WTF, D&D: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: After The Bomb (Palladium)

In 1985, before the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went mainstream, a little company by the name of Palladium published a role playing game based on the gritty comic book turtles. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness became a big success for the fledgling company. For the first supplement to the TMNT RPG, Palladium decided to do the logical thing: completely forget about the turtles and create a post apocalyptic wasteland where mutant animals drive Mad Max style cars. If that sounds good to you, prepare to be disappointed. Steve and Zack suffer the fallout of After the Bomb.

ATB_cover

Steve: I remember this book cover. It promised so much and delivered so little.

Zack: Did it promise a bird, with no hands, holding an uzi?

Zack: Because, how did it shoot the uzi, Steve?

Steve: This book is really short, get that out there. I mean, it spends a lot of time giving you detailed stats for characters for something that so radically changes the setting from “modern pizza loving sewer living turtle dudes” to “ultra violent future where the remnants of humanity struggle to enslave or eliminate a bunch of dog men and bird ladies.”

Zack: It’s Palladium syndrome, where they cram in the full stats for like 30 different NPCs, character classes and vehicles, and then give you like a page of background information and a couple bad maps.

Steve: Is another part of Palladium syndrome where they reuse the same rules and even the artwork in ten different books?

Zack: Yes, it’s a steady accretion of random charts that let you roll up a mutant animal.

Steve: Sometimes I think Kevin Siembieda should just make one huge 300 page random table that lets you roll up a character and have a random adventure with that character.

Zack: At the climax you would be rolling the hit location for your 24 micro missiles on the Behemoth Skull MK3 transforming jet walker.