#188 – Rifts World Book 13 Lone Star

Breakfast puppies?

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. Live from Radio City Music Hall, it's the Glitter Boys!

Okay, not really.

The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. This is where you are all supposed to sing along. I'm very disappointed in both of you. This is the biggest letdown of my life.

Deep in the heart of Lone Star.

Yes.

I, I, if you had gone with another Texas song, I would have been able to do it, but I can't remember the words to that one ever.

Uh-huh. Well, anyway, Rifts Lone Star, World Book 13. We are finally, finally, finally at my favorite set of books, starting with Lone Star. Fantastic cover. You know, I don't frequently vibe with a lot of Zelensny's work. It's just not my, you know, the style of art that I really like, but this, this is fantastic.

Yeah.

That is a badass looking thing. I don't want to fight that. I would probably not invite that over for dinner.

No.

Yep. And then a fucking badass picture of a line walker on the— wait, is that a line walker?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's a line walker on the second page by Ramon Perez. Uh, man, this book Lone Star, it's about freaking time. So best book ever. Thanks. Catch you in the next episode.

Well, you know, there's, there's a little more to talk about than, than, uh, the COVID and the first picture. Lone Star is, it opens up all the dirty secrets about where the Dog Boys came from.

Yes.

And it, like, if you like Dog Boys and you want to know where they came from and all of the, like, when I was rereading this, I forgot how evil Desmond Bradford is.

Yeah.

He's like Mengele evil.

Yeah.

He is horrible.

There's a couple small references where they were taking bits and pieces from Mengele's biography for It's just, but before we get there. And he's doing it to dogs too.

He's doing it to dogs!

Yeah, before we even get there, we have a really nice dive into areas of the Coalition. It's just kind of an overview of some of the places as we're starting to head south of the Midwest that haven't gotten as much discussion, as much exposure up to this point in the Rift saga.

they were touched on in Juicer Uprising. Yeah, you got some, some names. You're like, oh, there's stuff going on down in that, that big Lone Star area.

The other thing is that this is the book where they really start to dig into the internal structure of the Coalition. And if you are playing a game that involves the Coalition, whether it's as an op for, or if you are playing characters who are members of the Coalition or from the Coalition, it is the first keystone to explaining the complexity of the Coalition.

Yeah.

And, and, and it gives you an idea. I know it talks about the Lone Star Base, but it gives you an idea what some of the other, like, big bases might look for, for the Coalition States. You can take this out and go, this is a base the CS developed somewhere else, drop it in and becomes this like great checkbox and what it would look like militarily and what would be in it. Goes over the history and it really, uh, it very much describes, hey, the CS basically found most of their tech. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they discovered, everyone kind of knew this. But this is really like, oh, by the way, complete accident, complete accident. They found this great big base that was filled with a whole bunch of nasty, nasty.

Oh, cool.

And then they handed it to an evil fucking megalomaniac biologist. Okay. That nothing bad could come of this. I'm sure.

And we cannot unders— we cannot overstate this. Bradford is He is top tier of the coalition. Like, this is one of the leaders of of the coalition, not necessarily their military, but he is one of the leaders of their scientific progress, one of the leaders of their thought. Bradford is fucking evil.

He is. It's hard.

Like you, we we looked at book eleven, which had all the details and the stats for you know Prosek and his kid and. the rest of the people, and they're all kind of like mustache-twirling evil. This guy's the devil.

So, I mean, just in a nutshell, Sector 357 on page 20, this is the area of a complex that is super evil, and it's so evil none of the elite guard want to go down there. They get the willies just standing in front of the damn door. That's like, oops. Another one got out, our bad. It quickly, and then it kind of lightens the tone in some ways, in my opinion. It's like, why mutant dogs? Why did they create them? Well, they're loyal and they're, and they're, they're, they have good senses and they raise quickly. And you have almost some like endearing pictures of anthropomorphic baby puppies. And you're like, oh, this is cute. This is cute. No, no, no, no, no. They're just setting you up.

They're setting you up. But before we even get there, I want to get back to Bradford.

