil monsters, evil races, and general asshats around, so they have a bit of a point, especially when it suits the narrative.

To expose a CS soldier to the good however is the step to break them of their programming. Which happens to the Imperial Guard all the time. They're only human, not unbreakable super soldiers who can barely be considered human anymore.

Take my words as you will.

Some folks just want to hate on the CS. It's easy to do, they are set up as a bad guy human nation within Rifts. But they also set it up so that players COULD play that group, why not? Not everyone loves Magic, Psychics, or Monsters.

I personally like to play humans in games, and when I play those games I also don't play Mage's, and for the most part, minimal to no psychics. Why? Not my cup of tea.

There are so many stories that can be told with the CS, without them having to be ruthless baby murderers. Why not let people play them the way THEY want to play them? Mikel has a good handle on the stories he wants to portray.

Mark - I would like to point out to the pages in Coalition War Campaign that go into more detail on the morality of the citizens and the soldiers of the CS. That would be page 45 to 47 of World Book 11.

Some cherry picked points from those passages:




But then again, trying to convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced is like hitting your head against a brick wall. At some point, your going to give up, or the wall will come down.

This is how I explained the CS to a player new to SavageRifts.com today:



The points Tiree brought up (thanks btw) are precisely the reason why I like to play the non-baby murdering CS. There's plenty of room for questioning orders. But just like it's fun to punch Nazis, it's also fun to punch the big demon bad guy.


Actually I agree with you, and it is in no way excised form the setting. It's acknowledged and brought up by the players and I often. But it is not the focus of the adventures. As you're on the site, read through the adventure threads for the Fighting Joes. You'll find we don't ignore anything. But we don't FOCUS on that. And to be honest, for the average soldier in Old Chicago, kept in the dark about everything, fed a line about how victorious the CS forces are, while being shown the sacrifice of the brave men and women of the military and ISS, there's very little to disabuse them of the propaganda they've been fed all their lives. Everything in Old Chicago *IS* trying to kill them. The Fed of Magic are bogey men, they are active combatants! Monsters and bandits of all stripes are trying to strip them of their lives and gear. Rifts open regularly, and not all of them naturally. And sure, they may encourage some scared folks just trying to get somewhere, but why in the heck would they voluntarily travel through the worst combat zone in North America? There must be some ulterior motive? And can YOU be sure they aren't just another batch of terrorists?

For the record I intend to put that last point before the group. How they react will decide a lot about how the campaign advances.

Mikel: Well, there ya go--I was going entirely off your earlier posts here. The intel you provided just now? Yeah, that's sufficient to allay my own concerns (though, yeah, when I get time I might go reading through the archives). Old Chicago is probably one of the few theaters of operations where I think there is a sufficient case of "No, seriously, everything here wants you dead" to make the CS the good guys by comparison, at least.

In the original Rifts, there are no utopias, and power and survival come at a price. The Coalition is a good example of this: a totalitarian, militant, fascist regime that provides its people with more safety and security than anyone else on the continent.

Savage Rifts seems to present its central hub in the Ozarks as "the good guys" who are open and friendly to aliens and magic, yet they seem to suffer no consequences.

While I like the SR presentation and system, I prefer the moral complexity of the original.

You think the CS as a rigid nation that does not change over time but if you've read the majority of books, you get to witness the way CS was, the way it is now, and the way it is going toward the future. For example, the war with the demons on American soil has the CS amend their pervious view of keeping their humanity at all cost. Before, the CS' thinking was that juicer conversion was losing your humanity. That is why they preferred man in augmented suits. Now with the coming war with outpouring of demons, the CS had to rethink their position. So, the CS is not black and white. It is a whole kind of greys.

There's another slant to this topic besides the "Is the CS a shade of grey or evil" question. It's why I find the concept of playing a Coalition character so fascinating. History has many examples of good people doing good things even though they're part of awful regimes.

Consider John Rabe, for example. This man was a staunch Nazi and an ambassador to China, and he was a hero who saved far more lives than Oscar Schindler. When Japan conquered Nanking, he led 22 western diplomats in saving 200,000 civilians, sheltering them in the diplomatic quarter and using Germany's relationship with Japan to keep rampaging soldiers at bay for two and a half months. Then he went home and lectured about the Rape of Nanking to try to get Hitler to stop further Japanese atrocities until the Gestapo put a stop to his speeches.

To this day, if you go to Nanjing (Nanking's modern westernized name), you'll find statues dedicated to John Rabe, an objectively good Nazi.

How often do you hear or read the phrase "Objectively good Nazi?" People like John Rabe, Oscar Schindler, and other good Nazis complicate our modern view of Nazis being monolithically and uniformly evil. Their mere existence challenges the idea that it's totally OK to punch a Nazi. It invites us to question the trope of disposable, faceless goons being hero fodder.

This is why I like the idea of playing Coalition characters. Exploring the challenges of moral decisions in the face of evil within your own side during an RPG session can be both entertaining and enlightening. Such a game could be useful in developing the genuine moral courage it takes to confront and restrain one's friends from acts of cruelty or to defy abuses of power and authority in real life. By including the option of playing CS soldiers and acknowledging their implicit moral dilemmas, the original Rifts RPG enables and encourages this. It's one of the key reasons I like Rifts so much as a setting.

While Palladium's books include warnings and disclaimers at the front of their books, they leave it to their customers to decide what's ok to try in their games and often work moral complexity into their NPCs, factions, and adventures. The Savage Rifts approach of excluding a huge faction as a playable option by design strikes me as calculated censorship in the interest of avoiding controversy, and that, to me, is a real shame.