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)
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