Oh, okay.

Take a look at his experience level. This is something that you rarely see. 20th level cyberduck. This is in a game where there are only 15 levels, right? This man's so evil, he has 20 levels of one class.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like just oh, he's a tenth level administrator. That's actually more scary to me. Yeah, he's also a tenth level administrator. He's the bureaucrat's bureaucrat.

Oh man, what if it was like 20th level DMV clerk.

Run away. I don't want to jump to the next. Oh geez.

Uh, all the other characters are pretty cool too. Um, I think I have skipped ahead. Sorry. We were talking about, we were talking about Bradford and I was like, Bradford, Bradford, let's talk more about Bradford.

I mean, I want to talk about his, his, his, uh, his, his staff of evil idiots. And some people that are not bad, but they have bombs in their skulls because Desmond put them there.

Yep. Yep.

Right.

Yep.

Okay. But yeah, dog pack.

Yay. And in history that has never ever happened. No.

Military dog program. You can talk about the different dogs, the training. It tells you about like how they set them up, how they, how they manipulate them basically. And it goes through kind of a rehash, an upscaled version of the Dog Boys or the Psi-Hounds.

Like if you read the Butz edition, because by this point we still don't have the ultimate edition. So, You know, at the time you read the Butts Edition and you're like, man, this dog boy thing, dog boy thing is pretty cool. And they do get a lot of pages dedicated to them in the Butts Edition. But you wanted to know more. This book has you covered. Like everything from their birth to their training, to their use in society, all of it.

You want to play a beagle dog boy? Here we go.

It did add a few more options and things such as some of the, uh, it added more breeds and more mutations. So that's always welcome.

Did they add a pug?

There's no pug.

There's no pug.

No, trust me.

Well, no, no, no, no, no. The reason I asked is I actually played a pug dogboy from Lone Star at one point, and I couldn't remember if we built that off of an existing breed or something else. Yeah.

You could do that.

There's no pug and there's no Frenchie.

Yeah. Bull terrier, pit bull, maybe.

Yeah.

But also, if you ever wanted to play a dogboy who wasn't part of the coalition, this book has you covered, goes through all of the stuff.

Well, you have both the ferals and the freeborn offsprings, right? This is like so cool.

Then the special forces, like the customized dog boys. Like, I want to play a dog boy, but I don't want to be a grunt.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, tell you what, we got the dog boy SEALs. We got the dog boy special trackers. We got the dog boy murder bots or kill hounds.

Yeah.

It's so much cool stuff. Have you ever wanted to customize your dog boy gauntlets? Well, guess what? We got 6, at least 6 different options for you here.

Now, now I will say one of the interesting things in here is they, they reiterate, even though they've made them, even though they've trained them, even though they may or may not have kill chips in them, they still don't trust them with the latest and greatest weapons. Correct. All their weaponry is the older In some people's opinion, cooler looking weaponry. And so, okay. So it gives you the tense right there. The Dog Boys are an expendable commodity.

Yes.

Kill all you want. We'll just make more. The—

now here's a question for you two that I've had discussions about in the past. Does Lone Star do a good job on expanding on the interesting relationship between Psi-Stalkers and Dog Boys?

I think it adds, it adds a bit more. I do believe we're going to get more Psi Stalker stuff coming up. I always forget that there's more than just dog boys in this book.

Well, of course you would.

But yeah, we have other stuff coming down the line here.

They have some descriptions of some of the leaders that have very loyal dog boys. And some of them are Psi Stalkers, some of them aren't. And so you kind of get the feel on on like the indoctrination level, so to speak, right, that you would have of, of the dog boys that are that fanatically loyal, right, even in spite of themselves.

Yeah, we have multiple pages dedicated to the Psi Stalkers, the wild Psi Stalkers here. Actually, I think a lot of this was just copied and pasted wholesale into Ultimate Edition.

Yes.

So that, that's what you get there.

The, the reason I ask that is if there was any shortcoming in Lone Star, this is the book I would have looked to to expand that relationship. Because if you think about how psy-stalkers are presented in the original Butz edition, the loyalty between psy-stalkers and dogboys is a two-way street.

