Palladium Announces New TMNT Kickstarter

Palladium Books has announced the return of the official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roleplaying game. Out of print for decades, the 1985 game is coming back as a pair of full-colour hardcovers featuring new artwork. It will be hitting Kickstarter on October 31st and will also include miniatures, dice, and more. You can sign up to the pre-launch page here.

Westland, MI – October 13, 2023 – Palladium Books and Paramount Consumer Products have joined forces to reissue the ever-popular role-playing game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

The beloved, out-of-print Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles role-playing game and its sourcebooks are sought-after collector items that have enthralled generations since its release in 1985 as one of the first licensed TMNT products. They are returning to print as two deluxe hardcover collections of the RPG and sourcebooks. Each is being completely remastered by industry veteran Sean Owen Roberson and presented in full color, and Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, will also provide a new painted cover.

Bonus material includes an array of new artwork, never before seen behind-the-scenes info and art, plus remembrances and tributes by renowned comic book and RPG creators including Eastman, Peter Laird, Freddie E. Williams II, Steven Cummings, Sophie Campbell, David Petersen and many more.

“This is incredibly exciting! I am 1000% onboard to help bring this historic and original TMNT Role Playing Game series back in a truly deluxe collector’s edition that will thrill original fans and open the door for new ones,” said Eastman. “I've made all my archives available for expanded behind-the-scenes content as well as a few top secret surprises you need to be part of. Stay tuned!”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness Kickstarter

The Kickstarter campaign, launching October 31, 2023, will offer a host of mind-blowing Kickstarter exclusives: TMNT miniatures based on the role-playing game, dice sets, variant book covers, art prints by legacy TMNT creatives, a card deck, and more, including special stretch goals to entice role-playing fans and TMNT fans alike. All products ship in 2024. To be among the first to hear about the entire exciting slate of releases, creators, exclusives and stretch goals to be unlocked with your support, be sure to go to the Kickstarter page and subscribe for updates.

 

[mcmillan]

Is MItN a conversion guide, and where is it available?

More of a rewrite of the system is my understanding - haven’t had a look directly since I just learned about it from this thread and was waiting for my next paycheck to pick it up. Links to itch.io and drivethrurpg are at Julian Kay’s website j/k! Games

 

[Keovar]

Great, thanks. I’m going to skip the Kickstarter, but I’ll be interested to see the system cleaned up, and I still enjoy the mutant animal concept, even if the system, and its owners, may not be great. I know the system is a hodgepodge mess, as were the early couple editions of D&D, but TMNT and other Palladium stuff is what I was allowed to play without having my books seized and destroyed. (Grew up in the southestern US during the satanic panic crap.)

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This pseudo-review gives me pause, though:
"Completely pointless virtue signaling? Into the trash it goes!" - anon

Sounds like someone cloaking their antisocial opinions behind the fiction of being apolitical.
Example: [List] TTRPG Guide to Woke Companies

 

[Julian Kay]

Without getting into the weeds (as guided above), I'm not apolitical, and aim to be straightforward about my views where I can be so you can make an informed choice. It's not going to be for everybody, and that's fine. Mutants in the Now is meant to be inclusive, hence the "Now"; not just modern mechanics, but a modern viewpoint. It's a statement as much as a description.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Coloring the art makes it worse, IMO

The orginal:

 

[Julian Kay]

Coloring the art makes it worse, IMO

View attachment 318845

It's got the weird effect for me where each is a reference to a different Herald of Galactus (I think from left to right: Terrax, Air-Walker, Firelord, Silver Surfer) but they're obviously not going to color them accordingly. When it was black and white, of course I could envision them having the expected colors of each character, but now only the Cocker Spaniel matches (though I originally presumed he was wholly silver).

 

[Keovar]

Sure, if it's "not for everybody" in the sense that it wouldn't suit everyone's taste, that's inevitable. As long as it's written to be inclusive enough for anyone who wants to be involved, that's what matters.

I got Now & Next. Does the LQ version have fewer speckles behind the text? I'm somewhat visually impaired, so the mottling can be hard to sort out. I can try running the docs through the OCR process on PDF24 tools, and see if I can save a version with no background.

 

[Julian Kay]

If somebody's intolerant; an ethnic supremacist, an authoritarian, homophobic, etc., I'm not sweating giving their purchase a miss, as aforementioned. I will absolutely take that financial hit to have a better, healthier fandom and community for my game in the long term.

 

[DarkCrisis]

People kicking in $1 just to complain/rant about the old unfulfilled KS from years ago sure is something.

Kicked in for the 2 books basic tier. Really wish they used the all red bandanas though or had an option for full color plus red bandanas.

 

[Sacrosanct]

People kicking in $1 just to complain/rant about the old unfulfilled KS from years ago sure is something.

Kicked in for the 2 books basic tier. Really wish they used the all red bandanas though or had an option for full color plus red bandanas.

Looks like all of those comments are getting reported and deleted. So folks have been making comments on Kevin's disaster Robotech KS page instead

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/palladiumbooks/robotech-rpg-tacticstm/comments

 

[Keovar]

Back to the game, I appreciate how you managed to combine randomness with fairness in character creation. I generally prefer the choices and fairness of point-buy ability scores, but I understand that some people still find it fun to randomly roll stats. When GMing, it’s harder to balance encounters for a party that has the demigod/sidekick dichotomy which rolled stats often produces, and some players will expect rerolls until they beat the odds, or roll unsupervised and leave me with the choice to either assume it was done fairly or question their honesty.

By giving extra GOO-P points, those who believe in luck can do what they enjoy, and those who don’t roll so well up front will get more character creation options later. It combines the sense of mystery/discovery which entirely-built systems lack with the equality of opportunity which entirely-random systems often lack. As a GM, I can let players make characters without individual supervision (once they know how, anyway) and ‘do the math’ later to ensure they were all made fairly.

Now I want to figure out ways to incorporate something similar into other games’ character creation systems. The best I’ve seen before is giving an experience point multiplier commensurate to the ability score flaws, but many games no longer use XP. Maybe in D&D and similar games I can create a ‘luck’ score that is increased by the flaws in the randomly rolled ability scores. I guess that could be similar to the ‘takebacks’ in MitN, but applied as a metacurrency for in-play rerolls and the like.