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| CELEBRATING 35 YEARS OF RIFTS® – ONE GAME SYSTEM – EVERY GENRE – COUNTLESS WORLDS – ENDLESS ADVENTURE |
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| | Rifts® Month – Palladium Books®
Weekly Update – September 4, 2025 |
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| We hope your Labor Day weekend was outstanding. Ours was relaxing and rejuvenating.
Please take a peek at this week’s Closing Thoughts. I think you’ll enjoy it and it kicks off September being Rifts Month. We have been celebrating the Rifts® 35th Anniversary and offering special sales all year, but now we get serious! We have declared September to be Rifts Month and you’ll soon discover why. |
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| September is Rifts® Month – A New Sale Every Week |
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| The RIFTS® SALE begins with Rifts miniatures, poker decks, art books and all prints on sale at HALF price, while supplies last. You’ll see a new sale EVERY week of September, plus additional surprises and sales starting on Monday, September 8th and continuing every week of the month! Do NOT miss the savings and fun that is coming throughout the month of September.
On sale now! – All Rifts miniatures – All available poker decks – All art prints (Rifts and others) – Art books: Rifts Machinations of Doom (graphic novel and sourcebook), Rifts & the Megaverse: The Art of John Zeleznik (Softcover only) and Future Visions. Look for our next announcement on Monday, September 8, 2025. |
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| UPDATE: Kevin & Sean’s September Convention Schedule |
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| 1. Alliance Open House, September 4-6. The van is packed up and by the time you read this, we will be on our way to the Alliance Open House in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We’ll be showcasing TMNT & Other Strangeness RPG products directly to retailers, in person, for the first time, and they’ll be able to place orders for the end of the year. We’ll also have a selection of other Palladium RPG titles on display and we are happy to sign any books retailers may ask us to autograph. Sean and Jeremy will be running demos Thursday and Friday nights. This is always a pleasant event.
2. Granite State Comicon – Booth #5 & #6 in Artist Alley, September 19-21, in Manchester, New Hampshire. Sean and I will be part of at least two panel talks – one with Ninja Turtles creators. We’ll have TMNT & Other Strangeness RPG products on display and available for preorder, as well as physical RPG books to sell like After the Bomb (suitable for use with TMNT RPG), Ninjas & Superspies, and select Heroes Unlimited, Dead Reign, and Rifts books. We are always happy to sign any books you buy or bring for us to autograph.
AND don’t forget, you can get After the Bomb sourcebooks and the original TMNT & Other Strangeness RPG and sourcebooks signed by Jim Lawson (he did all the interior art for Mutants Down Under and Transdimensional TMNT) and get Kevin Eastman and other TMNT artists’ signatures the next time they are guests at Granite State Comic Con. Sean’s original 1985 Ninja Turtles RPG is filled with TMNT artist signatures and Turtle Head drawings and it looks amazing.
Note: We do not know the next time both Kevin Siembieda and Sean Owen Roberson will be at a convention on the East Coast, so fans in the surrounding area should come on over to get books signed and to chat a bit. We are booths 5 & 6 in Artist Alley, near Jim Lawson.
3. PAGE Con – Philadelphia Area Game Expo, January 15-18, 2026. Sean won’t be at this one with me (Kevin Siembieda), but my old cohort in creativity, Matthew Balent, will be there and so will J-M DeFoggi, as well as other notable guests. This is an old school RPG convention so I will bring TMNT books along with some vintage RPG items from my personal collection for sale. Maybe even some Judges Guild art. |
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| UPDATE: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness RPG Redux: Our overseas manufacturer has informed us that the Kickstarter items (RPG books, GM screen, dice, exclusive miniatures, prints, playing cards, etc.) will be loaded in containers and put onto a ship by the end of September. If all goes well, we should be shipping Kickstarter rewards to our backers in November. We cannot wait to get all these awesome books, dice, and rewards into your hands. |
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| UPDATE: Yin-Sloth Expeditions (Fantasy): This book is brimming with new places, setting info, and adventures, along with updated, cleaned up and expanded adventures, and new maps. I am expanding the Dragon’s Gate Mountains, the mysterious town of Dragonedara and Dragonedra City of Dragons, and a whole lot more! I’m having a blast with it and you will too. Still shooting to release it this fall. Fans who are starving for new fantasy material will love this book. And there’s more coming for Palladium Fantasy in the new year. |
