My first role-playing game was Rifts from Palladium Books, though my friends and I pretty quickly moved on to their modern horror game Beyond the Supernatural and the Palladium Fantasy RPG (PF). To this day, PF is one of my favorite settings, and the system in which I am most expert. But being deeply familiar with the system doesn’t mean that I find it to be perfect.

For as much as I have deep, abiding affection for Palladium Fantasy and other Palladium games, their system is very imperfect. I’m not the first to point this out, of course, but I have some specific ideas on what the problem areas are, and I’m working on solutions — solutions for my own use, of course, but which I intend to document here for any others who may be interested.

It’s obvious, to start, that PF began its life as D&D. Kevin Siembieda — the frankly underappreciated force of nature behind Palladium Books and their many publications over four decades — had some of his art published in Judges Guild material for the original Dungeons & Dragons and early Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Obviously, then, D&D was a significant influence. As Jon Peterson points out in his The Elusive Shift, the earliest days of RPGs following immediately on from the publication of D&D in 1974 were a time of wide interpretations of the rules of D&D, with each play group not only devising different styles of play, but building out the rules system as they saw fit. Often systems would be invented at the table, either on the fly by the referee or through consensus by the whole play group, to handle scenarios which the original rules admitted they were not intended to adjudicate. From the start, D&D admitted that it wasn’t designed to do everything for you, but that it was adaptable enough to handle anything which might come up with a bit of quick thinking and ingenuity. In other words, the early rules were intended to be a framework for one’s own game more than a closed system.

The Palladium system is evidently an effort at filling in that framework. If we look at the first edition of the Palladium Fantasy RPG, we see that spellcasters have tables of “spells per day” according to experience level; the biggest other change when going up in experience being an increase in hit points; tweaked version of familiar spells named for important personages in the Palladium milieu; and so forth. But Siembieda was also obviously trying to fix some problems he perceived in The Original Game.

For one, he made characters more skilled, competent, and survivable at first level; Gary Gygax himself solved this problem by starting player characters in his own games at 3rd level, but other designers like Siembieda obviously wanted a solution which didn’t require such in-system artifice. A first level wizard in Palladium can already cast more spells in a day, and in 2nd edition can learn and cast spells even above their level as long as they can find a source for the knowledge and for the occult energy necessary to activate it. Combat is more reactive, with defenders also being permitted a die roll to parry or dodge their attacker.

All of Siembieda’s solutions are surprisingly well thought out for how long ago the system was devised. But there haven’t been any significant overhauls of the Palladium system since the 1980s! Once the systems of S.D.C., M.D.C., and P.P.E. were fully integrated, the Palladium system was pretty much in its final form — and all of those were already in place in the first edition of Beyond the Supernatural in 1987. I’m not enough of a historian to know for sure if these systems were present in earlier Palladium Books games, but knowing for sure that they were at least there by 1987 is enough to illustrate my point.

I have lately been running OD&D using the Delving Deeper v.4 iteration of the rules. The irony of using a retroclone of 1974 rules in 2021 is not lost on me in this connection, but once again those rules are really much more of a framework than a complete game — and I enjoy treating them as such. My Delving Deeper game is not going to look a lot like someone else’s, and that’s a great strength to me. While we may use the same combat matrix, list of spells, and so forth, there will nevertheless be fairly big divergence between my and another referee’s DD campaign. And that’s great!

So I’ve begun the project of a total conversion: Palladium Fantasy RPG to Delving Deeper. Some of the subsystems and procedures in Palladium’s games were interesting moves at the time they were devised and implemented but many of these are inelegant and could use rethinking; others seem like afterthoughts, as if Siembieda and his early groups simply forgot about certain details until they had to figure something out at the table and they never went back to clean things up for long-term play.

As this series progresses, I will be detailing my own handling of these things. At first this will be purely theoretical, but with time I hope to playtest each of them at my own table — in the form of a total conversion of my own ongoing Palladium Fantasy RPG campaign.