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TMNT/ATB rpg
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness
A Role-playing game book. A complete game compatible with Heroes Unlimited and Ninjas & Superspies. Contains dozens of mutant animals, martial arts, ninjitsu, the ninja turtles, adventure scenarios and more...
112 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1985
2 people are currently reading
139 people want to read
About the author
Erick Wujcik
42 books24 followersErick Wujcik (January 26, 1951 – June 7, 2008) was an American designer of both role-playing games and computer role-playing games, and co-founder of Palladium Books.
Wujcik started off as head of the gaming society at Wayne State University, and then as a computer columnist for The Detroit News from 1979 to 1981, where he wrote their weekly Computer Column. That served to be a springboard for him to co-found Palladium Books and work on developing numerous role-playing games and supplements for such gaming settings as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, Paranoia, Robotech, Rifts, and many others.
Wujcik was also the director of the Detroit Gaming Center, and founder of the gaming conventions known as Ambercon. In 1997 he went to work for Sierra Studios, and was lead game designer on the game Return to Krondor. He also served as a game designer at Outrage Entertainment for the game Alter Echo.
Wujcik served as Chief Editor of Amberzine, a fanzine for the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which has published the work of such notables as Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, and Roger Zelazny, and which published its last issue in 2005. He has also been an editorial contractor for the Detroit Historical Museum, and gives seminars on a wide range of topics related to the writing, design and development of role-playing games.
From 2004 to 2006, Wujcik was Game Design Studio Manager for UbiSoft China, in Shanghai.
Until his death, in June 2008, Wujcik was Senior Game Designer / Writer for Totally Games, north of San Francisco.
Wujcik started off as head of the gaming society at Wayne State University, and then as a computer columnist for The Detroit News from 1979 to 1981, where he wrote their weekly Computer Column. That served to be a springboard for him to co-found Palladium Books and work on developing numerous role-playing games and supplements for such gaming settings as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game, Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, Paranoia, Robotech, Rifts, and many others.
Wujcik was also the director of the Detroit Gaming Center, and founder of the gaming conventions known as Ambercon. In 1997 he went to work for Sierra Studios, and was lead game designer on the game Return to Krondor. He also served as a game designer at Outrage Entertainment for the game Alter Echo.
Wujcik served as Chief Editor of Amberzine, a fanzine for the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game, which has published the work of such notables as Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, and Roger Zelazny, and which published its last issue in 2005. He has also been an editorial contractor for the Detroit Historical Museum, and gives seminars on a wide range of topics related to the writing, design and development of role-playing games.
From 2004 to 2006, Wujcik was Game Design Studio Manager for UbiSoft China, in Shanghai.
Until his death, in June 2008, Wujcik was Senior Game Designer / Writer for Totally Games, north of San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 25, 2023
If you are a TMNT fan then this book has all you need to play in the setting. very nice lay outs and write-ups. Recommended
September 8, 2017
Quick, fun, and nostalgic!
Non fiction: roleplaying, D20, rule book, setting, campaign, RPG, gaming, Palladium
TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness by Erick Wujcik
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is a role-playing game based on the comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The core rulebook was first published by Palladium Books in September 1985 – a couple years before the Turtles franchise achieved mass popularity – and featured original comic strips and illustrations by Eastman and Laird. The rules and gameplay are based on Palladium's Megaversal system.
Non fiction: roleplaying, D20, rule book, setting, campaign, RPG, gaming, Palladium
TMNT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness by Erick Wujcik
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness is a role-playing game based on the comic book created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The core rulebook was first published by Palladium Books in September 1985 – a couple years before the Turtles franchise achieved mass popularity – and featured original comic strips and illustrations by Eastman and Laird. The rules and gameplay are based on Palladium's Megaversal system.