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| UPDATE: Rifts® Bestiary Volume 2: This is another long-awaited book that is nearing completion. If you were a Palladium Megaverse Insider Backer, fear not, we still have your information and the special books and items you have coming to you. However, we are likely to need your current shipping address. This will be another big, 200+ page resource with updated stats and information on monsters of North America, plus some new artwork, maps, and more. A 2025 release. |
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| UPDATE: Rifts® Chaos Earth® First Responders: Sean Owen Roberson has taken the reins on this bad boy, coordinating art with Steven Cummings and doing the writing of new material and rewrites of the old. The artwork is looking great and Sean is making sure most of the gear, robots, and vehicles can be used for both Chaos Earth® and Rifts®! After all, the Republicans (NEMA forces in suspended animation), Archie Three, Titan Robotics, and the Black Market all have access to pre-Rifts technology, as well as adventurers who discover a cache of ancient pre-Rifts tech from time to time. Awesome, right? Probably an early 2026 release. |
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| | UPDATE: Rifts® Antarctica World Book: Epic. Mindblowing. Filled with adventure opportunities, weapons, gear, alien war horses and attack animals, Rifts under the ice, ice magic, a secret Splugorth zoo and outposts, a Splugorth enemy, and more. A 2026 release. |
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| | AND More! Palladium may have an exciting announcement before the end of this year, and expect some surprise releases in 2026. |
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| NEW on the Palladium Books YouTube channel – Official History of Palladium Books |
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You can find a whole bunch of episodes and interviews on the Palladium Books YouTube channel. People are still discovering these fun and informative chats, so please spread the word. They reveal behind-the-scenes information and dispel rumors and false statements about Palladium’s history and creation process. A new episode goes live every other week. Whether viewers are Palladium fans or enjoy RPG history straight from the source, enjoy these intimate chats. I hope you find hearing about the creation process behind the scenes and learning more about the people behind the games you love to be entertaining and inspiring. |
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| | | You can see more online chats with Siembieda and Roberson on Legion of Myth and great podcasts with the Glitterbois. Oh, and Through Gamer Goggles as well. Hey Podcasters and YouTubers, we are happy to consider appearances on your shows too. Please reach out via the Help Desk. If you don’t hear back from us in a month, reach out again, because maybe your first inquiry got missed. We are juggling so much. Thanks. |
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| Books BACK IN STOCK and available now |
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| Rifts® Black Market (new cover) – Cat. No. 886 – Secrets, weapons, robots, power armor, and more revealed. Rifts® Psi-Ops: Psychic War (formerly Rifts Coalition Manhunters, new cover & title) – Cat. No. 894 – Coalition State secrets revealed. Rifts® Primer & Adventures – Cat. No. 824 – How to Play Rifts® by Gleba and Siembieda, 4 full adventures, 101 Rifts® adventure ideas, and more. Rifts® Bionics Sourcebook – Cat. No. 850 – A compendium of bionics and cybernetics from around the world. Rifts® Psyscape – Cat. No. 822 – Info about mythical Psyscape. Beyond the Supernatural RPG – Cat. No. 700 – A complete game, fun player characters, psychics, ordinary people, creatures of darkness, and more. Villains Unlimited – Cat. No. 501 – 80+ original villains and more. Note: See Gramercy Island for 90+ additional villains (Cat. No. 517). Both titles are available now.
More reprints are coming! Additional low stock and out of print titles are being prepped to go to the printer. That includes Rifts Ultimate Edition “Softcover,” Rifts 30th Anniversary Edition, the Cyberworks Collection, Federation of Magic, Chaos Earth RPG, Powers Unlimited 3, and Nightbane Shadows of Light, among others. |
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| | 300+ RPG products on DriveThru – a dozen unique world settings – one game system – endless possibilities. No other game company offers game worlds for so many different genres. Best of all, learn to play one Palladium RPG and you can play them all, because each uses the same basic core rules and combat. There are differences, but the fundamentals are the same. This also means you can bring characters, villains, monsters, powers, magic, weapons, gear, and adventure ideas from one setting into another or mash them together!
In addition to PDF titles for entire game lines like Rifts®, Palladium Fantasy®, Heroes Unlimited™, Ninjas & Superspies™, After the Bomb®, Beyond the Supernatural™, Dead Reign® (zombies), Nightbane® (Urban Fantasy), Rifts Chaos Earth®, Systems Failure™, Splicers®, RECON®, The Rifter® #1-85, and others, there are Game Master and player aids, character generators, paper minis, map packs, and FREE Previews of books like Creature Feature™, Dead Reign, Coalition Manhunters, Titan Robotics™, Rifts Bestiary Volume One, World Books, Dimension Books, and more to give you a glimpse of what’s in the book. Enjoy endless adventures across the Megaverse®.