Yeah.

Because they specifically mentioned that psy-stalkers are frequently very tied to the dogboys under their command. And I, I don't— I honestly don't know where I actually personally come down on this, and this is something I've been struggling with for 10 years, but I wanted a little bit more here on that because this is the book where that should have been fleshed out, and instead they just hinted at it a bit more than I would have liked.

Yeah, most of the text that deals with their relationships is Heavily focused on humans, right? Yeah.

And, and the, the, the— given that for as an old head started with Butts Edition, Rifts players, Rifts player, one of the keystones for me was the very interesting relationship between Dog Boys and Psi Stalkers. And it's like, so, okay, I—

Psi Stalkers, now to me Psy stalkers are one of the more interesting of the core iconic things. Oh, very much so.

Literally probably my favorite class.

Yeah, they, I love, uh, we're going to get a lot more on psy stalkers in a couple of books. In the next book, uh, New West and Spirit West dive into them more because of the wandering tribes they have out there. But I'm pretty sure Canada, I think Rifts Canada might be the one that dives more into the tribes.

Yeah, that's— Canada's one I'm not super familiar with. Maybe.

And I, and I sit here being the odd man out because Psi Stalkers to me were just PPE vampires. I never latched onto them for some reason. I really never did. They, they never kind of jumped out at me, but I think it's because I tended to play magic-using characters. And so I was scared of them. Like, I was scared of them, but I, so I, but I kind of put them out of my mind. But the dog boy aspect that you brought up, yeah, it would have been nice for them to—

Oh, at some point I can do a whole thing on just psy stalkers, but it's got to be kind of a meta thing because it crosses over books and some of the unique potential.

I know I've read about more of the psy stalker tribes.

Yes.

And I can't remember exactly where that happened. All of the books tend to blur together.

Yeah, and I believe it's actually scattered across several books. And I believe we even get into non-North American psy stalkers in some of the books.

So I think possibly, yeah, maybe, I don't know, but I do really find them compelling.

Yes.

But we'll find it. Yeah, we'll cover that book, whichever one it happens to be, I'm sure.

Well, have you ever wanted more hovercycles?

Why, yes. Yes, I have.

This book has you covered.

It has all of the hovercycles. And I really like most of the designs of these hovercycles. They kind of, as long as I throw my economist out the window, I would, I could buy that all of these would be in production in Rifts Earth.

I really like the addition of more hovercycles. This is the first time I think we've seen it more than 2 or 3 added at one time ever since like what, Triax? I think Triax had a few.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. They had a couple.

Sourcebook 1.

Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I get, again, it's, there's so many of these books. You tend to get which one, get some of the earlier ones mixed up and what content they had.

It really strikes me weird that Japan, Rifts Japan did not have more hypercycles in it. Now that I'm thinking about it.

They didn't dive into that motorcycle gang kind of thing.

I talked about that too.

Yeah. We talked about that. Yeah, just like, obviously we're sitting at a table, all 3 of us ride. So we're a little motorcycle-centric as a group, which translates over to hovercycles. And it was just, I was happy to see this.

You know what? I'll say this. I'll say this now. People hold me to this because I've already started work on it, but I just need some gentle, um, supportive reminders. Keep reminding me if I can get about, let's say 10, if I get a dozen, if I get a dozen people to either remind me or post or do something with emotes, I don't know, something on our Discord server. Remind me to keep doing it because, so, because ADHD, I'm going to forget. Remind me to finish and publish or submit to a rifter my Motobushido Palladium conversions, which includes both Sosoku and the Motorcycle Samurai kind of stuff. I have it like halfway written. I just gotta balance out the numbers.

Awesome. I thought you were going to be proposing a Glitter Boys back patch.

Now, if you can get another dozen people, because that's fantastic. We do need a back-sized version in woven— embroidered, back-sized Embroidered patch of the Glitter Boys logo, or no, just the head.

Yeah, just the head. Uh, just the head, possibly with logos. Has to be single, has to be single piece, no 3-piece.

