The Home of Palladium Books and their Role Playing Games. By Kevin Siembieda. One game system – every genre – countless worlds – endless adventure. The last few weeks have been a blur. Heck, who am I kidding?
The first half of this year has been a blur. So much going on.
A lot of it very good and the rest very promising. Rifts. The book went long, so it is 2.
I will have Wayne put up a FREE sneak preview on Drive. Thru. RPG. com today. It is truly everything you have ever wanted to know about Atlanteans and then some. I’m already working on Nightbane. The finished manuscript for Rifts.
Oh, and Gen Con Indy is in about 3 weeks! How did that happen? Read on to get all the latest. UPDATE: Rifts. Probably shipping around August 9th, so get those orders in. Btw, we added 3. 2 pages, because we did not want to cut out any of the awesomeness.
Palladium Books®, open a Rift and explore the Megaverse® of RPG adventure with titles like Rifts®, Heroes Unlimited, Dead Reign, Nightbane®, Splicers®, Robotech. Jump Start: Reading For Kindergartners.
Price is still $2. And I got Wayne to put up a free preview on Drive. Thru. RPG. com! UPDATE: Last weekend to get Palladium Tumblers – Offer ends July 2. The window to get one of the tumblers with a snazzy Palladium logo design closes after this weekend. This item is made to order and we can only take orders till July 2. After that the offer is over and we cannot get any more made. So please place your orders this weekend or be left out.
Roughly THREE days left to order. The four designs: Palladium Fantasy. These vacuum insulated tumblers with logo and art have airtight lids, never sweat, hold 3. Watertight when sealed. Well worth it. Offer ends at Midnight July 2. News: Rifts! For those of you who don’t know, Bundle of Holding has been hosting sales on collections of RPG PDFs since February of 2.
Two of the great things about these sales are: One, they give gamers a chance to try out a new game or build their existing e- library by getting the core book and several supporting volumes at a bargain price. Two, 1. 0% of every purchase goes toward charity! That’s right, you can get PDFs of Rifts. In the past, Bundle of Holding has supported such diverse groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Heifer International, Ocean Conservancy, and Reading is Fundamental. For our first bundle, we have chosen to support Doctors Without Borders (http: //www. They provide desperately needed medical services to people affected by poverty, war and disasters all over the world. There are two tiers to this Rifts.
The Starter Collection gets you: Rifts! The PDF bundles are hosted through One. Book. Shelf, Drive.
Thru. RPG’s parent company, and your PDF bundle items are added directly into your Drive. Thru. RPG library. You don’t have a Drive. Thru. RPG account yet? No worries, they are FREE and very easy to set up.
OTHER CRITICAL HIT EFFECTS The author of the following Critical Hit Effects is Josef Tham, who, like myself, is a physician by trade, and thus both interested in and. Fantasy Grounds is the most supported virtual tabletop available, with more official licenses than any other virtual tabletop around.
Space Marine Legions . Together, bound by ties of unshakeable loyalty, a Legion is a force that can extinguish the stars and shake the very heavens. This initial Founding happened before the start of the Great Crusade that reunited the scattered worlds of humanity beneath the banner of the Imperium of Man, while the Unification Wars were still raging on Terra.
At the start of the Crusade, as the Legions were placed at the forefront of the Imperial Expeditionary Fleets that left Terra to reunite the human- settled galaxy, the Astartes were renamed Space Marines and their formations the Space Marine Legions. Unlike the current Adeptus Astartes, who serve the Imperium of the late 4. Millennium as a planetary assault and rapid strike force, the Space Marine Legions were the primary frontline military forces of the ancient Imperium of Man. This role changed after the Second Founding, when the Astra Militarum replaced the Legiones Astartes as the Imperium's frontline armed forces, relegating the much smaller Space Marine Chapters to a more specialised role as effectively special operations troops. A Space Marine Legion, unlike the 1,0. Chapters of the present- day Adeptus Astartes created after the Second Founding at the end of the Horus Heresy, could number anywhere from 1. Space Marines, as well as the Legion's associated Imperial Army, logistical support forces and fleet elements.
A force of a hundred of these genetically and biochemically- enhanced transhuman warriors could quell a rebellious city in solar hours. Thousands could conquer a world in only solar days, and tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands wielded at once were the doom of entire species, capable of reducing alien civilisations to mere dust and memory in a span no greater than the single course of Terra's orbit around the Sun. Much of the discipline and organisation of the early Astartes Legions owed greatly to the ancient and proven Terran patterns of military strategy, hierarchy and functions as laid down in the revered texts of the Principia Belicosa of Roma and Krom's fragmentary New Model that had survived in the hands of the tyrants of Old Earth down the blood- stained generations of the Age of Strife.
