What happened to all the magic stuff after the Tolkeen war? Find out within the pages of Rifts Adventure Sourcebook The Black Vault. In addition, get more detailed information on the Coalition States’ continued war on magic and more!
Rumors have abounded for years about what the Coalition does with all the magical items they take. This book describes what and where they hold these items with a bit of a twist!
The Black Vault Gm Material
There are a lot of magic items listed within the book for GMs to create adventures with. You could have them get out “somehow” (or it could be false intel) and lead the players into an ambush or whatnot. The ambush idea is in part what the black vault sourcebook has in mind in fact.
Rifts Adventure Sourcebook The Black Vault Player Material
Also for players, this book lists a lot of magic items for your browsing. Some GMs may say you can’t do that but I say bull crap. Take a look for yourself and use the items as ideas for your own creations. Or perhaps they could spawn an entire idea for a character build.
Adventure Sourcebook Black Vault Story material
The Coalition States have been collecting magic items for over 80 years. What they do with those items is put them in a vault, I know shocking. The truth of the vault though is that it’s not cataloged well at all, though that’s to be expected since they don’t have mages.
They leak information in an effort to get people to come looking for the “vault”. The location given leads would be robbers to a highly defended area with no real items to speak of and a huge army of defenders to deal with. In the end, this just continues their fight against mages and the supernatural.
Rifts Adventure Sourcebook The Black Vault originality
I sort of look at this book like I would the dungeons and dragons artifact GM guide and because of this don’t consider it to be that original. The reason being is that most of the items are indeed highly magical and could be likened to artifacts.
The minion wars is a series of connected books, check out this post to see what books can be used
game breaking
Some of the items within are very good and could be game-breaking but most of them are just TW versions of existing things. So they may have a few spells you can cast from them but that’s all.
That said though, many skills, spells, or abilities are only game-breaking based on use. For example, the black vault has a TW Animator, which is simply a way of animating the dead.
Specifically, a person puts a device on a dead body and then pumps PPE into animating it. That device is connected to a remote control unit. So if you were clever you could remote pilot this body to undo a trap, carry a bomb into a field of bad guys, or many other ideas.
This is one of the only books that have items that resemble magic items from other games that don’t require charges. It has elven magic boots that never leave trails, scuff marks, water, mud, etc. Makes one immune to fire and the boots are silent (so then if these boots are possible what else is possibly out there to find for players or to make by them).
How good are the occs
No OCCs are presented in this book. It’s amongst the shortest books in Rifts consisting in large part of just a detailed description of 101 magic items.
How well does it mix with the core book
This is a good example book of possible items to help one expand your understanding of what’s possible. Too often we limit our games to “only” what’s in the books. This is a terrible habit to get into. It is way more fun to create your own little magic items, allow players to do so, and work outside the stuff listed in the books.