RIFTS WORLD BOOK FOUR- AFRICA (1993):
-And now we finally come to one of the most notorious, maligned and forgotten books in the Rifts line- Rifts Africa. Most of the early books have a bit of poor material in them- having splurged on the Main Rulebook, the creators kind of threw out whatever idea they could think of into the early books (featuring Vampires, England & Africa), but had little left in the tank. It took the infusion of some new blood (like CJ Carella, Vince Martin & Ramon Perez) to shake things up and start going "okay, so we can do LITERALLY EVERYTHING- why not try?"). So these early books are... quite poor.
Rifts Africa suffers from the same thing a lot of early books do- poor Wayne Breaux art before he got any good. Poorly-thought-out classes. Poor R.C.C.s (Tree People and Agogwes?). Unnecessary "also Magic, but different" classes. "Take something from a foreign culture and make a class out of it" thought. Add to that the sheer cringiness of a bunch of white guys designing a setting around "Noble Savage" archetypes, and it's pretty bad. The book has even been accused of racism- given that there's an actualy PYGMY R.C.C., this might have some basis in reality. But it's more the "Clumsy Dumb Nerdy Guy" kind of racism, and still nowhere near as cringey as Rifts Spirit West, which was basically "Indians are savages, but boy are they morally the most superior people on Earth".
The book also has that weird Palladium thing where "two and a half good ideas" got thrown together, whether or not they fit, into one setting. So about 25% of this book involves the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the brand-new "Big Bads" of the setting, meant to be ultimate evils that face down against all humanity, lest armageddon erupt. Another 25% is based around the Gods of Egypt, as they realize that "Gods are Real" is totally a thing that could and should be explored, and Egypt's in Africa, so why not? And then it's 50% pages about tribes and stuff.
One of the more annoying things is how they waste AN ENTIRE HUGE CONTINENT on a single book, which shows you the kind of weird thought processes going on at Palladium at the time, and kind of how a lot of Westerners view Africa as this monocultural thing. I mean, countless other nations are described in books of their own. The New German Republic, England, Japan, Mexico, and later Canada & Australia all got tons of infromation revealed in very focused books. There are TWO books about China and Russia! America itself of course has a swack of books just about individual regions (the Magic Zone, two in the Wild West, Texas, Chi-Town, etc.). Even South America, the closest thing to "the whole continent explained at once", got two books. But Rifts Africa shoves everything on the continent into one small-ish book, then you pretty much never hear from it again.
The book... did not really go over well. The art is bad, the O.C.C.s & R.C.C.s boring, the cultural content is cringey at best and misguidedly racist at worst, and they just didn't do much "I REALLY want to play this!" stuff here. And so Rifts Africa kind of got forgotten, though the Horsemen were mentioned a few other times.