To these venerable treatises the Emperor and His commanders had added their own genius and created a sturdy but adaptable strategic framework that spoke to the fundamental strengths and superhuman abilities of the Astartes themselves. At the outset of the Great Crusade in circa 8. M3. 0, many of these early Legions were raised along the so- called . Nine of these Legions would continue to stay utterly loyal and faithful to the Emperor of Mankind during the Horus Heresy and thus they serve as the genetic forbears of all current Loyalist Space Marine. Chapters of the present era. The Space Marine Legions and their Primarchs were the Emperor's primary military force and most important advisers, respectively, and were intended to be the political and military speartip of the Great Crusade.
However, the Emperor also wanted to create a civilian government for the Imperium of Man which would ultimately hold authority over even the Primarchs, a change embodied in the creation of the Council of Terra in the early 3. Millennium that angered many of the Emperor's sons and ultimately became one of the contributing factors to the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. The Legions were aided by the ground and naval forces of the Imperial Army, the predecessor of the present- day Astra Militarum and Imperial Navy, but these forces more often served in support and garrison duties while the heaviest combat and the most important and difficult missions were always carried out by the Astartes Legions.
This was a matter that only worsened as the Great Crusade pushed ever wider afield into the galaxy. Imperial forces could no longer be concentrated as easily as before, and attrition was taking its toll as standard years of near- constant battle became solar decades. To slow the relentless pace of the Great Crusade's progress was for the Emperor simply not an option. As such, the simple truth was that more Space Marines were needed and they needed to be created faster than before. Such accelerated gene- seed techniques, along with absent, inadequate or over- forceful psycho- doctrination techniques, were later found to have unseen fundamental flaws. Many Imperial savants since have come to believe that the drive to create larger Space Marine Legions at an accelerated speed played a prime role in the degradation of the sanity and psychological make- up of certain Legions and paved the way for the horror that was to come.
They became the Traitor Legions of Chaos Space Marines that still threaten the Imperium today. In the end, the Horus Heresy made clear that no single commander could be trusted to wield the enormous power of a Space Marine Legion, never mind several at once. The Ultramarines' Primarch. Roboute Guilliman led the post- Heresy Reformation of the Imperium that reshaped the Space Marine Legions into the Adeptus Astartes and broke up each of the remaining Loyalist Space Marine Legions into the myriad 1,0.
Space Marine. Chapters to protect humanity from the rise of another Horus. It has been suggested that they were destroyed by, or under direct order of, the Emperor for some unknown, grave transgression, or flaw in their gene- stock, and all evidence of their existence was purged from Imperial records. A precise, pre- set formation was never truly achieved or maintained. Even during the Great Crusade some Legions were very large, while others were not. The size of each Legion was fluid, with the numbers of combat- ready Astartes dependent on the number of new recruits, the inevitable battle- losses, the availability of potential recruits, and the administrative skills of the Primarch and his officers. The Ultramarines numbered approximately 2.
Astartes at their peak before the Battle of Calth and the Word Bearers approximately 1. It was the Ultramarines' sheer size, as well as the purity and stability of their gene- seed, which insured that more Second Founding Successor Chapters were created from the XIII Legion than from any of the other Loyalist Legions.
The Primarch Fulgrim's gene- samples had been largely lost on Terra, making it difficult to develop new gene- seed for his III Legion, and this meant that the Emperor's Children found it difficult to recruit new Astartes, also leaving it with a relatively small number of Space Marines. Both of these Legions would increase their numbers to acceptable levels only after their Primarchs were found by the Emperor during the course of the Great Crusade. With the loss of 5. Legionaries sustained during the Third Rangdan Xenocide, the Dark Angels no longer secured primacy over their fellow Legions and had fallen in number and evened this figure. Following the dissolution and/or destruction of the II and XI Space Marine Legions, the ranks of the Ultramarines supposedly swelled to approximately 2. Astartes, making them the largest Legion at the start of the Horus Heresy.
Sadly, their numbers would be depleted and their primacy ended by solar decades of savage warfare, particularly in the wars of the Rangdan Xenocides, one of the most apocalyptic campaigns of the Great Crusade. They suffered massive casualties holding the line during the Third Rangdan Xenocide; the blood of 5. Space Marines was spent in preventing the destruction of perhaps the entire northern Imperium by the alien menace from the outer darkness. Sources and estimates vary wildly, some making extravagant claims which may both overestimate or undervalue the Alpha Legion's manpower. Most contemporaneous accounts around the time of the Drop Site Massacre put the Alpha Legion at between 1. Astartes strong, placing it within the middle tier of Legion strengths. Some theorists have pointed the figure as far lower, somewhere in the 9.
Alpha Legion forces ever seen in operation in a single theatre.