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| | | Palladium Collectibles – at Kevin’s Online Toy & Collectibles eBay Store |
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| Palladium collectibles as well as action figures and other items from Kevin Siembieda’s personal collection are on sale!
One-of-a-kind Palladium Books negatives are always very popular items at the Palladium Open House, Gen Con, and conventions, and are catching on as rare collectibles, unique in and of themselves. Last year at Granite State Comic Con Kevin Eastman had TMNT negatives from the first comic book on display.
Before digital printing, pages of a book were laid out by hand on a board, and each page was photographed. These are the photographic negatives being sold as individual works of art and collectibles. When matted or framed on a white background they look like dynamic wood cut prints. And they are on sale right now! |
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| | | | It started with a boom
Once upon a time, I came up with the idea for a new role-playing game unlike anything on the market. It would be a blend of science fiction, fantasy, Cthulhu-like horror, heroic adventure, and the superhuman and the supernatural all found in a familiar yet bizarre setting. It all happens in a post-post-apocalyptic Earth more alien than a thousand distant worlds. Magic and technology clashing as humans struggle to reclaim a world their ancestors would not recognize. Think Lord of the Rings meets Star Wars with a touch of the Supernatural.
The central hero was to be a high-tech sort of knight inside a chrome exoskeleton that shed laser-fire like harmless raindrops. The knight’s devastating weapon, a massive lance-like gun so powerful that a single blast shatters windows, is heard a mile away, and can knock a dragon out of the sky.
The RPG would be named after this heroic character — Boomers!
Yep, Rifts® started out on the drawing board as Boomers. The iconic Glitter Boy was the Boomer. Its lance, the powerful rail gun known as the Boom Gun. There came a moment in time, however, when I felt the need to change the name. A popular anime that reached the United States had main characters called Boomers. Only I couldn’t think of a suitable replacement title. After I described the setting to Erick Wujcik, he suggested I call it Rift World. When I poopooed that name, he said, “What about just Rifts?”
Without a better name at hand, I made Rifts my temporary working title and planned to change the name later. When the game was finished, I couldn’t think of calling it anything but Rifts.
I renamed the iconic post-apocalyptic chromium knight, the Glitter Boy. He is still an iconic hero, but now part of an ensemble cast of post-apocalyptic heroes. These brazen heroes and rogues all fight for their humanity against the crushing weight of transformative technology and magic. You have the heroic Cyber-Knight, the chemically enhanced Juicer, the brain stimulated Crazy, the part-man/part-machine cyborg, genetically engineered Dog Boy, mutant human Psi-Stalker, the magic wielding Ley Line Walker, the demon summoning Shifter, as well as the Mystic, Mind Melter, Dragon Hatchling, and countless others. All player characters. All epic and challenging. Characters and setting unlike anything that had come before or since.
A UK magazine declared the Rifts RPG an instant classic. The RPG became a sensation. The initial press run of 10,000 copies sold out in three weeks. The 20,000 copy second printing sold out in three months, or was it two? Stores couldn’t keep it in stock. Millions of gamers have played it. Millions more have heard of it from ads in magazines and Marvel Comics. |
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| Side Note: You can hear the entire story behind Rifts and all of Palladium’s popular RPGs (TMNT, Robotech, Palladium Fantasy, Heroes Unlimited, etc.) in a series of ongoing interviews on the Palladium Books YouTube Channel. We think of it as the Official History of Palladium Books. And it comes straight from the creator’s mouth, me, Kevin Siembieda. We also have guest interviews with Palladium artists and writers, we talk about game design, running RPG sessions, and more. Check it out and please spread the word about this fun and tantalizing continuing series.
35 years after Rifts’ release into the world there are more than 100+ Rifts titles in print with more on the way.
We have been celebrating Rifts’ 35th Anniversary and offering special sales all year, but we declare September as Rifts Month with the biggest deals starting on Monday, September 8th and continuing ALL month long. Enjoy.
Pssst, in case you’re wondering, Sean and I have mindboggling plans for the future of Rifts. There is a new era of wonder and RPG magic for Rifts and Palladium Books on the horizon, and we’re glad you have front row seats to all that’s coming.
– Kevin Siembieda, Publisher, Game Designer, Writer and Friend |
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