#191 – Rifts World Book 15 Spirit West

Breakfast puppies. This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

You're listening to the Glitter Boys.

Closing out the Elvis Presley Rifts American Trilogy, we have Spirit West. Which is the first book I think I've ever seen with Wayne Broe Jr. as a title, uh, the author credit.

I think you are correct.

Yep. Another book taking place here in the, uh, the Southwest and the, the West of America. Cowboys, Indians, gunslingers, bank robberies, and genetic mutations, just like we had in our old Western.

I remember that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

This book is one that I had debated if we should do it for the same reasons that we've skipped over the Africa one until we've taken— give it a fair talk, you know? And this one, I read it over a couple times. I don't think it is as bad as some people have retroactively claimed it is.

So when you open up the book and you get into it and you've gotten past the table of contents and all that, on page 9, you start with kind of what their vision was in the introduction from both Wayne and from Kevin and how, at least to their thought process at that time, they are doing some due diligence to try to present this in a positive, accurate light, which by lenses today could be difficult. Lenses then, take it with, you know, kind of, you know, give them some liberty to some, you know, some be gracious with them to that they were trying.

Yeah. This is a book that I feel they had to do in order to finish up. If they were going to do New West, And they did New West. This book had to happen, or something along these lines, because you can't touch upon that region with things happening in that region focusing only on the aspects of the, the white people migration into the West. Like, you can't just glamorize the gunslingers and the cowboys. You also have to recognize the cultures of the people that were there before Our cowboys invaded. And this book had to happen. And the opening bit, the introduction, the words essentially come out and say that, like, we wanted to do this in order to show the rest of this region and to give it a fair look. And I think they did well. Like, none of this comes out as exceptionally racist in my opinion. It's—

Yeah.

There's a lot of vagueness. They touch on how a lot of the tribes have evolved, have merged, have changed, how old ones have vanished and new ones have come to light. They do the same thing that they did in South America by bringing out the old gods as new entities. It's— this is actually, in many ways, this feels like the Rift's South America take on the Native American West.

Yeah.

And they are kind of creating their own mythos for all of this because, you know, Native Americans, it's not one people, right? It's thousands of different organizations and groups of people. And they're basically saying, we know that, but for the simplicity of a game, this is how we're setting this field and follow us on this story of how we're doing it. They have a lot of buildup and background material, some really good Some fiction, some interesting stories on how they're telling their story, the origin story, kind of the return. When I first read this, I was like, oh, so they got a bunch of power. Like when the rifts came, this is actually not a horrible thing for them in some ways, for the different tribes and the shamans. All of a sudden they could actually cast big magic.

Well, it was kind of like, fucking finally.

Yeah.

And they go through that story and then they They talk about that.

I would say that my biggest complaint from the start is that there's only 32 pages dedicated to the actual setting component. As with Syescape, this is largely a stuff book, like OCCs, creatures, magic, weapons, and some machines at the back.

Right.

Yeah. I mean, each of these collections of OCCs and things are peppered with Inspirational fodder for you to include them in games. But largely it's, it runs that, it's that conflict between like, you know, we're going to Palladium, we're going to make a new book and our fans want stuff. They want lots of stuff. And we have all these cool ideas for stuff, but we ran out of space for, for the setting.

Right.

Yeah.

Right. Uh, yeah. Only, I mean, they talk about— I think I enjoyed and have used in my games kind of the breakdown for the different, not tribes or peoples, but the different types and how they interpreted the world. You know, the modern, the traditionalists, the pure ones, the renegades, and gives you their own schisms and their own breakdowns inside their own organizations. And they don't necessarily look down at each other about it. Just that's their— that was their viewpoint.

Yeah.

on how things went and, and the, the different walks in their lives. But as you said, like, that's only the first like 32 pages and then—

Yep.

We're off into OCCs.

But we got a lot of info on Canada, actually, of the tribes at least. That was, that was unexpected.

Yeah.

This is a book that I have a lot of opinions about and it's one I struggle with a lot. It's not bad.

I would definitely not say that this is a good book.

Right.

But I would not say it's a bad book either.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. It's a tough one to talk about because I am not rooted in any of these cultures. I don't have any of this in my history. So I cannot, you know, personally relate to this beyond movies that I've seen and, and this manifest of somebody else's imaginative version of these cultures. I like the stories that I've seen in here so far. I like the mechanics of several of the classes. I think the Totem Warrior is a very, very interesting class. I like the, the way that the class is based on different totems, giving it different manifestations of how those totems can appear. So that creates a bit of versatility and also means that no two characters of that class are going to be remotely alike. I like those concepts.

