Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

I believe I picked this game up in 1983 or so, so I guess I was about 12 or 13. I had not read any of the TMNT comics at the time, and I've only read one of them even now, more than ten years later. I was pretty impressed with the interior art and comic excerpts when I bought it. It seemed very moody, very cool. Now remember, at this time -- and I'm probably wrong about the date here, feel free to mail me and correct me -- the few TMNT comics that were in existence were so popular and so rare and so hot that you simply could not get your hands on them to read them, even if you wanted to. So.

The rules, however, were the Palladium Roleplaying System, and what's worse, the editing was apallingly bad. Let me give you an idea. In 1990 I described the game to another friend, who picked up the thirteenth printing; I had the fourth printing, and we knew a fella who had the seventh printing. We compared editions at one point. Not only were there typoes which had made it through all thirteen editions to date, there were typoes which did not exist in the fourth edition, which did exist in the seventh and/or thirteenth. Or an error would be present in the fourth edition, vanish in the seventh, and reappear in the thirteenth. God only knows where they are now.

Production values were okay at best. Lots of excerpts from the comics, lots of eye-damagingly small typeface and hard-to-read tables, lots of neato martial arts weapons and things. The system did allow you to run an anthropomorphized animal of almost any variety; I was involved in a later game which had as its PC team: Doc the drug-dealing skunk; Goldstein the Jewish turkey, who had escaped from (or "flown"), if you prefer, the coop just before Thanksgiving; Some neurotic schnauzer; a warrior pig; and a fairly human-looking individual of indeterminate race. A lawyer, I think.

The rules were vile, and changed with every printing. We faked it, but, as I recall, we had a house rule that if you could find a rule in any one of the editions we had floating around, you could use it. It was good for several wacky, rollicking adventures, all of which I enjoyed a lot, and all of which revolved around the motif of "Save the world, or play the gig that will make us into a nationally-famous band?"


June 27, 1995
tenzil@io.com
Copyright ©1995 James Kiley. All rights reserved.
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