TMNT and Other Strangeness - Revival of the Mutant Animal RPG

On October 31 of this year (2023) Palladium Books announced a Kickstarter for a new edition of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-based role playing game "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness". The Kickstarter campaign was well-timed and shrewdly presented, tapping on a vein of nostalgia that spans at least three generations. The campaign hit a home run, reaching a fairly-modest $250,000 funding goal in four hours and has almost tripled that fundraising as of this writing. Let's take a look at what the original RPG was like and what we might expect from a new revision of the campaign setting.

Prior History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Role Playing Game

I identified Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness ("TMNT & OS") as my introduction to RPGs in one of the very first entries on this blog over a decade ago. I am far from alone here as I have watched and read many other people comment that TMNT & OS served as their introduction to RPGs. Other people came across the game as they were looking through the Dungeons & Dragons section of their local hobby or book store and finding the book nearby. The book was undoubtedly one of Palladium's best selling games in the mid-1980s.

Palladium Books was founded in 1981 by Kevin Siembieda as one of many companies founded in the wake of TSR's success with D&D and AD&D. By 1984 his company had published the Palladium Fantasy Role Playing Game and Heroes Unlimited, the former being a medieval fantasy game and the latter dealing with superheroes. The books and their accompanying supplements sold well enough that Palladium could conceivably expand with a marketing deal like those TSR were making for the Marvel Super Heroes and Conan licenses.

In 1985 Palladium came into contact upon another up-and-coming publisher, not of role playing games but of comic books, known as Mirage Studios. At this time Mirage Studios was essentially Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird and the company published only TMNT. The late Erick Wujick, who was a very dedicated RPG player and an early admirer of TMNT, contacted Siembieda in late 1984 to suggest that TMNT would make a good RPG. Siembieda had also read TMNT, had the same thought and set about making it happen. Siembieda contacted Eastman and Laird and secured the rights to adapt the comic book into an RPG using Palladium's rule set. Eastman and Laird were certainly not adverse to any kind of reasonable licensing deal even at this point and lent their artistic services to the book as well. After a false start with another author, Wujick wrote the bulk of the book and playtested the rules with his own group..

The book was released in October 1985 and sold well enough that five TMNT & OS supplements were produced. Wujick was credited as the author of TMNT & OS and its first three supplements: 

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures! (June 1986) ("Adventures!")
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Guide to the Universe (May 1987) ("Universe")
3. Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (April 1989) ("Transdimensional")
4. Truckin' Turtles (November 1989) ("Truckin''")
5. Turtles Go Hollywood (March 1990) ("Hollywood")

A tri-fold Game Shield was also released as part of the "RPG Assessory Pack" in 1990. Sandwiched in between these supplements were the post-apocalyptic After the Bomb (1986), Road Hogs (1986) and Mutants Down Under (1988), which were originally were within the TMNT & OS system as supplements. Mutants of the Yucatan (1990), Mutants in Avalon (1991) and Mutants in Orbit (1992) would follow after the cessation of new TMNT & OS supplements.

TMNT & OS sold very well at first, the comic book was the only iteration of TMNT out there and it had some appeal with readers who skewed older and appreciated the often violent nature of the book. But in late 1987 things started to change because the animated cartoon from Wolf Films started to air on Saturday morning. The animated cartoon, which was also accompanied by a line from Archie Comics, was much more child-friendly, did not show graphic violence or crude behavior like the original Mirage Comics version. Those were the iterations of the TMNT that sparked Turtle Mania, which was great for Eastman, Laird, Archie Comics, Wolf Films and Playmates (who made the TMNT toy line).

Unfortunately there were both winners and losers in the wake of the kiddie TMNT success. The original comic entered into the "guest era" where different writers and artists took over while Eastman and Laird were trying to run a business empire and pursue other interests. To say that the quality and tone of those stories varied significantly would be quite the understatement. The Palladium TMNT campaign setting also suffered declining sales because, as Siembieda related, mature RPGers would not be caught dead with TMNT once it become a children's fad. 

