[Spectral Knight]

"I want to give the book a "4 - Meaty" for Substance, but I find I can't. While the book offers a springboard to tons of ideas, it really doesn't provide much help implementing those ideas. You really have to dig and do your own work to realize things as a playable game due not only to the poor organization, but also poorly explained elements. The biggest lack of gamer guidance is represented by those demons the text talks about having overrun the world but which are conspicuously absent from the book. At least the original edition had a couple of monsters and a quick roll table to generate demonic bad guys. Now the explicit instruction is, "Buy a supplement for that!""

While I know better than to expect good organization from Palladium, I did at least expect them to learn from past mistakes. The original edition left out the definition of D-Bee (spelling?), after all, which is a concept you can't run the game without!

Looks like they didn't. Another concept that you can't run the game without is gone, leaving a gaping hole in the setting. One surrounded by fiddly scrollwork and a 'Here Be Daemons' label, but a hole nonetheless, even if it does reference a supplement. Not a very Ultimate Ultimate Edition.

BTW, does anyone here know if the term Auto-G's was ever defined? It's mentioned in the original book, under the Coalition Grunt OOC (I think; it's been years since I opened my Rifts book), but a definition was every bit as missing as the D-Bee definition, and the Rifts Sourcebook didn't address that one.