Yep. Okay. Anyway, back to this book.

Uh, so I love, I love the, the hoverboard. Um, so what do you think about the picture on 62 there, Daniel? Oh God.

Anyway, so after that we have the addition of Things other than Dog Boy.

And we have the, oh yes, Desmond Brett is evil as fuck. This is where he gets his monsters for all of his horrible experiments and what he does to them.

Oh God. Yeah, seriously. All, all of the modifications listed in bullet point layout, followed by another set of bullet point layouts and followed by one of my favorites because, you know, I love Palladium and their random tables. Random tables of mutations gone wrong. Oh, it's so wonderful.

Now, now there's an awesome nugget hidden in here about—

There's a couple actually.

About why the CS leaders still look so good and they're in their 70s and 80s. Because, because they've figured out how to make them live, not forever, but way longer than you want an evil dictator to live.

Right. Yeah. So there, this is a question I gotta ask Kevin at some point. There are a couple comments here and there scattered throughout the section we're currently dealing with that kind of heavily imply that the Terror Bears are partially responsible for Rifts Earth.

Well, we talked about that when we were discussing the Terror Bears and specifically one of, I think it was Transdimensional maybe? It was Transdimensional. adventures where one of the adventures was literally the Terror Bears like going through a rift or something. You're like, huh, what could happen? Or no, them doing a thing that could potentially cause World War III.

And like, and it, within the context of TMNT, that leads directly to After the Bomb.

Right.

But you can fork it and there's a couple things they say there that depending on how you read them, oh my God, the Terror Bears are responsible for Riftsurge.

So, so, you know, you have your mutations gone wrong and then you get into, well, dogs were cool, but let's have bears.

Bears are even better. I love the Battle Cats.

Of course you do.

By the time this airs, perhaps some folks will understand why I love the Battle Cats. But the Killcats, I think, are a little overdone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everybody wants to play a Killcat. I love Killcats as NPCs, but not necessarily as bad guys.

Yeah. I mean, inherently when you read them, they don't play well with others, period, which is why they're so limited by the Coalition.

Yep.

I mean, like a lot of these ones they introduce in here, the bears, the cats, et cetera. It's like, we're going to try this out and see if it works. And you're like, why on earth did you even think this was a good idea?

Oh, because Desmond Broward.

Yeah.

Well, yeah. Um, then you have the mini monkey spies, which I always thought was hilarious. Uh, you know, and the monkey boys. I want my own army of mini monkey spies and monkey boys so that they can look at me condescendingly.

And, you know, you ever wanted to play a chimp in a lab coat? This book has you covered.

The mini monkey spies, when I was rereading this, had me dying laughing because I had recently gone down a deep, deep rabbit hole on CIA animal experiments for using animals as operatives. And I was just dying laughing because I like, there's a couple sections where I'm pretty sure I know where they got some of the concepts from.

For me, I keep going back to the original Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it's like bad dates, you know, the monkey that kept running around. But now we've made them smarter and given them cameras. And it's like, that's, that's just not going to end well. It's not at all.

Mutant rats.

Always here for a mutant rat.

And I really like the story. Oh, I love it behind how they came to be and why they continue to be despite everyone at Lone Star's best efforts to exterminate them.

Not just Lone Star. The Pecos Empire is actively trying to kill them too. Like, I love the fact that like rats, Yeah. What could go wrong with a species that multiplies rapidly and doesn't like being caged?

And also is known for intense, uh, intra-individual cooperation.

Yeah. It's like, yeah. Um, and I also love the fact that, oh, look, a rift jumped in. 1,109 jumped through the rift. 313 showed up in the sewers for the Lone Star Comic-Con. Where's the other ones? It's like, oh, some of them were rifted to the Badlands. Okay, we're still missing 400 of these things. Just run it out there.

And depending upon how much time has passed since then, that's thousands. Ratpocalypse has happened somewhere else in the Megaverse.

The fact that Northern Gun does not have a rat problem was a huge miss.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Given, given where Northern Gun's located.

Uh, okay. Then the mutant bats. I thought that was, that screamed Firm Gully to me.