However, while the sales kept dropping the process did not happen overnight. Turtle Mania was not in full swing until arguably the second season of the cartoon which broadcast from October to December of 1988 (seventh printing September 1988), so books that were nearly finished or for which advances had been paid during that year were still considered publishable in 1989 (eighth printing March 1989) and early 1990 (eleventh printing July 1990). The twelfth printing is dated May 1991, so there was still some life in the product line even at the height of the Turtles' popularity.

Eventually the falling sales figures of TMNT led to a shift away from licensed TMNT & OS material to the TMNT-less After the Bomb setting and other profitable ventures like Robotech and Rifts. A second edition of TMNT & OS was announced in 1997 but never materialized, with Palladium ending its licensing agreement with Mirage Studios in 2000. After the Bomb did see a second edition published in 2001 but new supplements for it have not materialized.

Content and Rules of TMNT & OS

Now that I have discussed TMNT & OS's history, it is time to take the plunge into the book's content. Eastman drew the cover art of TMNT & OS and both he and Laird contributed approximately 24 original illustrations to the book as well as lending artwork from previously published Mirage Comics. They also wrote a new 8-page short story specifically for this book called "Don't Judge a Book" in the middle of the book. 

The writing style of the book must be mentioned. Wujick's enthusiasm for the subject matter shines through the text. This book was a labor of love and it shows. There is an infrequent use of the first person "I" and "We", as in "The reason I use an experience point system is because I find them extremely realistic and practical." and "There is a good reason for [a point system]; we want to make sure that every player could create an animal character to suit themselves." Some of the more editorial comments in the game may come across as didactic ("An excellent player can play any character, and sees a weak character as a challenge, not a liability.") or even dogmatic (see the discussion on alignments below) but that what you can get when you have scrappy "upstarts" trying to carve out a niche for themselves and having to challenge the established brand. The game wants to be everything AD&D was not, modern, realistic, gritty and urban.

TMNT did not arise out of a vacuum, much of the gameplay mechanics were taken from Heroes Unlimited. To its credit, the book admits this and also proclaims compatibility with the Heroes Unlimited at least a dozen times in the text. TMNT was part of the Palladium Megaverse® system, which presented a reasonable degree of cross-compatibility across several lines of Palladium Books' products, not just Heroes Unlimited. Rifts, Robotech, Ninjas and Superspies (basically TMNT & OS without mutant animal characters and also by Wujick), and the Fantasy RPG are all within this system

Character Creation

It cannot be understated how much of an influence D&D has on this game through Heroes Unlimited. D&D has six attributes and corresponding bonuses determined by rolling 3d6, TMNT & OS has eight but if one rolls a 16-18, the attribute will receive the benefit of an additional d6. TMNT Hit Points use a d6 per level regardless of animal type, Alignments are generally similar, characters level through experience, attacks are conducted with a d20. Superficially AD&D and TMNT & OS look very similar.

The book is designed to randomly generate almost all essential elements of the character, attributes, animal types, background/cause of mutation, height and weight. Percentile die are used for animal type and cause of mutation but the book observes that the Game Master can let the players choose if he or she wishes.

The eight attributes come close to the famous six. Physical Strength, Intelligence Quotient and Physical Endurance correspond pretty well to Strength, Intelligence and Constitution. Mental Affinity and Physical Beauty are pretty much Charisma, Physical Prowess and Speed encompass Dexterity and Mental Endurance is the closes to Wisdom. Mental Endurance and Physical Endurance are very important in the game because the former indicates resilience to psionics and the latter forms the basis of hit points. Note that unlike D&D Strength, Physical Prowess gives a bonus to an attack roll. I.Q. is obviously important for all characters because of its boost to skills. All in all, the stats are more balanced in terms of their relative importance than AD&D stats were, although the Charisma stats are given nebulous applications within the rules. 

One the attributes have been rolled, the animal selection is rolled, BIO-E (Biological Energy) points are generated and spent, then another roll follows to determine the cause of mutation. 

