Tag Archives: Backgrounder

Backgrounder 003: Rifts Survivor States

Rifts is my eternal problematic fave, and also a source of bizarre, contradictory, and confusing lore. However, something that’s easy to let fall through the cracks of the gonzo setting is that there are actually many survivor states in the post-apocalypse. That’s right, places that directly trace their lineage, governance, culture, and dominant populations back to the Pre-Rifts era. And this Backgrounder as an overview of them!

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Backgrounder 002: Durpar (Pt.1)

Welcome to the second installment of the Backgrounder series! I’ve expanded the scope of these posts to include regions and peoples in addition to monsters, and the first post up is also the first one ever polled from the POCGamer fanbase. So let’s talk about Durpar. This was a bit more challenging than anticipated, so I’ve broken it into two parts, the first being an overview of what’s known about Durpar, the second being a theoretical framework to introduce Durpar into your campaign or as a subsetting in your campaign.  Read more

Backgrounder 001: Gnolls

Someone asked, so here we go, the first in what will probably be a number of lore and speculation fueled screeds about monsters, specifically underappreciated/potential player-race monsters that don’t get the love that they deserve. This all started as a commentary on how in-game characters like Mordenkainen and Volo are, at best, unreliable and biased narrators and witnesses to the events, monsters, and races they describe. Basically, they can’t be trusted, only the stat-blocks can. Then it turned into a rant on how awesome Gnolls are.[1] So, this is the supporting, hopefully more readable post to support my Twitter craziness.

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