I've had a lot of people make comments about the bats, and I will support any quibbles people have about the class from a mechanical— mechanistic— mechanistic point of view. However, as a book that is set in Texas, which has some of the largest concentrations of bat caves in the entire United States, it makes sense to be here.

Yeah. Yeah. And then you get into the Zytychics killers.

Yes.

And I, I, I love these creatures. I think they're awesome. I've really liked them. You know, you flip to the COVID you flip to this page. I think these, it's, I don't want to give him credit, but of all of his horrible evil ideas, this one actually might help people, not just humans, because the Xiticix are a horrible thing.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

And he's going to breed creatures. Now, of course, because nature finds a way.

Yep.

There's this little caveat here that Yeah, they can breed in the wild. And right now they only can feed on the big nasty bugs right now.

So I was going to bring this up later, but this is a great point to bring it up. Lone Star brought to you by Jurassic Park.

Yeah.

And there you have it.

It's like, oh, look, we've wiped out all the horrible bugs. What are those? What? Oh, no, no, no. Wait, hold up.

We get into the, the underground, the, the escapees, multiple pages of backstory stuff here. Like, this is, yeah, we've, we've come back to the good Palladium stuff. This is meat. This is stuff to work with. This is good Underground Railroad kind of stuff. Alternate options, things that they've experimented with that didn't quite work out. Have you ever wanted to be a dog boy crazy? Well, you can't really do that here, but there are some thoughts What are your thoughts on if you wanted to try and why it was a bad idea?

See our recent episode on PsyScape and psi implants for some potential ideas.

I love the, I love the Psy-X aliens. I think they are awful as characters because, because their whole thing is essentially they're lazy, lazy and addicts. But the whole, the fact that they tried to breed aliens.

Also, why was, why did they appear in this book and not a book that included Nevada? Come on, folks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we'll talk about that.

No, I know.

But yeah, they're all lazy addicts basically. And then we get into talking about Desmond Bradford.

Sorry, before we go to Desmond Bradford, when was this book published?

1997.

1997.

I want to say April of '97.

When did American Dad come out?

Oh, I don't know. Oh God, no, that was the early 2000s.

Right.

Yeah.

That's the alien from American Dad.

Oh, you are correct. That is the alien from American Dad.

I could almost argue that the alien from American Dad is an early 2000s version of ALF.

To a certain extent, yes. But I would also point out, tell me that's not ALF.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But I love the fact that like they got away with it because everyone just thinks that they're DBs, right? That are like the Grays. Like, yeah.

Anyway.

So, you know, a character is fascinating When the entire character's introduction is a multi-page story.

Yeah.

And it's not badly written.

No.

This is good stuff.

Oh, that picture. I love that picture.

I, that is one of my favorite pictures in all of Palladium. Desmond Bradford. I love that look in his face. He's, he's well dressed. He looks like he's kind of tired of your shit.

Yes.

He doesn't look like a psychopath though. He looks like he could be your dad or your, your boss or something. He doesn't have that look in his eyes until you stop and you look real close. And then those eyes sort of peer into your soul and you realize, oh, fuck.

He, he come in this picture. He's the professor that you've been trying to like appease. And you just miss it. And finally he just gives you that look.

Yeah.

And you're like, oh man.

Counterpoint, did we need another Baxter Stockman? That is his— this character is so, so well-written and everything else. I think a couple of the choices are cribbing a little too hard off of Baxter Stockman.

Baxter Stockman's awesome.

Baxter Stockman's awesome. So do— so separate the two a little bit more. That would be my only tiny quibble. Uh, it's a very minor quibble.

Make them the same person.

So I think they are in my headcanon. They are the same person in my headcanon.

You were just talking about the Terror Bears.

That would make— oh my God.

Right.

Oh my God. I've always seen them as the same person.

Uh-huh.

Maybe alternate Earth or straight up rifted over and like, oh, I can manipulate these idiots. Off we go. I know where this— he already knew where that secret base is.

Let's take this back to the first handful of issues of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics.