Animal Types

The core of this particular book, and by far its most distinguishing feature is animal mutation element of character creation. Various pathways to mutation are given (chosen by percentile roll) but the end result is that an animal can change its nature to become more humanoid by the expenditure of BIO-E  points. There are at least seventy different animals to choose from (again chosen by percentile roll) and some of which, such as dogs, have breeds to choose from. Each animal starts with a certain set number of BIO-E points and can spend those points to become more human like or use special abilities natural to that species. Larger creatures, like elephants and bears, have fewer BIO-E points and must sacrifice some size levels to gain more. Smaller creatures, like cats and foxes, have a larger starting BIO-E reserve but must spend some points to reach human sizes. Most animals will need to spend points for full or partial hands, bipedality, speech and human looks.  Special abilities may include claws, bite, night vision or flight depending on the animal. Playing a porcupine or a skunk has its advantages, but even they must spend BIO-E points to enjoy the natural offensive capabilities of their base animal type.

While there may have been other, non-Palladium RPGs which include mutant animal characters, I am not aware of any which have gained significant traction in the history of RPGs. Eric Wujick's system remains the standard by which animal character mutations are measured and undoubtedly his finest achievement. The organization could have been a bit better here because the section which describes the BIO-E point system and the section containing the animal descriptions is separated by fourteen pages of other rules.

Background Types

The cause of mutation establishes the character's background, educational and skill levels and money to buy equipment. Cause of mutation include Random Mutation, Accidental Encounter and Deliberate Experimentation. The TMNT would have been the product of Accidental Encounter with the TCRI chemical cannister, while Splinter is a product of both Random and Accidental mutations. Deliberate Experimentation has a number of subtypes depending on the relationship between the characters and the humans who caused him or her to mutate. These relationships can result in a relatively high level of education or specialized training, such as assassins, and may be hunted by the people or organizations if they escaped from a hostile relationship. Some characters are educated as wild animals (like the TMNT) and have somewhat limited access to education and equipment in many cases.

Alignment

Alignment is an area of the game that explicitly tries to distance itself from other systems (D&D is not named here but it clearly is the target). There is a paragraph which criticizes the concept of a "neutral" alignment and states that its rejection of that alignment is one of the "hard and fast rules of this game." However, its own alignments fall fairly well on the nine-point alignment system. Consider the following equates:

Principled = Lawful Good, Scrupulous = Neutral Good, Unprincipled = Chaotic Good

Anarchist = Chaotic Neutral, Miscreant = Neutral Evil, Diabolic = Chaotic Evil

Aberrant = Lawful Evil

These equates are not 1:1, Principled may exhibit Lawful Neutral tendencies and Scrupulous characters may veer more toward Lawful Good than Neutral Good. Aberrant characters live by their own codes, not society's laws, but generally do not have the indifference to suffering of Miscreant characters or the sadistic impulses of the Diabolic characters. Lawful Evil is the closest AD&D alignment to aberrant.

Equipment & Skills

Equipment covers a breadth of medieval weapons, eastern/ninja weapons and modern weapons. Hand guns, rifles, explosives, energy weapons all tend to do more damage than traditional hand held weapons. It may seem that characters armed with katanas (2D6 damage), nunchaku (1D8) and shuriken (1D4) going up against enemies armed with AK-47s (4D6), 9mm Uzis (2D6) and laser pistols (4D6) may be at a disadvantage, especially with a burst attack. Stealth instead of frontal assaults may be required to overcome such foes.

Non-weapon equipment covers a variety of items both high-tech (for the 1980s) and mundane. If your character does not come from a moneyed background, you can scavenge for many items on the lower end of the technology scale. Scavenged equipment is said to be of poor quality, but there is little in the way of breakage rules in the game. 

This game does not have character classes, instead it provides skills. Skills were not officially a part of D&D or AD&D when this game was published and there are many of them in this game. Some of the skills and equipment, which as those related phone bugging, are a bit dated today as they were devised in a world where smartphones did not exist. Educational Skills, less formalized Secondary Skills and Combat disciplines are contained within the Skill list. Skills consist of more scholastic skills like Medical Doctor and Astrophysics, more applied skills like Locksmith and Electrical Engineer, artistic skills like Cooking and Photography, physical skills like Body Building and Gymnastics and practical skills like Land Navigation and Demolitions. Skill checks are made with a roll of a percentile die and the maximum rating of a skill is 98% to allow some margin of error.

Physical Skills and and Weapon Proficiencies are especially important. Physical Skills can grant a character one-time bonuses to attribute scores. Weapon Proficiencies add bonuses to strike which improve as the character gains levels.  Each class of Hand to Hand combat skills gets a new bonus or ability for each new experience level. Educational and Secondary Skills also improve with experience levels.