April 2, 2007
One of the few games I played other than RM. Quick and fun, nothing for a long campaign but always good for an afternoon. Based on Paladium's core D20 system, it was easy, fast, but lacking any real depth - but what does one want from a TMNT game? The best but was the character development, which let you make any animal you wanted into a mutand powerhouse. I still remember a chain-gun packing hamster I rolled up. Ah, those were the days.
November 10, 2023
The first three role-playing games I was introduced to were Dungeons & Dragons (Basic/Expert and AD&D 1st Ed.), Car Wars (which my group pretty much played as a role-playing game), and Palladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. I was already a fan of the TMNT comics and when I saw this RPG I was automatically hooked! I played Leonardo and a small army of various mutant animal characters in a years-spanning campaign that incorporated many of the expansion (and After the Bomb) books and it was fun. Playing mutant crime-fighting animals in a modern world setting requires a level of suspension of belief to make it work and as a kid playing this with other kids there was no problem. This game was my gateway to other Palladium games, and it didn’t take long before I started playing and running Heroes Unlimited, Robotech, Macross II and Rifts.
The TMNT RPG is one of my favorites and it provided many years of fun and entertainment. With that in mind, unfortunately this book is mix-bag of good and bad, and I am hoping the recently announced Pallidum Kickstarter (which I backed) to publish a revised/updated edition will modernize and polish this game into a great product.
Here are some good and bad for this older edition of the game (perhaps there is an errata to address some of these):
The BAD:
- The typos and proofreading errors are annoying and plentiful. Misspelled words, spacing not between words, and totally wrong or contradicting information are present in abundance. Some of these errors provide confusion over what a rule is saying.
- Book/Rules organization is not great. You will have to switch to multiple different sections at times to see the entirety of how a certain game mechanic works. There are numerous examples (some more complicated than others), but an easy one to bring up is involving Knock-out stun or Death Blows. Each of these categories of attacks have their own section in the combat section but isn’t until you go to a different combat section that you see the rule that these types of attacks must be declared before attempted. It would have been easier reference to just explain all the rules in the pertinent section.
- Blunt Weapons. I do not know why a character would want to take blunt weapons (including punches and kicks) over bladed weapons and firearms because of Roll with Punch or Fall mechanic. Granted it is not a guarantee, but its another way to mitigate damage that the other weapon types are not affected by. Using your staff, you have to first hit someone, hopefully it doesn’t get parried or dodged, get through their Armor Rating, then they can attempt to Roll and reduce the damage and as far as I can tell (unless its in a different rule section) there is no penalty (loss of attack or such) for Rolling with the blow. So other than just wanting to look cool and swinging nunchuku like Michaelangelo, it seems better to just be like Leonardo and use swords for more combat effectiveness.
- Armor Piercing. Armor Piercing ammo (and arrows used by Ceasar’s Weasels) are mentioned but other than saying there is a reduction in armor protection there are no rules outlining how they work.
- Body Block, Leap Attack, Jump Kick, etc. There are several special attacks listed but some are not really explained, and I don’t know why you would want to do certain attacks. I get it, the game is a cinematic combat game, so I could see doing some of these things for a scene or depending on the situation, but I’m just saying, “is the juice worth the squeeze” for some. Take Leap attack. You could potentially strike two opponents and do double damage to them but then you are out of attacks because it uses all of your melee attacks. If you are Leonardo (as described in the book), you have 6 attacks and I feel that is a lot of attacks sacrificed to do Leap Attack. Body Block. What is this and why would you do it instead of punching or kicking someone. I just wished there were more explanations on why these attack options are listed if they seem very subpar to another action. Perhaps there is a cascade effect that was never explained in the rules (maybe Body Blocking someone successfully throws them off balance and they lose an attack or initiative?).
- Natural and Non-Natural Armor. Natural Armor seems too powerful. You deplete the Structural Damage Capacity of a bullet-proof vest and the Armor Rating is no longer in effect. But you do this to Natural Armor and it still maintains its Armor Rating.