That's literally where my brain went.

With the fucking, the Mouser robots and him robbing banks. But then we also get to the introduction of the Utroms and their thing. So let's just connect some dots here. Baxter Stockman and his Utroms step, or in his Mauser, step through the Utroms portal and end up in Rifts Earth at Lone Star. I love it.

Yep.

Okay.

I'm here for it.

And you know how there were 3 survivors? Maybe there were 4.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, and, and like, Sorry. And like, you keep reading this section on him. He has, he has, he has so many pages.

He has more pages devoted to him in any one place than Emperor Prozac does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like, if you keep reading this, it just gets worse and worse. Like randomly, uh, he's a genius. He's, oh, he continues to hide his highly Hide his illegal genetic experiments and was able to mastermind the assault on Lieutenant Emerson, plant false documents, and continue to manage the complex without missing a beat, leaving the slightest bit of evidence pointing back to him.

The last sentence before his stat block. After all, isn't it a god's duty to create new life?

Mm-hmm.

Right. If they did, well, we'll talk about that at another time. But if if if they ever are able to do a animated or live action adaptation of Riffs, Desmond Bradford needs to be the bad guy.

Denzel Washington.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, or oh Samuel Jackson.

Have you ever seen Forrest Whitaker do a bad guy?

Oh. Idris Elba. Desmond Bradford.

Oh yeah, yeah, 100%.

He even has the look in his eyes.

He's even got the like, look into my eye.

Yeah, yeah, there we go. No, um, that one's free, Kevin.

So the— so here's the thing. When Lone Star first came out and I read it, I was 100% certain they were starting to set up for a Coalition civil war on a much larger scale than they actually sort of did.

I, I never got that feeling because I think Desmond, as long as they just leave him alone.

Right. But the moment they start not leaving him alone, that's—

But the thing is, Desmond doesn't have to do anything. Right. All of this is in— we even get his opinions on the people and his connections to them and the power that he actually has over everyone else. He doesn't want to rule. He wants to play God.

Right. Which is where if the CS started screwing with him and his personal agenda, that would be the tipping point.

But I think, I honestly think that they would come to him and go, hey, this is bad. He goes, do you want to live another 50 years? It's not that bad.

Right.

Right.

Um, okay. You want disposable troops?

He's, he's one of the best written megalomaniacs I have seen in a role-playing setting. I like whoever wrote this character did a lot of thinking about, and there's a lot of internal logic to the character, which can be hard to do when you give him a 6-page backstory.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Skelebots come from here too? Because Lone Star isn't just genetics, right? Um, isn't it a whole industrial complex?

I don't remember.

I thought the Skelebots were found. But I honestly, I don't know. Now I have to go down a rabbit hole.

Now we have to go down the rabbit hole. Yep. Yep. We'll probably find out before this airs, but dear listeners, if you have thoughts on that, please, please post them. I think the people that follow Bradford are just as interesting, not necessarily on the grand scheme of things, but definitely as side characters in a movie about the fall of Desmond Bradford. Cashbrook, I think is a very interesting, compelling character that could potentially become something of a foil or an ally. Uh, the, the rest of them are, they, they all have, I like that they're mostly aberrant. They're not like miscreant or diabolic. You have these characters that, I mean, there are some, but it's, there's power playing happening in the background. There are angles of approach. that a group could potentially capitalize upon to insert themselves somewhere in the power scheme of Lone Star.

You have 2 good counterpoints. You have Frederick Philip Alexander, who's scrupulous. This guy, but he's a human supremacist, but he's scrupulous and he's loyal to the CS. But he's the good guy, right? But he's still chopping people's brains up. And then you have Dr. Laura Cunningham, Who's diabolic and human? I don't know if I've ever seen an NPC that's diabolic and human, not some supernatural evil.

I mean, they're, well, okay. In Rifts.

Diabolic and human? Yeah. Karl Prosek.

Okay.

I know he's diabolic.

There's a couple others. Like there's one in the England sourcebook, but it's not common. Yeah.

She's just a doctor.

Well, look at that picture. I know.