Experience

TMNT & OS gives an experience level chart up to 15th level, which requires 334,501 points. Achieving 2nd level requires 1,951 points. Combat in and of itself is not going lead to rapid advancement, as "subduing a great menace" only earns 300 XP. The system is designed to award (mostly heroic) role playing, making good plans, saving lives, endangering one's self to save others, over combat. It is not designed for rapid advancement at high levels as the text acknowledges. You do not earn XP by acquiring "treasure" (cash, weapons, equipment, vehicles) as you do in D&D. The text indicates it was designed to taper off advancement at 5th or 6th level, which probably not-coincidentally are the levels of the TMNT.

One element of the game which may counteract some of the weaknesses of low level characters is playing as Team Characters. This enforces each player on the team to choose the same animal type and spend their BIO-E points in the same way. The benefits, however, are not to be trifled with. If one player gets an extra attribute die, then all the players get the result of that roll added to that attribute. Each member of the group also gains an additional bonus skill level for the number of other members in the group, so a level 1 character can have the benefits of four levels of Hand to Hand: Advanced by having a team of four characters. The idea is that characters improve more rapidly by training with other members of their kind.

Players more familiar with more modern RPGs should find the skills, point buy and combat maneuver systems here more relatable than AD&D's relatively obtuse and limited systems. While I would not recommend TMNT & OS as one's very first pen and paper RPG, with a modicum of experience it can be a playable game. It does demand a good amount of effort from the Game Master, who must make his own scenarios and NPCs or guide and map the given scenarios. There is no "Keep on the Borderlands" style scenario in any TMNT RPG product where players can go to a Caves of Chaos-like location to find monsters to slay and treasures to win.

Combat

Combat includes elements such as initiative, a to-hit roll, bonuses to hit and damage and critical hits, but also elements not found in AD&D, such as Structural Damage Capacity (SDC), Dodge, Roll with the Punch and Entangle and Body Armor SDC. A variety of combat maneuvers, such as burst fire with a firearm and leap attacks are possible. 

In D&D & AD&D, one rolls an attack on a d20 against armor class, and if the roll (including bonuses) is equal or above the to-hit number required for that armor class, then a hit is scored and damage is rolled. Low level characters will miss more often than they hit. An AD&D 1st Level fighter with 18/50 or lower strength requires a roll of 13 to hit an Orc (AC6) when attacking with a longsword or other melee weapon. If he hits, he rolls a d8 for damage. Ranged weapons must have distance from the target to be effective. Spells have their own set of rules, but combat is very straightforward at low levels. 

TMNT & OS combat is much more exciting by comparison to its better known contemporaries, even at the lower levels. An attacker hits with a roll of five or better (plus bonuses) on the d20, but if the defender has natural body armor or is wearing body armor, the damage will be inflicted on the SDC of that body armor unless the roll is above the Armor Rating of the body armor. If it is above, the damage applies to the character's SDC and then his or her hit points. 

It gets more involved from there, as the defender has options. The defender may parry automatically (if trained in Hand to Hand combat) or give up his melee attack to dodge or entangle the attacker's weapon. The defender must roll above the attacker's roll to be successful.  If the attack is not successfully avoided by one of these methods, then the damage is rolled and the defender can attempt to roll with the punch to halve the damage if he rolls equal or above the attacker's roll. 

Multiple melee attacks are common in this game. Initiative is checked for every melee round by comparing the d20 rolls of the combatants, with the higher roll going first. A natural 20 does a critical hit, leading to 2x damage. There are attack options available to certain combat trained characters such as leap attack and jump kicks can hit for double damage. Characters with a weapon in each hand can attack a single defender twice, attack and parry or attack two defenders per melee attack. A successful sneak attack by ambush or prowl grants the attacker the initiative and the defender cannot parry or dodge.

The result of these rules is a game where combat is designed to play out more dramatically than AD&D. Hitting an opponent will be more frequent unless that opponent has good parrying/dodging abilities. Even though damage will be inflicted more often, damage taken even at low levels is not likely to lead to one-hit kills.

