(23/41: 1981) KEVIN SIEMBIEDA (1956–)
The Defilers Campaign
Every Palladium product traces back to a single AD&D campaign.
In the late 1970s, a Detroit art student named Kevin Siembieda ran a game he called “the Defilers” out of the Detroit Gaming Center. He was already a working illustrator—hundreds of pieces for Judges Guild, freelance work for FASA and Steve Jackson Games—but the Defilers campaign was where he started designing. The house rules he wrote to resolve what AD&D couldn’t handle became the foundation of everything that followed.
The Mechanoid Invasion (1981) was the first publication: a 48-page newsprint booklet funded with a $1,500 loan, about humans fighting psychic cybernetic aliens. It was tight, tactical, and lethal—pure wargaming DNA filtered through the energy of early RPG culture. Two sequels completed the trilogy by 1982. The proto-Megaversal engine was crude but functional, and it carried a design signature that would persist for forty years: dramatic character concepts, high-stakes tactical combat, and an artist’s eye for visual spectacle driving every mechanical choice.
Palladium Fantasy RPG (1983) formalized the system. Eight attributes on 3d6, percentile-based skills, d20 combat with class-and-level progression. Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons describes it accurately: an overhaul of the system Palladium had originally derived from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This is where the Megaversal engine was born.
It would not fundamentally change for the next four decades.
What Siembieda Actually Invented
The Megaversal System’s mechanical innovations land in a specific band: meaningful enough that the hobby noticed, derivative enough that priority claims require careful examination.
The Mega-Damage Capacity system is his most distinctive mechanical contribution. First appearing in the Robotech RPG (1986)—not Rifts, as commonly assumed—it establishes a hard binary: one point of MDC equals one hundred points of SDC, meaning conventional weapons simply cannot damage mega-damage targets. The concept addressed a real problem: representing anime-scale mecha alongside human infantry within the same combat round. BattleTech (1984) had handled scale separation differently, as a wargame with graduated multipliers. Siembieda’s specific implementation—the hard binary cutoff, the absolute lethality threshold—was distinctive. It was also never widely adopted. Most later scale-bridging systems chose softer approaches.
The opposed combat roll was genuinely early for mainstream d20 RPGs. Present since The Mechanoid Invasion (1981), the mechanic gives defenders an active choice: parry, dodge, or absorb the hit. Each defensive action costs one of the character’s limited attacks per melee, creating a genuine resource-management layer in tactical combat. RuneQuest (1978) had active parrying first, but Siembieda’s integration with the action economy was a meaningful contribution. Decades later, players still praise it as the best thing about the Megaversal System.
The seven-alignment behavioral system—Principled, Scrupulous, Unprincipled, Anarchist, Miscreant, Aberrant, Diabolic—replaced D&D’s abstract axes with concrete behavioral descriptions. It is widely considered superior to its predecessor. The Horror Factor mechanic for supernatural encounters added atmospheric weight to investigation scenarios.
The SDC/Hit Points dual health track appeared in Palladium Fantasy (1983)—but Champions/HERO System implemented a functionally identical concept with STUN and BODY in 1981. The OCC/RCC class taxonomy formalized D&D Basic’s race-as-class concept with cleaner terminology. Percentile skills were pioneered by RuneQuest (1978) and BRP (1980). Cross-game compatibility was explored earlier by HERO System and Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder (1982).
The pattern: Siembieda assembled existing elements with genuine creative vision. He was ahead of the field in specific areas. But most of his mechanical building blocks had prior art, and none propagated into the broader design ecosystem.
The Kitchen Sink as Design Philosophy
The most influential thing Siembieda created may not be a mechanism at all.
Rifts (1990) committed to a premise no prior RPG had attempted at this scale: post-apocalyptic sci-fi, high fantasy, cosmic horror, cyberpunk, and anime mecha coexisting through dimensional rifts, all playable in the same campaign using the same rules. A Vagabond and a Glitter Boy pilot sharing a character sheet format. A dragon hatchling and a cyber-knight in the same party. The answer to “can I play this?” was always yes.
This wasn’t a toolkit approach like GURPS, where the GM builds a specific genre from modular parts. It was a single continuous world where every genre lived simultaneously. Torg (West End Games, 1990) explored similar multi-genre territory from a different angle. Later games like Numenera and Exalted would explore power-diversity and genre-blending territory, though direct influence claims remain speculative.
The methodology values systems over settings. But the kitchen-sink philosophy isn’t purely setting—it’s a design philosophy about what a game should accommodate, how character creation should span wildly different power levels, and what a unified mechanical framework needs to tolerate. That philosophy was genuinely noticed by the hobby. It opened design space. It shifted conversation. It was not adopted wholesale.
