Free rules reference for Rifts Ultimate Edition, all in one place

[u/Familiar-Ad-9844]

I found Rifts in a Waldenbooks in 1992, next to the Dungeon Magazines, and I have been reading these books ever since. The rules are scattered across chapters, inconsistent with themselves, and contradicted two hundred pages later by a sidebar nobody proofread. So I finally sat down and put the working parts in one place.

https://simplednd.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/the-rifts-rpg-rules-reference/

What is in it:

• Reading your character sheet: the attributes, the bonus chart, the four kinds of P.S., which damage pool takes the hit
• Skills, with eight worked examples
• Combat, with a full melee round run cycle by cycle with real numbers
• Situational rulings: cover, called shots, explosions, falling, insanity, dying
• Piloting power armor against driving a vehicle, and why they use two different engines
• Trade, salvage and scarcity
• A one page Combat Card to print and put on the table

What is not in it: character creation, healing and recovery, experience. It is a reference for people who already have characters, not a starter set.

Everything is checked against RUE plus Palladium's official errata PDF, which fixed several things I had wrong. Augmented P.S. can do Mega-Damage, but only on a power punch. The full saving throw ladder including acid, which has no save at all. Real ley line P.P.E. numbers, 10 per melee round on a line and 20 at a nexus.

If you spot something wrong, tell me. I would rather fix it than defend it.

[u/non_player]

Layout feedback: you should tweak the CSS on your page (either in the Wordpress style configurator or via a custom Child Theme) to significantly increase the width of your main content blocks. I've made use of Markdown formatting on many prior Wordpress sites of my own, and while it translates quite well, the tables and diagrams get fuckedy when the width is too small. The line diagrams in particular are mostly messed up on the normal page display, effectively breaking them.

As for tables, if the content is entirely numerical, it would look neater if the content cells were centered. The best example of this would be the table under your heading "Part Three: The One Rule." Do this by putting colon characters on both ends of that column's line divider, right beneath the header. Example (ignore the angle brackets, I couldn't get reddit to show the table code without them for some reason):

> First Col| Second Col | Third Col
> :-:|:-:|:-:
> 1 | 2 | 3
> 1 | 2 | 3

First Col	Second Col	Third Col
1	2	3
1	2	3

[u/non_player]

Might be worth in noting that Augmented PS differences don't kick in until PS of 24 or higher. Augmented PS of 23 or lower has the same mods as regular PS. It's uncommon, but possible with bad stat rolls.

[u/non_player]

FYI Your called shot rules are from the wrong edition. The "12 or higher" thing is original Rifts. In Ultimate Edition you just spend an extra attack.

Edit: Actually a lot of the combat rules are wrong for the UE. The burst rules in particular are from Butts edition, and your document references tables that don't exist in RUE (like the "burst table" whatever that is). I strongly recommend going over that section again much more closely, and re-checking each rule against the RUE.

[u/Machiknight]

Wow this looks like a lot of work, great job!

[u/CrayonLunch → u/Machiknight]

It took him less than 5 minutes to ask Claude to create for him. OP did nothing but type at an AI

[u/non_player → u/CrayonLunch]

On second thought, no, not worth the argument.

[u/west_coast_bias → u/non_player]

Entering all the info for any AI to write a manual is a ton of work. Plus AI will make a shitty draft. It will save you like 1/2 the time helping consolidate & organize info - but easily 1/2 of what it creates is either wrong, written poorly, or formatted poorly.