The GOOD:
- The mutant animal creation is AWESOME! What a great idea/mechanic to give players the feel of really building their character.
- TMNT and supporting cast. You get character sheets for the TMNT, their friends and some of their enemies (of course the Shredder is listed). Great material for running a one-shot or a short campaign if people are TMNT fans.
- The Skills and Combat system is different from a lot of other RPGs and while it needs to be explained and organized better, it can provide a fun experience. Characters that are good at melee fighting can really shine in this system. I personally think percentile-based skill check systems are the best and that is what you have here.
- The art is excellent and a lot of it is by Eastman and Laird (the creators of TMNT). They also have art pieces just for this book of different mutant animals to help give ideas to players about what certain animals might look like.
Despite its flaws, I still love this game and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for good things to come from the upcoming revised edition.
The TMNT RPG is one of my favorites and it provided many years of fun and entertainment. With that in mind, unfortunately this book is mix-bag of good and bad, and I am hoping the recently announced Pallidum Kickstarter (which I backed) to publish a revised/updated edition will modernize and polish this game into a great product.
Here are some good and bad for this older edition of the game (perhaps there is an errata to address some of these):
The BAD:
- The typos and proofreading errors are annoying and plentiful. Misspelled words, spacing not between words, and totally wrong or contradicting information are present in abundance. Some of these errors provide confusion over what a rule is saying.
- Book/Rules organization is not great. You will have to switch to multiple different sections at times to see the entirety of how a certain game mechanic works. There are numerous examples (some more complicated than others), but an easy one to bring up is involving Knock-out stun or Death Blows. Each of these categories of attacks have their own section in the combat section but isn’t until you go to a different combat section that you see the rule that these types of attacks must be declared before attempted. It would have been easier reference to just explain all the rules in the pertinent section.
- Blunt Weapons. I do not know why a character would want to take blunt weapons (including punches and kicks) over bladed weapons and firearms because of Roll with Punch or Fall mechanic. Granted it is not a guarantee, but its another way to mitigate damage that the other weapon types are not affected by. Using your staff, you have to first hit someone, hopefully it doesn’t get parried or dodged, get through their Armor Rating, then they can attempt to Roll and reduce the damage and as far as I can tell (unless its in a different rule section) there is no penalty (loss of attack or such) for Rolling with the blow. So other than just wanting to look cool and swinging nunchuku like Michaelangelo, it seems better to just be like Leonardo and use swords for more combat effectiveness.
- Armor Piercing. Armor Piercing ammo (and arrows used by Ceasar’s Weasels) are mentioned but other than saying there is a reduction in armor protection there are no rules outlining how they work.
- Body Block, Leap Attack, Jump Kick, etc. There are several special attacks listed but some are not really explained, and I don’t know why you would want to do certain attacks. I get it, the game is a cinematic combat game, so I could see doing some of these things for a scene or depending on the situation, but I’m just saying, “is the juice worth the squeeze” for some. Take Leap attack. You could potentially strike two opponents and do double damage to them but then you are out of attacks because it uses all of your melee attacks. If you are Leonardo (as described in the book), you have 6 attacks and I feel that is a lot of attacks sacrificed to do Leap Attack. Body Block. What is this and why would you do it instead of punching or kicking someone. I just wished there were more explanations on why these attack options are listed if they seem very subpar to another action. Perhaps there is a cascade effect that was never explained in the rules (maybe Body Blocking someone successfully throws them off balance and they lose an attack or initiative?).
- Natural and Non-Natural Armor. Natural Armor seems too powerful. You deplete the Structural Damage Capacity of a bullet-proof vest and the Armor Rating is no longer in effect. But you do this to Natural Armor and it still maintains its Armor Rating.
The GOOD:
- The mutant animal creation is AWESOME! What a great idea/mechanic to give players the feel of really building their character.
- TMNT and supporting cast. You get character sheets for the TMNT, their friends and some of their enemies (of course the Shredder is listed). Great material for running a one-shot or a short campaign if people are TMNT fans.
