Provides all a mercenary needs to get a job done, like job broker, bounties, how to collect on them, how to deal with the Coalition States, preserving anonymity, mercenary missions, Techno-Wizard equipment, power armor, and truckloads of weapons, armor, and miscellaneous gear.
Gm Material
Rifts Merc Ops introduces a plethora of bounty types that game masters can use to generate games from. With the list you can assign rewards to players based on the threat level of the target. In addition it helps you to understand better what kind of threats get assigned what kind of credit values.
Alongside the list of what types of bounties there are this book includes examples of NPCs with a boutny on their head. You could use them as the focus of the games or as secondary objectives, NPCs in need of rescue, or just as distraction from your actual game.
Aside from all of that there is the equipment to consider. Game masters can now use the equipment list to outfit their NPCs in vastly different ways. With the miscellaneous gear you can have regular day folks and know what sort of equipment they will be carrying. All around useful in every way to both GM and player.
Player Material
Bounties good yes, but equipment.. holy grail right there. What does a mercenary need more than a target.. equipment to take them on with. This book has so much equipment that I won’t understate how good the book is for it.
The retrofitted Hummer, Automated Rail Gun, Improved Apache Helicopter, are just some of the surprises you’ll find waiting for you within this book. Whats even better is that the prices on many of the items within Rifts Merc Ops are extremely reasonable.
When I say reasonable, I mean we are talking about many under 100,000 credits. If you compare the prices of these to the power armor of the Rifts Ultimate edition, you can easily see that a small start-up mercenary company can easily get started using the Merc Ops book much more feasibly.
Story material
There is quite a good amount of story options listed within the descriptions of NPCs. With most of the book taken up by equipment and NPCs there isn’t a lot of story otherwise. Some care is taken to explain how to work with the Coalition States and Tolkeen, but this isn’t really a story point.
My favorite story idea is the Top 10 Most Wanted Gunther Black. He is wanted for teleporting into an office and going on a mudrer spree. There is a major twist with the individual that will end up with most mercenaries going to the grave instead of capturing him for the 5 million alive bounty.
Originality
There hasn’t been another book published that goes into depth on mercenary work, with the amount of equipment listed in this one. So, to me, this is a completely original book that Palladium Books created.
Game breaking
There is nothing breaking in this book at all. In my opinion this book filled a whole that many game masters and players wanted for a long time. The sheer amount of equipment listed from old school Earth and all the miscellaneous gear were sorely lacking from the Rifts Main book and still the Rifts Ultimate Edition.
How good are the occs
No occupational character classes (OCC) are presented in this book. It does include a racial character class (RCC), the Auto-G. This race is a shapeshifter that is hunted by the Coalition states. Some stuff happened with one that they had to make up new safety procedures to deal with them and other shape changers.
How well does it mix with the core book
This is the hands down most useful book to have in addition to the main book. The amount of miscellaneous gear within it is so useful at all levels of play.
Buy PDF from DrivethruRPG