We’ve been playing Rifts with a few of our friends for a couple of months now. The game has always been really, really good, in part because the GM has such knowledge of the Palladium universe and is a born actor and orator and story teller. However, last night’s game was above and beyond.

It’s been a long time since there’s been a game where I’ve felt my character, and it’s also been a long time since I’ve been in a game where everyone consistently plays their character and isn’t just reading stats off a piece of paper, and that’s going on in this game all of the time, which is why things were SO great last night.

We had a very dramatic session, two of the players were involved in something which would awaken the spirit inside another players planet. It’s something that there’s been rumblings about for a few sessions, which added to the tension. At the previous session my character had a vision of it happening and we’d actually talked one of the guys into going back to our vessel instead of remaining on the surface so he didn’t accidentally trigger the Apocalypse. However his best friend, played by my husband, had come to be of the opinion that awakening the planet would help restore his people and also prevent a worse disaster, that if he agreed to graft himself to the planet he could act as it’s conscience, given the planet was actually an “ancient being” known as “the one who sleeps” and would basically once awoken go around eating other planets. He believed strongly, due to his character’s depth of faith, that it was his mission to help this planet and thus convince it that being good was better and thus he could prevent it from destroying the universe. He had a fairly convincing argument that it would wake up anyway at some point and without him as it’s conscience that would be worse.

Roomie who was playing the planet’s native made a heartfelt and heart-tugging appeal that had several of us nearly in tears, and coupled with that and the fact that one of the GMs non-player characters attacked my husband and hurt him making my character feel that he would have less chance of standing up against the alien intelligence of the planet she took a measure that someone had given her which said, “when all hope is lost use this”.

At a certain point the entire room went silent we were just so drawn into the story, as the end of the awakening “ritual” came about and everything went haywire. It was a very tense night but also a really great one too. We have to wait two weeks until we found out what’s going to happen next. Is hubbie’s faith justified? Do we have to take other measures we now have at our disposal to “undo a big mistake”? Are we even going to be able to get away from the planet to try anything?