- The Skills and Combat system is different from a lot of other RPGs and while it needs to be explained and organized better, it can provide a fun experience. Characters that are good at melee fighting can really shine in this system. I personally think percentile-based skill check systems are the best and that is what you have here.
- The art is excellent and a lot of it is by Eastman and Laird (the creators of TMNT). They also have art pieces just for this book of different mutant animals to help give ideas to players about what certain animals might look like.
Despite its flaws, I still love this game and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for good things to come from the upcoming revised edition.
January 23, 2020
My daughter is now old enough to like watching the adventures of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles* and while watching along I kept getting the itch to play this particular outing of the franchise. I have most of the books in the RPG series**, including After the Bomb stuff, bought back in the strange, heady days where I was a near completist in Palladium franchises***. To play it, I had to read it (and reread it, and flip back and forth through it...and then again...to be honest, I will probably doing this for the foreseeable near future as I read through stuff a second time and make note of important areas).
I do not know how much you know about role-playing games or how much you know about RPGs from the 80s & 90s. This is maybe the first RPG product I have ever reviewed on this site so I don't have a feel for how people go for this sort of thing. I especially do not know not how much you know about Palladium as a company and as a...style...of RPG book. Let me explain by starting with the mechanics and material aspects of the book.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is a fairly slight RPG, one of the smallest complete RPGs that Palladium has released. It is only 112 pages and that includes a one page of adverts for other (related) games and a two-page character sheet/worksheet. It has character creation, equipment (possibly one of the heftiest parts of the games outside of the bit detailing different animal species and stats), game mechanics (including combat), a tiny bit of GM advice (surprisingly slight), sample characters, and a nice variety of adventures (all of which are written fairly briefly with the idea that the actual play will take these ideas and expand a bit).
It gets most things in there, but in that particularly Palladium way, including sections copied from other games (or reused in other games). There is over two and half pages dedicated to Palladium's particular alignment system which was fair-for-its-time as far as alignment systems go, and younger me preferred it to Dungeons & Dragons' version of the same (though much less iconic), but present-me realizes that all such "alignment bucket" systems are pretty terrible ways to handle character personalities and goals. This is increased in its "pretty terrible" aspect by including Siembieda's infamous screed against "True Neutral" alignments.**** There's a bit justifying the large amount of random-roll-against-a-table aspects of character creation (if you play it "straight", you are supposed to roll not only your attributes and bits like your money but what type of animal you are, what caused you to mutate, how you were raised...which has some hefty impact on character skills and abilities...and some options are more heavily weighted than others). There's a section justifying Palladium's experience point system [an actual improvement-over-D&D's]. For such a short book, you have to get through quite a bit of game design theory explaining why they wrote what they wrote (surely there was a better place for it). And while it has plenty of sample-play moments, some of these can be a bit clunky [they are still good to have since it will point out rules you might have missed...speaking of...]
Then you have numerous instances where a rule will show up in one random place but not in other places or in other places but with conflicting elements. One page lists "Martial Arts" as costing "two skills", and then a few pages later it says "three skills" (I'll lean towards two...it's good but not super good). Saving Throws (another staple of this era of RPG that tends to be done better nowadays) are listed on one page for lethal toxins, non-lethal toxins, psionics, harmful drugs, and acids (which is "none"). Earlier, there is a bit talking about bonuses to saving against coma/death. I can houserule that as being the same as "lethal toxin" but I see no actual rule for it. In fact, I'm left with a minor case of a weird "dread" that some useful rule was overlooked because it showed up at the end of a weapon description or, like "Paired Weapon" in the combat situation, was simply inserted out of alphabetical order. Having other Palladium books (see footnote ***) helps, since I can look up relatively equal elements in them, but doesn't fix this issue really.