The Incubator
Siembieda’s most significant propagation runs through people, not mechanics.
Erick Wujcik designed TMNT & Other Strangeness (1985), Ninjas & Superspies (1988), and After the Bomb—some of the best-loved Palladium products. Siembieda published them, edited them, held the licenses. Then Wujcik created the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game (1991), one of the most influential diceless RPGs ever published. Siembieda actively encouraged the project and called Wujcik “a game design genius.” He presented Wujcik with a Lifetime Achievement ENnie in January 2008, months before Wujcik’s death from pancreatic cancer.
C.J. Carella’s name adorns the spines of dozens of Palladium books—Nightbane, Phase World, multiple Rifts World Books. He left to create Unisystem, which powered WitchCraft (1996), the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG (2002), All Flesh Must Be Eaten (2000), and several Origins Award winners.
These designers didn’t propagate the Megaversal System. They left it behind and built entirely different engines. What Palladium provided was an environment where they could develop their craft under the umbrella of a prolific publisher who kept the lights on. The incubator mattered. The specific system they incubated in did not follow them out the door.
The Savage Rifts Test
In 2016, Pinnacle Entertainment Group launched Savage Worlds Rifts—the first and only time Siembieda licensed his flagship property to another mechanical system. The Kickstarter raised $438,077 from 4,238 backers. Multiple subsequent campaigns sustained the line.
The project proved something the fan community had argued for decades: the Rifts setting could thrive under different mechanics. Players reported combat running an order of magnitude faster with better balance. The license was a tacit acknowledgment that the setting and the system were separable—and that the setting was the part worth preserving.
For the methodology, this is a setting endorsement, not a mechanical one. Nobody adapted the Megaversal engine into Savage Worlds. They adapted the Rifts universe. The distinction matters.
A System Beloved and Broken
The critical consensus on the Megaversal System has been remarkably stable for decades: extraordinary settings married to deeply flawed mechanics.
The system’s structural weaknesses are well-documented. Different books present different versions of the same rules. Attributes over 30 are handled differently across game lines. Strength types use different bonus structures. Internal consistency is poor. Balance is essentially nonexistent by design—the MDC/SDC divide creates a hard binary where SDC characters are functionally irrelevant against MDC threats. A City Rat in a party with power armor users gets eliminated in the opening rounds of combat.
Long-term play requires extensive house-ruling. Players have reported creating so many house rules they essentially rewrote the entire game. The level cap of 15 provides slow, underwhelming advancement. Equipment rather than character growth drives power progression.
But the system has genuine strengths. The opposed combat roll creates meaningful tactical decisions. The alignment system works. The Horror Factor adds atmosphere. And the loose coupling between subsystems makes house-ruling safe—changes to one area rarely cascade. The system endured not because of its mechanics but despite them, carried by settings that made players want to do the work of fixing the rules.
The Forty-Year Engine
Siembieda’s design philosophy remained remarkably consistent across four decades. Remarkably, and revealingly.
The core Megaversal System never received a fundamental overhaul. The Rifts Ultimate Edition (2005) updated terminology and improved presentation but left core mechanics essentially intact. The architecture of percentile skills, d20 combat, and SDC/HP/MDC remained unchanged from its 1983 foundations.
The methodology distinguishes between longevity and mastery. Longevity says: you showed up for twenty years. Mastery says: did you get better during those twenty years? Siembieda showed up for forty. His settings grew more ambitious. His production values improved. His mechanics stayed the same.
There are flashes of genuine mastery throughout: the opposed combat roll, the alignment system, the conceptual architecture of Rifts, the biological character sheet that treats creation as biography. These moments of real craft sit within a body of work that never refined its fundamental tools.
The Honest Assessment
Invention scores at 7—”People noticed.” The MDC binary, the opposed combat roll, the kitchen-sink design philosophy, and the behavioral alignment system represent meaningful innovations that opened new design space and shifted conversation across the hobby. But they were not adopted wholesale. Most mechanical elements had prior art in HERO System, BRP, RuneQuest, or BattleTech. The innovations were noticed, discussed, and left in place. That is exactly what a 7 measures.
Architecture scores at 5—”It works.” The methodology PDF uses Greg Porter’s EABA as the benchmark: a brilliant unpropagated system caps at 7. The Megaversal System has the same zero propagation but significantly lower quality. The system functions, supports multi-genre play, and has enabled a massive product library—but it requires extensive house-ruling, has poor internal consistency, and nobody built on it.
