The Rifts pen and paper role-playing game, first published by Kevin Siembieda in 1990, is famous for being one of the most gonzo adventure settings ever devised. Sean Patrick Fannon, author of several new Rifts rulebooks, loves the game’s wild, anything-goes creativity.

“It’s a role-playing setting that features everything and anything, including a fully-weaponized kitchen sink,” Fannon says in Episode 254 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “If you can imagine it, you can justify putting it in Rifts.”

Unlike most role-playing games, in which the characters start out as low-level adventurers battling rats, Rifts lets players wield superhero-level powers right from the start. One of the game’s most iconic character types is the Glitter Boy, a towering suit of laser-resistant armor with a cannon so powerful that firing it creates a sonic boom.

However, the gonzo nature of Rifts can make it hard to get into. The rules, designed for hardcore gamers, can be daunting for new players, especially considering that the game features over 100 volumes of supplementary material. “There were, and are, fans who can run that, and really enjoy it,” Fannon says. “But then for the rest of the hobby, there was perhaps a desire to take those amazing ideas and adapt them to something new.”

Last year Fannon raised over $400,000 on Kickstarter to fund his new Rifts books, which adapt the Rifts setting to the popular Savage Worlds ruleset. And while he hopes this version of the game will attract a new generation of players, he’s quick to add that the original rules are still there for anyone who wants them.

“There’s no wrong way to have fun,” he says. “As long as nobody’s being hurt, as long as everybody’s having a good time, you go, you be you.”

Listen to our complete interview with Sean Patrick Fannon in Episode 254 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Sean Patrick Fannon on the attitude behind Rifts:

“[It’s] this very punk aesthetic. Rifts really exemplifies that in a way that you had not seen in a role-playing game before that period. … Any parent who picked up that first Rifts book with the barely-dressed women with the crazy eye goggles and the giant slavering monster who’s clearly the slave lord of these—basically very objectified—women, that’s the cover of Rifts. And we’re all buying the hell out of it, because holy crap that looks awesome, and our parents are going, ‘What are you doing? You will not buy that. I will not have that in my house.'”

Sean Patrick Fannon on the Rifts setting:

“I’ve got to give him credit. I have not seen a presentation of the apocalypse that quite does what Kevin did with Rifts. It’s nuclear war, but that’s just the beginning. He went with this idea that the nuclear war released so much death energy into the world that it reactivated the ley lines, which of course are the psychic and mystic patterns that surround the world, and at their nexus points, where the various lines cross, these holes in spacetime ripped open. And because they ripped open violently, it killed even more people, and then there are massive storms, and hordes of demons, and hordes of alien beings and who knows what else come in and kill even more millions and millions of people. And of course the deaths of all those people creates this cycle, and oh my gosh it’s just insane.”

Sean Patrick Fannon on Savage Rifts:

“We’re giving you a reason to team up and not be murder hoboes, which is pretty much the way that a lot of people approached playing Rifts was ‘high-tech murder hoboes.’ And we just thought, OK, that’s been done, and you can play that way, but we’re going to focus our energy and attention on [something different]. … And of course people who know me knew it was going to be a particularly heroic group. I’m that guy. To me the point behind these games is to be the hero that maybe you can’t be in real life, that you’d really like to be in a fictional world. So I was definitely going to take a very benign, we’re-the-good-guys kind of approach. And I called up [creator] Kevin [Siembieda], and he fell in love with it immediately. He actually even said, ‘This is something that has been missing from Rifts all along.'”