Let's switch to positives, though. At its core, this is game about having dumb amounts of fun playing mutant animals doing...well, really whatever you want. The fact the book spends so much time talking about equipment and quite a bit of that equipment is weapons or has weapon potential (at least has a damage/armor stat of some sort) means you will take it as something like a fighting RPG...and surely it is meant to be (look at the source). The skill list for non-fighting skills is middling, overall, and while it has many of the standards, there is a definite emphasis on bulking your character up and increasing their combat potential (and they can be quite beefy by the end) [physical skills often give bonuses to strength and "SDC" which is sort of your natural ability to soak damage, but mental/social skills give no similar bonuses to other skills, which is kind of sad and could be fairly well houseruled]. That all being said, you could play a group of bunny rabbit hackers where fights are a limited aspect. With a few house-rules or by using Palladium's essentially cross-compatible features, you could have Giraffes that hunt ghosts (with Beyond the Supernatural) or high fantasy adventure with Rat Knights (with Palladium Fantasy). Toss in a few supplements that increase the number of animal descriptions and options, you can go even further (though I'm limiting this review to mainly the main book).
And the animal creation is fun and (mostly) balanced. Animals have a particular size and you change that as well as tweak how human they are and which "natural powers" they retain (retractable claws, night vision, etc). There are a few places where two animals are not balanced, especially in the case of larger animals or with animals that give different amounts of stat boost (Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears have the same starting ability, but the Polar Bear can generate more "Bio-E" points to use on other things...it's a little harder to make a full Alligator character than others because of some minor stat bonuses eating into available "Bio-E") but generally, the animal creation system is the meat of the game and makes for a varied and enjoyable story. Seriously, in the days where there were a dozen Dungeons & Dragons clones [with "upgrades"] coming out every month [*cough* Palladium Fantasy RPG *cough*], this would have been a shining star of weird and fast gameplay based on a weird and fast comic book [the source predates the children's cartoon and subsequent entries that tended to tone down the violence and reshaped the story into something that did not appeal to the original fanbase, which is part of what killed this RPG line in the end].
And the combat and skill resolution system is a bit clunky, but generally it is a more fun version of 1980s D&D combat with a skill system that is sort of Chaosium but a bit lesser with some side notes/boons (such as physical skills boosting physical stats). The game is pretty simple by modern terms, but it really was a not-bad and sometimes-good/great RPG of the old-style (even if you have to Gamemaster some rulings on a fairly frequent basis). I can see why I used to be such a Palladium fan. Just digging out all the right stuff at the right time can be a headache if you have no familiarity with the product or its many cousins, but that aspect never bothered me back in the day (when I would spend hours every week just reading and re-reading RPG rulebooks even though I only rarely played*****). It does moreso now, since there have been decades of improvements and innovations, but it's a bit rough to judge a system too harshly by the light of such improvements (it's not even like Palladium is still updating/publishing this title).
So...3 stars for the mechanics (judging them by a mix of then- and now-standards), 2 stars (or less) for the ease of use and layout/editing, 4ish stars for the art (including some old school TMNT comics), and 5+ stars for the crazy core story and the kind of game it facilitates. I'm not sure if that averages out to 4-stars or not, but that's what I'll give it.
======
* We tried the more recent Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which I enjoy but she considers to be far too scary. We moved on the 2012 (?) CGI series which is a bit more "classic" in its approach and my daughter loves a lot more. I miss the over-the-top Rise-stylings, but I feel like she will have a better grasp of the characters from this, anyhow.
** I am missing at least one title I would have been sure to go for, The TMNT Adventures book, because it had some rules notes. Back in the day when I was stretching my budget as thin as I could stretch it, I would tend to prioritize those books that had new rules (and I often skipped over pure adventure books...so I know why I'm missing a couple of them). My guess is that it was already out of print by the time I made my order.