I'm just going to say, as someone who works in the medical profession, I don't see the problem with those 2 things.

I read slash saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Yeah.

Uh, what was that actress's name?

Uh, the one who played Nurse Ratched?

Yeah.

Oh God.

Also Kai Winn in Deep Space Nine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Louise Fletcher. I'm pretty sure that's it.

I think you're right.

I think it's Louise. Goddamn. Seriously, Nurse Ratched. This is Nurse fucking Ratched here. Dr. Amanda Santiago. Again, another one of these, these pictures where you look at this woman and she's like, oh, this pleasant woman holding this little baby puppy. Alignment: Miscreant. Oh, and then you read like she's got a 5-point plan.

Oh, fucking shut up. Like, like what?

There's, there's so much happening behind the scenes here at Lone Star. If only we had this much information on Syscape.

It would almost have been a complete role-playing game.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Almost.

And then, okay, we're not done yet.

Right.

Right. We've just got through Sci-State, through Lone Star, not Sci-State. We've just, we're not done yet. We just got through Lone Star and we're to page 126 and the Pecos Empire starts now. Now here is, here's, here's when I was going through this again, I thought to myself when I got to this point, I need another book for Pecos Empire.

Need another book. Like, there's a lot here.

There's so much already here in Lone Star. I want another book because the Pecos Empire, these aren't even really the foil to Lone Star. It's just the rest of Texas. Like, and it's not like Texas is small, guys. It's a big, it's a big chunk of land.

I have a momentary curiosity. What's the page count on Lone Star?

Uh, 176 with the ads.

What is the page count on Syescape?

Uh, 160 pages with the ad.

Wow. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, 18 more pages.

18 more pages and substantially less world-building content.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Lodestar has 18 more pages than Syescape and significantly more world-building content. Yeah.

But 18 pages is hardly anything.

Hardly anything.

Oh, but in that 18 pages, we're going to cover—

Oh yeah.

A million and a half people and the political craziness of a bunch of bandits, multiple of which have king and emperor in their titles.

Yes.

Good old Texas.

So we finally, finally get one of the creatures. Okay. Well, finally, I don't think these were in the sourcebook, were they? The Simvan?

They the revised they are. I think they're mentioned. They're mentioned everywhere.

Yeah, mentioned everywhere. Now we get to see the Simban. Oh man! Hold on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no. Let's get back to Paco Senpai here. These guys are fucking awesome. So you okay? One thing you were talking about Texas.

Yeah.

Earlier in the book at the very beginning when it's talking about like the coalition's presence. It makes a good frequent recurring point of letting you know that the Coalition really only controls a tiny little fraction, despite the fact that they call it the whole state. They say the whole state is ours. It is not.

No.

And this section here details exactly how much the Coalition actually owns, because the entire rest of the goddamn state outside of what, like, the Lone Star Complex. And I think like 2 other places in the northern hat of Texas.

If you look at page 14, if you look at page 14, it has a great map.

Yep.

It says, okay, here's the CS northern quadrant. Northern quadrant.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. They get the hat.

And that's like, that's being really optimistic.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. Like I would say they have their 3 or 4 major cities and they patrol the fuck out of it.

Yeah.

But in reality, it's 3 or 4 major cities.

And when you're reading about the Pecos Empire, it implies that extends into Arkansas and New Mexico.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, as you read about the Pecos Empire and you start picking out the leaders, you start figuring out like, what's it like to be a bandit? The nomads, how the gangs work. You're like, you're, there's lots of background material with no super specifics yet. But then when you start getting into the leaders, and again, Pecos Empire, you get this vision of like the Roman Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, right? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no. These are despotic warrior kings that have minions that they throw at things.

Yeah.

This is like Germany after the Thirty Years' War where everybody hates each other and will put a knife in each other at the drop of a hat. But screw it if we're going to let those Spaniards muck with us one more time or those goddamn Swedes.

Right. These are all very fascinating characters too. Yeah.