Mastery scores at 6—”Competent professional, moments of real craft.” Forty years. Roughly a dozen core RPGs personally designed. An unmistakable design voice. Origins Hall of Fame. But the core system never changed. The methodology explicitly separates attendance from improvement. Siembieda’s settings evolved; his mechanical craft did not demonstrate refinement. The flashes of genuine mastery earn the 6. The absence of refinement prevents the 7.
The Scoring Case
Invention (7):
“People noticed.” The MDC binary scaling (1986) was a distinctive approach to the scale-bridging problem, noticed across the hobby though never adopted. The opposed combat roll (1981) was among the earliest active defense implementations in mainstream d20 RPGs. The seven-alignment behavioral system replaced D&D’s abstract axes with superior concrete descriptions. The kitchen-sink design philosophy committed to genre omnivory at a scale no prior RPG had attempted. These are meaningful innovations opening new design space. They shifted conversation but were not adopted wholesale. Prior art exists for most individual elements—HERO System’s STUN/BODY, RuneQuest’s active parrying, BRP’s percentile skills—but the specific assembly and the commitment to its implications were genuinely Siembieda’s.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” The Megaversal System functions and has supported 100+ supplements across 40 years. Some subsystems are genuinely well-designed: the opposed combat roll creates real tactical decisions, the alignment system is praised, the Horror Factor adds weight. But internal consistency is poor across books, balance is nonexistent by design, and the system requires extensive house-ruling. Zero propagation: no designers adopted the Megaversal engine, no third-party ecosystem developed. Greg Porter’s EABA—brilliant quality, zero propagation—caps at 7. Mediocre quality with the same zero propagation places the Megaversal System at 5.
Mastery (6):
“Competent professional, moments of real craft.” Forty-plus years of active design. Roughly a dozen core RPGs personally designed, most solo-authored. Clear design voice: the biological character sheet, the Key Visual concept, the 15-second melee round. Origins Hall of Fame (2015). But the core system received no fundamental revision across four decades. The 8 vs. 7 inflection asks for demonstrable improvement over time; the 6 vs. 5 inflection asks for flashes of real mastery versus steady competence. The flashes are real. The refinement is not.
Adjustments (+5):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (1981–present. Published designs spanning 40+ years.)
- ■ Full-time career: +1 (Sole owner and operator of Palladium Books since 1981. Game design was primary profession.)
- ■ Awards: +1 (Origins Hall of Fame, 2015.)
- ■ Branded name: No. Rifts is well-known among gamers but does not pass the grandmother test. TMNT is recognized by non-gamers, but Siembieda licensed the Turtles—he didn’t create them.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. All successful designs are RPGs. Robotech RPG Tactics (miniatures) failed catastrophically and never completed fulfillment.
- ■ Commercial success: +1 (Rifts: 45,000 copies in its first year, 100+ supplements over 30+ years. Lifetime retail for the line exceeds $10M.)
- ■ Design propagation: No. Influence propagated through designers who passed through Palladium, not through mechanical adoption. No designers copied the Megaversal approach. Savage Rifts licensed the setting, not the engine.
The Hidden Pattern
Kevin Siembieda treats rules as scaffolding for spectacle.
Most designers ask: how should this system work? Siembieda asks: how should this moment feel? The Glitter Boy’s Boom Gun doesn’t exist because the math demanded it. It exists because a fifteen-year-old at the table should look at the illustration, read the damage output, and say “I want to be that.” The mechanics serve the moment. The moment is the design.
This is why the settings endure and the system doesn’t evolve. The settings ARE the design. The rules are the delivery mechanism. When the delivery mechanism breaks, Siembieda doesn’t fix it—he writes another sourcebook with another set of moments that make you say “wow.” The system’s forty-year stasis isn’t stubbornness. It’s a design philosophy taken to its logical conclusion: if the rules are scaffolding, you don’t renovate scaffolding. You build more buildings.
His most lasting influence runs through Wujcik’s Amber Diceless and Carella’s Unisystem—designers who learned their craft under Palladium’s roof, then built something entirely different when they left.
What Remains
The Glitter Boy. The Ley Line Walker. The Juicer. A hundred dimensions connected by rifts in the fabric of reality. The idea that you can say yes to everything and let the rules figure it out later.
Kevin Siembieda built one of the most imaginatively ambitious settings in RPG history. The methodology is honest about separating that achievement from the mechanical craft questions it actually measures. The settings are extraordinary. The systems are not. Both things are true.
For hundreds of thousands of players who ran Rifts campaigns with house rules, the theory wasn’t entirely wrong. The system endured not because of its mechanics but despite them—carried by one designer’s relentless, four-decade commitment to the idea that the next sourcebook should make you say “wow.”
Sometimes the wow is enough.
Total: 23 points. Year: 1981.
Total: 23 points. Year: 1981.
Sometimes the wow is enough.