*** I first came into Palladium by way of their revised edition fantasy RPG in the...late 80s? early 90s? I was not that old, anyhow. Pre-teens or early teens. I ran a few adventures where one player, my brother, played multiple characters...and it was a lot of fun. I did a couple of games of their (again, revised) Heroes Unlimited, and had some fun, maybe a couple of games of Beyond the Supernatural, and I think maybe a single game of Nightbane (which I had back when it was called Nightspawn). Despite having had played only about 10-15 total games in products released by the company (and most of those being in Palladium Fantasy), I went on a kick where I bought nearly everything they had in nearly every franchise. And just read them***** with no precise intention of ever playing them. At any rate, I have too many Rifts books that I will never use, but I don't want to give them up. I gave up my Fantasy books during a move, once, and still miss having my original editions of them.
**** Palladium alignments take up seven slots being a rough equivalent of lawful and chaotic good, lawful and chaotic neutral, and all three evils (to put in terms of the D&D buckets). In every Palladium product I have ever seen, including more recent ones, there is a paragraph about how a "True Neutral" character is a philosophical impossibility and how you could not play such a character and therefore there will be no "True Neutral" characters and this is an unbreakable rule of the game (the only game rule described as such). It is strange, since in the 7-bucket system you could just leave this out and be done with it. It exists only as a long repeated commentary on D&D.
***** I grew up fairly isolated in the swamps of Lower Alabama and only had a few groups of friends willing to play games with me until I left for college. However, I used to spend a lot of time reading and daydreaming about RPGs and "playing" solo adventures to learn rules and dice mechanics. Frankly, just flipping through huge swaths of character options is probably one of the best reasons to be into Palladium, because they have some crazy character options (cybernetic dolphin mecha pilots, boyyyyy).
I do not know how much you know about role-playing games or how much you know about RPGs from the 80s & 90s. This is maybe the first RPG product I have ever reviewed on this site so I don't have a feel for how people go for this sort of thing. I especially do not know not how much you know about Palladium as a company and as a...style...of RPG book. Let me explain by starting with the mechanics and material aspects of the book.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is a fairly slight RPG, one of the smallest complete RPGs that Palladium has released. It is only 112 pages and that includes a one page of adverts for other (related) games and a two-page character sheet/worksheet. It has character creation, equipment (possibly one of the heftiest parts of the games outside of the bit detailing different animal species and stats), game mechanics (including combat), a tiny bit of GM advice (surprisingly slight), sample characters, and a nice variety of adventures (all of which are written fairly briefly with the idea that the actual play will take these ideas and expand a bit).
It gets most things in there, but in that particularly Palladium way, including sections copied from other games (or reused in other games). There is over two and half pages dedicated to Palladium's particular alignment system which was fair-for-its-time as far as alignment systems go, and younger me preferred it to Dungeons & Dragons' version of the same (though much less iconic), but present-me realizes that all such "alignment bucket" systems are pretty terrible ways to handle character personalities and goals. This is increased in its "pretty terrible" aspect by including Siembieda's infamous screed against "True Neutral" alignments.**** There's a bit justifying the large amount of random-roll-against-a-table aspects of character creation (if you play it "straight", you are supposed to roll not only your attributes and bits like your money but what type of animal you are, what caused you to mutate, how you were raised...which has some hefty impact on character skills and abilities...and some options are more heavily weighted than others). There's a section justifying Palladium's experience point system [an actual improvement-over-D&D's]. For such a short book, you have to get through quite a bit of game design theory explaining why they wrote what they wrote (surely there was a better place for it). And while it has plenty of sample-play moments, some of these can be a bit clunky [they are still good to have since it will point out rules you might have missed...speaking of...]
