YMMV / Palladium Fantasy

• Fair for Its Day: When it first came out it was generally seen as a nice alternative to the other fantasy titles that were released around the late 80s and early 90s. Unfortunately, with the much wider availability of RPG games in the new 10s and 20s and the emergence of tabletop gaming into the mainstream it's becoming increasingly seen as outdated due to it's clunky mechanics, cliché setting/character classes and overcomplicated mechanics compared to its modern contemporaries - without much done for the sake of an update.
• Mainstream Obscurity: This series was one of the very first games Palladium Books ever made as well as one of the first major fantasy tabletop RPG games ever made period. (It first came out in 1983, less than a decade after the big king of tabletop gaming D&D hit the scene.) Yet, despite getting a ton of sourcebooks and even a second edition printing in the 90s it never even came close to the recognition of it's main rivals and is today rarely mentioned outside of Palladium's gaming circles. The fact that Kevin's other main baby Rifts fell into this as well while also heavily overshadowing Fantasy basically sealed it's fate.
• Narm: With a name like Land of the Damned 2: Eternal Torment you'd probably expect the cover◊ of this particular sourcebook to maybe feature something like a horde of monsters, demons or dark wizards to reflect its grim title and dark nature... instead the artist went with a group of adventurers in a generic looking woodland setting battling a bunch of tiny glowing faeries. (In fairness, the book technically manages to avoid Covers Always Lie as both faeries and a magical forest both feature prominently in this particular sourcebook but one still wonders why Palladium choose to focus on them rather than the legions of undead, curses, scary monsters or literally anything else that would have been much cooler and badass.) What makes this choice of artwork especially bizarre is that the cover of Land of the Damned 1: Chaos Lands used a much more fitting image◊ that better reflected its overall tone and content.
• So Okay, It's Average: While the game does have some good content and original ideas there's no getting past the simple fact that it's a largely paint-by-the-numbers medieval fantasy that ticks off most of the standard checkboxes without really offering much of a twist or gimmick to make it stand out. Outside of Palladium fans most tabletop gamers will likely just see it as a poor man's Dungeons & Dragons that doesn't really do enough to be unique in a market already oversaturated with fantasy titles that have more compelling mechanics and designs. Making matters worse is that its eventual successor series Rifts takes most of what made Palladium Fantasy great while adding a cooler apocalyptic sci-fi setting and amping the more outlandish and crazier elements up to eleven.

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