There's some interesting aspects here of— they, they call them fetish fetishes.

Yeah.

Of kind of the shamanic thing that gives them some power. Several of the classes use those.

Yep. The mask powers are pretty cool.

And they're, they stay pretty consistent within the classes of the different ones. And, and it's very different aspects. So you can kind of, I as you're saying, pick to see each character of that type. H-O-C-C will never, you'll never see the same one twice.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lots of new magic. Again, Palladium, I think is, is in my opinion, I love seeing it anytime that they come up with brand new magic, like paradox magic. That's cool. It's hard to really come up with much of an opinion about this simply because it's just a big old stuff book. Most of the stuff is cool. It's really neat stuff, but it's also very, very, very focused on a very specific region. I, as a game master, will frequently look at a Rifts book and think, can I use this in something else? How can I apply this to another part of the world? And there's not much here that you can do that with. The creatures, I like the Black-Winged Monster Men despite their really stupid name.

I kind of want to know where those origins came from. They mention Nez Perce in the write-up.

Yeah.

And I know that there are some very— from the little research that I've done, various of the Native American tribes have some very scary stories of the things that make them— their bump-in-the-night stories, right?

Yeah.

And then some of those creatures are very Hard to grasp and are terrifying, and I kind of and I'm wondering if these are coming from that. The man eagles—I don't know if the name fits. There might have been a better translation there.

The man monsters are fascinating as well. Yeah, the the variety that they come in and the yeah yeah yeah yeah, and they're and and most of them are.

corruptions of the other OCCs. Like they've gone too far down a path. They've, they've been corrupted. You know, it's, you know, the, the old saying, you know, uh, he should— he who fights monsters should be careful not to become one. And this is like definitely talking about how you're the hero until you're the villain.

Mm-hmm.

And they become the, the, the bad guys. There's a lot of interesting aspects here that you can play with. at just a very high surface level. And it gets interesting.

The spirit realm, I think, is interesting to me because I've— so I've gained a lot of inspiration in my tabletop role-playing game from a very popular series of television called Avatar: The Last Airbender. And in that show, one of the recurring themes is the existence of a spirit world that the Avatar can go between. And of course, that spirits can go between as well. This representation of the spirit realm is very, very similar to that as well. The different manifestations of the spirits, how they cross over, how they will interact with this world and that world. It's— This is probably the one part I think that you can take the most inspiration from If you were going to take the contents of this book to use in another part of the world.

Because theoretically it should be there, right? You know, you should be able to latch into that. Um, if you're playing an OCC from this and you're not in the New West, you ventured off somewhere else, it could be an aspect for it, the contacting the different spirits, the different creatures as part of your, your ethos, as part of what you are and what you're doing.

Yeah. Um, and we get the appearance of the Sasquatch, even though mistitled. Which one?

The Windigo?

Yeah.

Yeah. That, that knowing what I know about Windigo.

Yeah. It's a putting them under that name is not problematic, but just really super incorrect.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Like I, that one has never, ever, ever, like, how did, Hmm.

I've never before this book seen the term wendigo used to, to be used to describe creatures that are noted as being good.

Yeah, because they're not. No. And, and more of the fact, the fact that they're described as a physical entity is also incorrect. Yeah.

This is basically Sasquatch.

Well, I mean, if you go down, down below the heading for wendigo, wendigo NPC and optional RCC, also known as Sasquatch and Bigfoot. You know, they're 2 different things. Even in different Native American mythologies, they literally in some cases exist side by side.

Yeah.

That said, if you were to call them Sasquatch or Bigfoot, I really like them.

Yeah. They have some of the deities.

I think the deities are pretty cool too.

Yeah.

They have some good flavor there in the deities. And then you get into the technology, which is—

Let's just ignore that part of the book.

Yeah.

Well, I do want to make one specific I have a specific callout on the technology front, and that's the fact that they, the Native Americans, have access to the oldest operating version of Samus.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

That's, that's worth a callout just because it's pretty darn cool.

Yeah. And I like the aspect of the technology because the, uh, the modern natives and the Renegades They, most of this stuff is their things that they built, they designed, or they have their, their, their guidance through their, their, their, their spirits have helped them build this stuff. So it's like they have their own technology base. It's not just magic. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you could have spirit warriors coming at you with magically enhanced horses and magically enhanced lances. Oh, and a wing of Samus fly by.

You're like, wait, what?

What? What was that?