Then you have numerous instances where a rule will show up in one random place but not in other places or in other places but with conflicting elements. One page lists "Martial Arts" as costing "two skills", and then a few pages later it says "three skills" (I'll lean towards two...it's good but not super good). Saving Throws (another staple of this era of RPG that tends to be done better nowadays) are listed on one page for lethal toxins, non-lethal toxins, psionics, harmful drugs, and acids (which is "none"). Earlier, there is a bit talking about bonuses to saving against coma/death. I can houserule that as being the same as "lethal toxin" but I see no actual rule for it. In fact, I'm left with a minor case of a weird "dread" that some useful rule was overlooked because it showed up at the end of a weapon description or, like "Paired Weapon" in the combat situation, was simply inserted out of alphabetical order. Having other Palladium books (see footnote ***) helps, since I can look up relatively equal elements in them, but doesn't fix this issue really.
Let's switch to positives, though. At its core, this is game about having dumb amounts of fun playing mutant animals doing...well, really whatever you want. The fact the book spends so much time talking about equipment and quite a bit of that equipment is weapons or has weapon potential (at least has a damage/armor stat of some sort) means you will take it as something like a fighting RPG...and surely it is meant to be (look at the source). The skill list for non-fighting skills is middling, overall, and while it has many of the standards, there is a definite emphasis on bulking your character up and increasing their combat potential (and they can be quite beefy by the end) [physical skills often give bonuses to strength and "SDC" which is sort of your natural ability to soak damage, but mental/social skills give no similar bonuses to other skills, which is kind of sad and could be fairly well houseruled]. That all being said, you could play a group of bunny rabbit hackers where fights are a limited aspect. With a few house-rules or by using Palladium's essentially cross-compatible features, you could have Giraffes that hunt ghosts (with Beyond the Supernatural) or high fantasy adventure with Rat Knights (with Palladium Fantasy). Toss in a few supplements that increase the number of animal descriptions and options, you can go even further (though I'm limiting this review to mainly the main book).
And the animal creation is fun and (mostly) balanced. Animals have a particular size and you change that as well as tweak how human they are and which "natural powers" they retain (retractable claws, night vision, etc). There are a few places where two animals are not balanced, especially in the case of larger animals or with animals that give different amounts of stat boost (Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears have the same starting ability, but the Polar Bear can generate more "Bio-E" points to use on other things...it's a little harder to make a full Alligator character than others because of some minor stat bonuses eating into available "Bio-E") but generally, the animal creation system is the meat of the game and makes for a varied and enjoyable story. Seriously, in the days where there were a dozen Dungeons & Dragons clones [with "upgrades"] coming out every month [*cough* Palladium Fantasy RPG *cough*], this would have been a shining star of weird and fast gameplay based on a weird and fast comic book [the source predates the children's cartoon and subsequent entries that tended to tone down the violence and reshaped the story into something that did not appeal to the original fanbase, which is part of what killed this RPG line in the end].
And the combat and skill resolution system is a bit clunky, but generally it is a more fun version of 1980s D&D combat with a skill system that is sort of Chaosium but a bit lesser with some side notes/boons (such as physical skills boosting physical stats). The game is pretty simple by modern terms, but it really was a not-bad and sometimes-good/great RPG of the old-style (even if you have to Gamemaster some rulings on a fairly frequent basis). I can see why I used to be such a Palladium fan. Just digging out all the right stuff at the right time can be a headache if you have no familiarity with the product or its many cousins, but that aspect never bothered me back in the day (when I would spend hours every week just reading and re-reading RPG rulebooks even though I only rarely played*****). It does moreso now, since there have been decades of improvements and innovations, but it's a bit rough to judge a system too harshly by the light of such improvements (it's not even like Palladium is still updating/publishing this title).
So...3 stars for the mechanics (judging them by a mix of then- and now-standards), 2 stars (or less) for the ease of use and layout/editing, 4ish stars for the art (including some old school TMNT comics), and 5+ stars for the crazy core story and the kind of game it facilitates. I'm not sure if that averages out to 4-stars or not, but that's what I'll give it.
======
* We tried the more recent Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which I enjoy but she considers to be far too scary. We moved on the 2012 (?) CGI series which is a bit more "classic" in its approach and my daughter loves a lot more. I miss the over-the-top Rise-stylings, but I feel like she will have a better grasp of the characters from this, anyhow.