Well, and it starts with Gray Fox, an Apache who, you know, is running around and you're like, what is this guy's story? Why, why is he the— he's a 14th level wilderness scout. What the hell? Like, like, oh my God. What's he doing? And then you start King Macklin and who's, who's like kind of reluctant. You have all of his followers.

Then you finally get to the one who believes, who is trying to set himself up as the empire, right? As the emperor of the empire, Emperor Saberlazar.

Yeah.

And he's a fucking dragon.

Oops. My bad.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like, he's really a dragon. Oh, okay. Now this is where my mechanic mind, I'm like, uh, could you pull this off mechanically? And I don't think you could purely based on like how long you can hold human form, I think. But this is the first time This isn't the only time they've done this. And later on they do it again. The idea that a dragon's like, you know what? I'm going to muck with human politics. I'm going to go lead an organization.

I would, I would like to, uh, point out that there is a difference between how long a dragon hatchling can maintain human form and how long a fully adult dragon can maintain human form.

Absolutely. This is, they call this the young adult fire dragon, which I think they're cheap. It might be around the time the Dragon and Gods book. for Palladium Fantasy that came out and I think they tweaked some of the rules, but yeah. But anyway, aside, that aside, which I can totally put aside, he's also a 10th level leyline walker.

Oh, we got a good picture from Ramon Perez here, advertise, which is essentially an advertisement for the Machinations of Doom comic that he did. And again, I love any pictures we get of the good old 3-wheeler. Yeah, that's the classic mainstay of Rift's adventuring parties since day one.

Yeah.

We've got some new OCCs. We've got some— the deeper dive into the Psystalker that by now we're all familiar with from the Ultimate Edition and the Sim Van. Oh, love it. And we close out with a little bit more about the Lone Star State. What else is happening in Texas, including the haunted ruins of Dallas, which I actually have— I've semi-written an adventure that takes place there. Again, unfortunately, the Rifts campaign that I was running never got to go there, but I always found it very cool. More on the Pecos Empire, more— just, just, this is a fucking awesome book.

Yeah, the only criticism I have about it Is I would have liked touch, touch, touch more detail on, uh, what's going on in Texas between Lone Star and the Pecos Empire and the Vampire Kingdoms. They actually do.

They mentioned some of that.

I, I just wanted a little bit more, just a little bit, like just a little bit.

The— I agree with you, uh, and the The kind of the, oh, well, the Rio Grande River kind of keeps them out. And I'm like, uh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Um, but, uh, that, that like, there's so much in this book and they crammed, like, this is why I think it should have been a second book. It should have been like the Pecos Empire World Book 14 should have been the Pecos Empire.

Right.

Because they crammed this in like 18, 20 pages. And I'm like, there's so much here.

The one thing I love though is given how Texas is a lot like California, where you can— like when you talk to someone from California, they talk about how there's like at least 3 separate Californias inside of California. I do really take my hat off to Palladium for recognizing the same thing is very, very true in Texas.

Yeah.

It, and that head nod of how geography and distance and culture and habitability shape different social structures in one geographical region is spot on.

Yep.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'm going to come out and say it. You need this book.

You need this book. I think across the board.

Yeah.

Buckley's nodding.

Okay.

Yep.

Yep.

This is a must-have if you are a Palladium player, unless you're one of those weirdos who has abandoned North America completely.

True, fair. Or you're one of those people who plays entirely in like Faesworld or something. And there's a lot of books there for you to do that. So no shame. But if you, if you are considering even taking an adventuring party to Rifts North America, Lone Stars has so much information behind the scenes on one of the dominant factions of the region.

Yep. Yep. Oh, such a good book.

Yep. So folks, stop by our Discord and tell us your favorite adventuring tales of running around in the Lone Star region. We'd love to hear them. It's, again, there's, there's so much to work with here. I can only imagine you've spent, you know, 20 years of a campaign just running around the Pecos Empire. Catch you next time. Starships, magic, mystic martial arts, romance— all of these can be found in A Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher.

You might have heard my name before.

I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies, and I've recently released my first novel. It's available on Amazon as an ebook and paper paperback, and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription.

I do hope you'll support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one.

Thank you.

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