I just said the technology looks a little dumb in this book.

Yeah, it doesn't fit from that perspective. Yeah.

So, but, um, and then the last few pages of the book are some on some of the government, uh, the regions. It's, it's very minimal information. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

I recently tried to use this book in a campaign. I tried to use it in, uh, the game that luckily you were in. The, we called it the Popsicles campaign. Yep. In that campaign, I tried to, I wanted to include the presence of 3 nations, the Pawnee, the, um, the Comanche, and I forget who it was that I had to the west in the mountains.

Paiute or Ute?

No, no, no. It was, um, that's the tip of my tongue. Anyway, tried to include these 3 cultures. And I spent a lot of time looking over this book. It's like, okay, find all the references I can to these regions. And it just wasn't much information. Nope. Yeah. Yeah. I had to make a lot of it up. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, you know, unleash your imagination and all that stuff. But this, that, that is a definite negative quality of this book. It, it, it has more than Syescape did.

Mm-hmm.

It might even have more setting information than the complete role-playing game known as Chaos Earth, but it's still— I didn't find it to be enough information to really bring these cultures forth into the game.

And especially given that this is, shall we say, the sister volume for New West. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that the Blackfoot are not mentioned almost entirely, given their strong presence in Colorado, was kind of like a Huh?

I, as someone who grew up on the Oregon coast and I look at the Northwest tribes, there were more tribes than that within 25 miles of where I grew up.

Oh yeah. The modern Grand Ronde Reservation at one time had 90 different languages and just shy of 85 different tribal groups on it. So yeah.

Now I have to, I will go back to what we said at the beginning is this book was done in '97. They're game designers, not anthropologists. Right. Right. Right. And they, they, and not to give them, well, no, I would give them a pass. They're like, we did what we could. Here's our references. If you don't like these references, here you go. Yeah. And, and maybe these references now, as happens, aren't good. Right. Right. And so they're not going to catch everything. No. Should we ask the question how maybe they should have approached it?

Well, Without taking this too far on a tangent, you have to set these side by side by— with other products that were currently on the market at the time. Shadowrun fundamentally did a far, far better job of research and portrayal by doing the Shadowrun high-level macro, don't drill down too deep on mechanic— mechanistic structures. Uh, did a far better job on cultures and actually interpolating historical trends within the cultures to their modern present forms. I think they did a little bit better job of balancing traditionalist views versus non-traditionalist views within various cultures. So I mean, there were other presentations of this. This is not bad. I have seen Before, during, and after the period this book was written, far worse portrayals of Native Americans. Someone was working their butt off to try to be respectful, and they did a pretty decent job. One of the biggest problems I have with this book is it tries to take on pretty much all of the vastly different cultures and mythologies of the Native peoples from North America. And while they did a 210-page-count book to do it, it's real damn hard. Like, you know, I literally teach a 2.5-hour class on a very basic introduction to some of the subject matter.

I've got thoughts on how it could have been done better just using the existing material. Yeah, we talked in the New West episode about how the cloud magic, the, the Lince Real, probably should have been put into Spirit West. And yeah, actually, I think so. And I think that the Renegades and the, uh, the technological aspect of the Native Americans in this setting should have been removed from Spirit West and put in the New West book.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Possibly.

Yeah, because Spirit West is Spirit West, right? So if you focus on nothing but the spirit aspect of things, instead of making it the Native American book, make it the spirit world presence around the New West.

Yep.

Of course, given that the Native Americans have been here the longest, simply by nature of being here throughout generations, they would have a closer connection to the spiritual presence of the region.

Which makes sense. Yeah. You know, I mean, I guess the greatest criticism I have for this book is it falls into the trap of the traditionalist-modernist split in Native American culture, which is fundamentally a thing that never has existed. And when you see books fall into it, it always makes me kind of just go, What? And I get why they're doing it. They're pairing it with the New West book, which is an homage to the Old West and all of that. And so it makes a lot of sense. It's, it's just— and I don't want to criticize anybody who's writing a gaming book for failure to go in-depth as hard on the subject as, like, someone like me who literally grew up with a foot in the culture.

Yeah.

That it's, it's just a flawed assumption that a lot of game designers do. And I honestly think that if game designers moved away from that flawed assumption, there's a lot more interesting things you could do. And it's— I really wish they had done it. Taking this to our standard, should you own this book? I think there's actually a lot of great material in here for what amounts to a catalog book, a stuff book as we call it. It's one that as long as you don't take it as anything more than a Rift-specific sourcebook, it's, it's the one that I actually kind of think everyone should own just because there's so much to plumb in there. And like you were talking about the spirit world, like, and getting to and from it, I You know, there's references to that in other books, and I would love to see that have been expanded on more, and I think it's a perfect reason to own it. If you are going to pick up New West, you almost are required to pick up Spirit West to get the other side of the story on the same areas that are covered in New West.