** I am missing at least one title I would have been sure to go for, The TMNT Adventures book, because it had some rules notes. Back in the day when I was stretching my budget as thin as I could stretch it, I would tend to prioritize those books that had new rules (and I often skipped over pure adventure books...so I know why I'm missing a couple of them). My guess is that it was already out of print by the time I made my order.
*** I first came into Palladium by way of their revised edition fantasy RPG in the...late 80s? early 90s? I was not that old, anyhow. Pre-teens or early teens. I ran a few adventures where one player, my brother, played multiple characters...and it was a lot of fun. I did a couple of games of their (again, revised) Heroes Unlimited, and had some fun, maybe a couple of games of Beyond the Supernatural, and I think maybe a single game of Nightbane (which I had back when it was called Nightspawn). Despite having had played only about 10-15 total games in products released by the company (and most of those being in Palladium Fantasy), I went on a kick where I bought nearly everything they had in nearly every franchise. And just read them***** with no precise intention of ever playing them. At any rate, I have too many Rifts books that I will never use, but I don't want to give them up. I gave up my Fantasy books during a move, once, and still miss having my original editions of them.
**** Palladium alignments take up seven slots being a rough equivalent of lawful and chaotic good, lawful and chaotic neutral, and all three evils (to put in terms of the D&D buckets). In every Palladium product I have ever seen, including more recent ones, there is a paragraph about how a "True Neutral" character is a philosophical impossibility and how you could not play such a character and therefore there will be no "True Neutral" characters and this is an unbreakable rule of the game (the only game rule described as such). It is strange, since in the 7-bucket system you could just leave this out and be done with it. It exists only as a long repeated commentary on D&D.
***** I grew up fairly isolated in the swamps of Lower Alabama and only had a few groups of friends willing to play games with me until I left for college. However, I used to spend a lot of time reading and daydreaming about RPGs and "playing" solo adventures to learn rules and dice mechanics. Frankly, just flipping through huge swaths of character options is probably one of the best reasons to be into Palladium, because they have some crazy character options (cybernetic dolphin mecha pilots, boyyyyy).
April 3, 2007
I wish I still had this. Even though the Palladium-based system was unbalanced and not playable for long, it was fun to look through and read the stats of the Turtles as well as the mutant abilities of various animals. The illustrations were either culled from the comic book or custom-drawn by Eastman or Laird, so it's a good-looking book as well.
March 24, 2010
How do you review a RPG rules system? Lord knows but the Palladium system focuses on simplicity rather than a statistically valid study on probability (Cyborg commandoes, anyone?) or rule nazi porn (AD&D with all its additional abominations). This got flogged to death with mates in the teen and uni years. Comic book adventure. I was the games master so 5 stars because ego commands it!
March 29, 2014
You bet I own a copy. Even if you never play the game, the information in here is 8-shades of how-the-hell-do-they-come-up-with-this-stuff. This is an absolute gold-mine of background information.
If you are a fan of the TMNT, then do what you can to get a copy of this book.
If you are a fan of the TMNT, then do what you can to get a copy of this book.
September 10, 2017
A fine roleplaying system that allows players to mutate any animal as player characters. Based on heroes unlimited system if you care to cross universes.
You might need a time machine to find people to play this.
You might need a time machine to find people to play this.
December 17, 2013
Comic book art, strange rules, the TMNT game was messy and sometimes clumsy but sometimes the funnest games are of that type. I will always have a warm spot in my heart for this game.
September 23, 2019
Easily the greatest role playing game of all time.
April 6, 2025
I have the online copy and as a fan of the franchise. I can certainly tell you. I was over the moon, when I found it had an rpg, it's definitely got its issues, but otherwise pretty good
November 6, 2007
crazy rpg set in palladiums universe- open minds and semi-serious attitudes work best
April 22, 2012
good rpg book!
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