It’s time for Rifts Dimension Book 4 Skraypers review. For a Rifts book, Skraypers is different and one of a kind since it allows players to have superpowers. In addition to that, it can easily be transitioned into any Rifts setting with minimal change.
Skraypers is the only book in Rifts that allows players to pick up super powers as a basic fact of the setting. Heroes of the megaverse, a Rifts dimension book, has super powers in it but I view that book more as a GM supplement book than a player character book. Let’s get into the review starting with GM material.
An epic fight between good and evil.
Skraypers GM material
The Skraypers solar system has a ton of races and planets to explore. With the descriptions available you could play as the Tarlok, one of their slave races, or bring in races from other dimensions. I sort of think that it’s not any different than playing against the Transgalactic Empire though so it’s not really a new setting in that regard.
What is new though are the plethora of races with superpowers and the vast area in space to explore without the use of faster-than-light travel. If played in the Phase World setting the ships in Skraypers would be really underwhelming, and underpowered. Even smaller ships have a chance as all they need to do is damage the ship’s engines, essentially dooming them to a trip through the stars they cant make.
Rifts Dimension Book Skraypers Player material
There are a good dozen or so races listed in Skrapers for player use. They are all fairly cool, however, I find them somehow to be lacking and I can’t quite put my finger on it. The main thing I think to myself when reading over the races, even the Blahze race, is that the limitations really offset the advantages.
Going further with the example Blahze race, they have quite a few superpowers. They have a restriction of being able to drop into an energy-only state but have a ridiculously low chance of reforming. When I read the race description I thought they sounded similar to the Phantom RCC from Phase World. Only that race has no restriction going energy form, can also travel super fast in it, and reforms with no problem.
This is one example that gets redone over and over with the other races, in that you’ll probably read them and go “Ya cool, but I could play this other thing instead and have more choices”. Why play a race that has entirely set super powers and be like everyone else?
Weapons and armor
Honestly, the stuff is rather lacking. It does have some cool-looking melee weapons but who in the hell really uses melee weapons when you can shoot lasers. Pffff.. seriously though the Tarlok energy sword and dread ax look great. Damage on all the weapons follows the same standard 1d6-3d6 in most other books, with plasma cannons and similar being around 5d6 or 1d6x10.
There isn’t really any armor to look at for players unless they are Tarlok. The same goes for fighters and vehicles. They are fairly fun sounding but made for the bad guys so no starting with them. There are some tie-ins for the Tarlok flying space ships to Phase World by sublight. None of the ships they use are actually listed so we have to assume they are bigger than the fighters described as those have “minimal storage” and the flight takes 6-11 years to do.
Rifts Skraypers story material
A quarter of a page is dedicated to the story player characters will engage in. Quite the let down honestly because so much space was used to describe the background of over 10 different new races. The main bad guys were discussed first but it was just setting information. Story and setting are separate, and when an RPG focuses mostly on setting then it often gets overlooked and unused. I think that is what happened with the Skraypers dimension book.
As described on page 65 of Rifts Dimension book 4 Skraypers, it’s really a simple story. Alien invaders came to the last planet(Seeron) in a solar system and conquered it. Many of the defenders eventually surrendered but not before the Tarlok used bio-weapons and caused genetic mutations. These mutations created super beings that continue to fight back, which began 30 years ago. So the planet is in a stalemate sort of.
The Tarlok has some trade allies that also operate as spies and assassins. The Tarlok are still trying to conquer the planet for good because they want its resources, including superbeings as slaves. The breaking of the stalemate is left up to the reader to figure out.
Phase World connection
I find this connection to be barely plausible personally. The Tarlok has been to Phase World, the first time being about 40 years ago. I find it implausible because the Tarlok is not truly that powerful compared to the Transgalactic empire, Splugorth, or any other major power block.
With their limited tech level, they would be prime targets, at least I think, for either of the two races above. With how warlike they are and how fast they give birth the TGE or Splugorth would love having them as slaves or at the very least an allied race.
As stated though, the Three Galaxies are quite large and only a fraction has been fully charted.. so I guess it works.
Dimension book 4 Skraypers originality
“Oh.. another setting that starts with a bad guy that expands only to enslave, and conquer.. haven’t heard that one before.”
That was my first thought when I started reading the Tarlok history.
Raptor-like predators fed primarily on the Tarlok race, millions of these raptor-like predators. If this is the case there would be hundreds of millions of Tarlok.. or at least 10s of millions. I just find the background story really hard to take for what it is, and I really try to prove the backstory to be how it’s stated. This wasn’t just a couple hundred-year struggle of being the primary food of a large predator but hundreds of THOUSANDS of years.
For a warlike civilization, it is odd that it is so united. Due to all the fighting of the animals and their early years of enslavement they didn’t have much time for infighting. I do find the structure of their society to be palatably different than the normal conquering style bad guy genre (Transgalactic Empire, Klingons, Star Wars Empire, etc).
That being said the Tarlok race is really something else. The females have a LOT of offspring, like upwards of one hundred, and they have kids up until about age 200. The males and females live into their 300s if they don’t die in battle or complications from many births. They also have a lot of special factors.
Physiologically they have 2 hearts to increase physical prowess. If one is damaged then the other still operates to keep them alive. In addition to a unique heart system is their respiratory system which gives them a great sense of smell, protects them from being suffocated by predators and gives great oxygenation for muscular performance. They have a weird king finger which is mostly looked at as a sign of age. Lastly, their physical attributes are impressive with a physical endurance that increase by 1 each year of age.
Is dimension book 4 game-breaking?
Rifts dimension book 4 is not game-breaking in any way. It really only offers some extra races or classes that can be created with current options already available in Rifts. Namely, you can use the Phase World race generator and come up with thousands upon thousands of entirely unique and vastly more powerful races than those listed in Skraypers.
How good are Skraypers OCCs(classes)?
They are “ok” and that’s about it, there being only two, the book mostly has raced. Nothing in the way of OCCs really stands out as something I would pick as often as I could. I am far more likely to pick OCCs from the Rifts Ultimate Edition than I am Skraypers. To my thinking, Skraypers simply adds some actual backstory to incorporate superbeings into Rifts Earth and other Rifts settings.
Note: It is said several times throughout the Skraypers book that the limitations on superpowers for races were done purely to save space. So it is up to GMs and players to decide to allow more powers and power categories from the Heroes Unlimited book. Doing this would really change the races and make them much more intriguing to play.
How well does Rifts dimension book 4 Skraypers mix with the core Rifts game?
It mixes just fine with Rifts Earth, Rifts Phase World, Wormwood, or any other Rifts setting if desired. It can also mix in well with Heroes Unlimited, Aliens Unlimited, and other settings with a little more tweaking. The main part of the Skraypers book that makes me go “meh” is that it’s just another “bad guys invading, conquering and need to be stopped” setting with more races and planets to explore.
We have that already on planets like Phase World, and others in the Three Galaxies with really cool races like the Phantom, Silhouette, Promethean, and others. There are easy ways to add Skraypers to many settings though so if you or others want to play something from it then it’s no problem to do.
For example, the Splugorth connection easily allows you to bring a Seeron, or other race, from Skraypers to Rifts Earth. They would either start as a slave or be an escaped slave with possible Splugorth slavers searching for them. Since player characters are considered the exception a lot of the time, it’s easy to allow them to play races/occs from strange and exotic places.