Like I said at the very opening lines of this episode, it's a trilogy of books. Lone Star, New West, and Spirit West. Yep. I feel that if you're going to get one, you should get all 3.

Oh yeah, 100%.

And I, I would agree with that. Uh, I think the comment that you made, Nathaniel, about the Lincerail should have been in here. Um, the Traditionalists and the Renegades, or excuse me, the, the Moderns and the Renegades could have been in New West and the robots could have tied it all together much nicer. I think along with kind of the split that you're discussing, they could have maybe tried to simplify, in some ways simplify and basically say, these are the ones that survived.

Yeah.

We're not going to give you 5 or 6, 7, 8 tribes for every— these are the 10 that survived. And we're sorry, we're not trying to pick favorites, but these are the ones that survived. This is how they're doing. This is the nations that rose or they combined. Right?

The one thing I would have loved to have seen them done is not go for the overarching treatment they did and literally concentrate on the core New West and gone deeper in that.

Yep.

Like, you have 85 different tribal groups in that particular slice of the country that is the Rift's New West, right? Because even though it's mentioned in New West, let's be real, Washington, Oregon, Canada, or California really aren't— no, no, not in there. And, um, they're, they're making nods to southeastern tribes and such. And I, I, I think maybe concentrating a bit would have been better, but overall great. It's a good book.

Well, like you said about Shadowrun, I was super, super, super, super steeped in Shadowrun for a long time. And Shadowrun, I think, did a better job of personifying the Native Americans of that time. But one thing that they did to make it simpler was they turned them into individual nations with greater power. And then they just focused on those nations while, you know, whenever they would dive into the nations, they would then talk about the councils that broke down. But in Shadowrun, ultimately it all broke down to what the Sioux, the Ute, the Pueblo, uh, I forget. The Cherokee.

There are just over 30 different, uh, polities of Native Americans in Shadowrun. Also, Shadowrun benefited from Native Americans from the onset being a core component of the world. Right.

So, well, at least, at least I know in North America, let's see, uh, there were 6. So let's see, there was Ucas, Cas, Aslan, Pueblo, Sioux, and Ute, I think were the 6 treat— no, the treaty nations. So, and everything else broke down out of that.

Yeah.

So yeah, as a part of the 3, you need it. Yeah. And it adds parts that don't show up anywhere else. And yeah.

For how to use this in the greater Megaverse, the more we talk about this being the Spirit West, and if we focus entirely on the spiritual components of it, I think this book could be a good companion to something like the Between the Shadows Nightbane book, which dealt with the astral and the dream. You take this and mix that into the spirit world aspects here, the astral and the dream and the spirit world. You have a nice group of 3, and 3 is always a good number, and a nice group of 3 external realms to balance between.

The other thing I'd call out for a reason to buy this book, actually independent of the other 3, is that if you are playing in Rifts Japan or Rifts Russia, or certain other parts of the— South America does a decent treatment on the native population down there.

Mm-hmm.

But other places where the other books didn't really bend into, like, the Inuit or the many, many, many different groups of Siberian peoples, you can take Spirit West and pull templates out of it you can— that you can use for traditional peoples in other parts of the world.

Yeah.

And, and that's another place to use it. Like, I grabbed— when I ran a Rifts Russia game, I grabbed Spirit West in order to do Siberian and traditional Finnish individuals. You know, it's— you, you, you have to do some tweaks and turns there, but not a heck of a lot.

Well, folks, please stop by our Discord and join the discussion. This is, this is one that I, I'm, I think we'll get a lot of conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to see where that goes. We will continue with this world book saga very soon. Thanks for listening.

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 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.

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys: Rifts the Megaverse, and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order directly at palladiumbooks.com, and their entire catalog is available digitally at DriveThruRPG as well. Our opening music is 8-Bit Bass and Lead by Furbyguy from freesound.org. This closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross, available at freemusicarchive.org. All sound effects used are self-made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero license. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as The Glitter Boys— that's B-O-I-S— and check us out online at breakfastpuppies.com/glitterboys, and also join us on the Breakfast Puppies Network Discord at breakfastpuppies.com/discord. And if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.