Gave my new IRL group a taste of this last night. Six players (which works in Rifts), minimum of books. Restricted everyone to OCC's that would be in the modern NEMA. All six of them are playing NEMA troopers and I told them to put together a NEMA Advance Party Recon Squad. We have a single GB, 2 Silver Eagle (SAMAS) pilots, basically a rigger, a medic, a combat engineer, and a tanker. (I shortened time by making about 2 dozen characters and letting everyone pick something. The rest of the characters are currently NPC's in the group and if their character gets killed they can draw from the pool)
Since the IRL group is vets or NG, figured I'd start them T-72 hours from the Coming of the Rifts at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, getting ready for a deployment to Nigeria.
Having a ley-line DIRECTLY hit motorpool row and wipe out the tanks, power armor lockers, helo's, and the like made sense to everyone.
We played about six hours and everyone had a great time. Two guys played themselves.
We used a map of Fort Sill (modded for a few decades from now), introduced some NPC's, gave them their mission briefing, all that good stuff. Then the ley lines went off, slowly spreading across the globe. The big ley lines and 6+ nexuses going off first, slowly moving down to the smaller ones. Demons and the like flickering in and out of reality. Motorpool row took a hit, there's a fucking open ley line nexus at the airfield, and demons keep flickering in and out. Then they felt the ground rumble from Yellowstone exploding.
They actually did stuff like 'run for the half collapsed barracks and pull people out' and 'grab a truck and head for the ASP. Gotta get those doors open' and 'get to the MI unit, see if a Keyhole is still operating, find the beacons on the armor' and try to rally everyone.
The game ran to T+24 hours. We ended with black snow starting to fall.
All of them had played 5E, but nothing like this.
After session, everyone commented how much fun it was. Combat was faster (WTF? Rifts combat can be fucking slow as balls as everyone bullet sponges) to them, more intense, more exciting. Keeping track of their ammo seemed more important then in D&D. No 'magic' healing outside of IRRMS kits.
They want to get together next week.
Felt good to introduce people to something that isn't D&D, even though I love D&D (Not 4E, not 5E, not PF2) and Pathfinder.
There's just something about Rifts, you know?
Edit: One thing they mentioned is how it was cool that they weren't held back from the heavy shit. When they were trying to keep the
things that were coming out of the leyline nexus at Henry Post Airfield I had no problem with allowing them to use the railguns on full auto. Sure, they had to recover their armors, get the motorpool guys they saved to load their biometrics into the armors, but they had their armor back by halfway through the game night. When the GB pilot hand-loaded a round into the Boom Gun (the feed is currently damaged) and fired at the big creature coming out of the Rift, hit with a crit, and rolled max fucking damage with an HEDP (not the shitty little APERS flechette everyone uses on Coalition Era Rifts) and I told him that it basically blew a hole clear through the thing and it collapsed, he got the biggest shit eating grin and "This is the shit, man!"
They don't even mind that the armors aren't fully unlocked, already have damage, and they're low on ammo (why they're heading for the ASP and the Rod & Gun Club), they told me they basically feel kickass.
Guys, it's just 2 SAMAS suits and a Glitter Boy, an APC, and what amounts to fucking MDC humvees.
