Setting
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.
Some of the important concepts upon which the Rifts setting is based:
- Supernatural events today are rare, generally discounted by science, and difficult or impossible to prove.
- The Rifts world is Earth, but hundreds of years into the future.
- Magic energy exists, and is called potential psychic energy (PPE). PPE can be found in certain places, objects, and animals, but one of its greatest sources is human beings. While this has a variety of applications, upon a human's death, the energy is doubled, and then released into the surrounding environment.
- Ley lines, lines of magic energy, criss-cross the earth forming supernatural geographic areas such as the Bermuda Triangle. In the Rifts game, 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 very strong, the very fabric of space and time can be torn thus creating a rift, a hole in space-time leading to another place, time or a new or 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, and stretching for many miles. If the PPE nearby is extremely strong the Ley Lines could be seen during the day too.
Read more about this topic: Rifts (role-playing Game)
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“The supreme, the merciless, the destroyer of opposition, the exalted King, the shepherd, the protector of the quarters of the world, the King the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced mighty and merciless Kings from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same to acknowledge one supremacy.”
—Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–59 B.C.)
“Many working mothers feel guilty about not being at home. And when they are there, they wish it could be perfect.... This pressure to make every minute happy puts working parents in a bind when it comes to setting limits and modifying behavior.”
—Cathy Rindner Tempelsman (20th century)
““Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them tonight,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow....””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)