Eat the Reich vs Rifts

Compare Eat the Reich and Rifts side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Eat the Reich	Rifts
Genre	Historical, Horror	Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, Superhero
Tags	Pulp Action, Combat-Heavy, High-Power, One-Shot Friendly, Mission-Based, Playbook-Driven, Rules-Light	Character Building, Combat-Heavy, Crunchy, Fear & Stress Mechanics, Gonzo, High-Power, Mana Points, Mecha, Superpowers, Tactical
Core Mechanic	Roll a pool of d6s equal to your stat plus one die per piece of equipment or ability you activate; discard any die showing 3 or less, count 4–5 as a success, and 6 as a critical. The GM builds a separate Attack pool equal to the engaged Threat's rating and rolls it. You then allocate each remaining die to one of five slots, narrating one scene detail per die as you place it: advance an Objective, eliminate a Threat, defend against the GM's Attack dice, feed for Blood, or trigger a SPECIAL (criticals only). Any GM Attack dice you don't cancel with defence dice inflict Injuries.	Combat and saving throws use a d20 plus bonuses, with high results overcoming a target number or opposing roll. Skills use d100 and succeed when the result is at or below the character's percentage.
Dice	d6 dice pool	d20, d100
Complexity	Low	Very High
Accessibility	Medium	Medium
Runnability	Low	Very High
License	Proprietary	All Rights Reserved
Third-Party Publishing	Not yet researched	Noncommercial only — Palladium Books Internet Policy limited license
Summary only, not legal advice. Check current terms before publishing.
Cost	$$	$$
Publisher	Rowan, Rook and Decard	Palladium Books Inc.
Year	2023	2005
Languages	English, Italian	English
Best For	Groups who want a self-contained, ultraviolent anti-fascist action romp playable in two or three short sessions with pregenerated characters and zero campaign overhead.	Groups who want long-form science-fantasy campaigns that move from a ruined Earth to other dimensions. The game suits tables whose GM will decide which parts of the broad setting a campaign uses.
Highlights	Every die spent on attack is a die not spent defending or feeding for Blood, so each turn forces an explicit tradeoff between killing nazis, staying alive, and refueling the abilities that make you dangerous. Reinforcement rules ratchet pressure up each round (defeated Threats roll d6 to restore rating and every active Threat's Attack rating ticks up by one), so lingering in a scene gets steadily more lethal. Six pregenerated vampires with fixed mechanics but explicitly malleable backgrounds let the table skip session zero entirely and be drop-coffin-deployed into Paris within minutes of opening the book.	Occupational and racial class packages assign distinct abilities and advancement tracks, giving each archetype a different role in the party. Mega-Damage places many supernatural creatures and war machines on a separate durability scale beyond the reach of ordinary Structural Damage Capacity attacks. Rifts and ley lines make dimensional travel a standing feature of the setting, letting campaigns move between devastated Earth and other worlds.
Considerations	Built around a single fixed scenario (the assault on Hitler's Paris stronghold) with no support for other premises, settings, or open-ended campaign play. Character creation is reskin or hack-from-the-pregens only; the book offers no point-buy or formal chargen system. Splatter-violence tone and nazi subject matter are confrontational by design; the rulebook opens with content warnings, lines-and-veils guidance, and an evil-calibration checklist the table is expected to work through before play.	Character creation combines rolled attributes with extensive skill selection, making first-time preparation lengthy. Combat asks each player to track an action economy, active defenses, and which damage scale applies. Magic and psionics use separate point pools and power procedures, adding class-specific rules to the shared system.