Hit Points are not the only thing keeping you from dying in TMNT & OS. In addition to hit points, characters have SDC, which corresponds to superficial damage whereas hit points are used to represent more dangerous forms of damage. Damage taken in combat comes off SDC first. Unlike hit points, SDC is determined by the animal type. Body armor, whether worn or natural, vehicles and objects also have SDC ratings, which determines how much damage these items can take before becoming useless. 

In this game, 0 HP puts a character into a coma and if further damage is inflicted beyond the Physical Endurance attribute, the character dies and resurrection is not possible. Saving throws are rarely invoked in TMNT & OS outside of psionics, but a character needs to make two successful saving throws to break out of a coma. Severe damage can lead to long term injuries which cause reductions to attributes until healed.

Psionics, the use of otherworldly mental abilities such as reading thoughts and projecting illusions to another mind and extra-sensory perception, always seemed an element to be OD&D and AD&D tried to incorporate into the main game but failed. Psionics is the closest thing TMNT & OS has to magic (until Transdimensional) and can be available to any character with a sufficiently high Mental Endurance attribute can potentially use psionic powers. While much of the TMNT & OS RPG system had been taken from Heroes Unlimited, psionics were not compatible, a more relevant consideration in the 1980s than today. Characters without psionic defenses should steer clear of the Terror Bears and sadistic Game Masters which might run that scenario!

Scenarios

The book contains four adventure scenarios, three of which involve or could involve mutant opponents.  All can be fairly difficult, even the introductory scenario is a tricky thing. Maps of lairs or potentially hostile areas are not provided, so it is up to the Game Master to plan the geography of settings and encounters. 

The scenarios are said to run the gamut of easy to difficult. The first scenario, Caesar's Weasels, has some really nasty antagonists in the three weasels and Caesar (a wolverine) is no pushover either. The second scenario, The Terror Bears (a parody of the Care Bears), requires psionic characters in order to stand a good chance of defeating the bears. The third adventure introduces recurring antagonists in Doctor Victor Feral and his mutant servants, but is little more than a sketch of possibilities involving the "good doctor" instead of a solid plot for an adventure. The fourth adventure, Terror on Rural Route 5, involves a hostage situation with mutant animals as the hostage takers and is a good start for 1st level characters. The Leg of the Ninja is the final scenario and its plot is rather thin as the characters come upon some shady dealings and waves of ninjas are sent after them until they gain the attention of the leaders.

TMNT Characters

At the time TMNT & OS was being published in late 1985, there was only so much existing TMNT material which Wujick could translate into the TMNT & OS system. Only TMNT #1-4 and Raphael's Micro One-Shot had been published before TMNT & OS went into press. The book gives us stats for the four turtles (Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo), Splinter, April O'Neil, Baxter Stockman, Casey Jones, the Shredder, and an average T.C.R.I. Alien. At this point the characters had only been sketchily presented in the five comics (except Raphael) which had been published by the time Wujick began writing TMNT & OS. He might have consulted with Eastman and Laird to get more background on the character's abilities, personalities and interests or he may have filled in those entries with his own ideas when the comics left off. A curious omission are stats for the Foot Clan Ninja, as they had already appeared twice in the books. There are four sample mutant characters not tied to TMNT universe included, the three Sparrow Eagles (Chirp Yenko, Brown Wing & Gorba Chirp) and Fred Hamster. These were the play test characters used when developing the game.

Original Edition

Revised Edition

In April 1988 (sixth printing), a Revised Edition of TMNT & OS was published. It can easily be distinguished from the original version by use of the yellow text for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" instead of black text on the original and also says "Revised Edition". With the tenth printing (March 1990) the text on the Revised Edition added "Suggested for ages 12 and older." to the cover. The first through the fifth printings are the Original Edition and the sixth through the twelfth+ printings are the Revised Edition.

The two-and-a-half page Insanity section was removed for the Revised Edition. The Insanity Table included listings for Affective Disorders, Neuroses, Psychoses, and Phobias, but as the Neuroses included Sexual Deviations like Pedophilia, Necrophilia and Voyeurism and there were rules for alcoholism and drug addiction and withdrawal, many complaints from parents were received and the mental disorders were covered over with a sticker in the fifth printing of the Original Edition which removed the sexual deviation table and replaced it with a new (and rather fun) neurosis. 

The Revised Edition also changed how weapons proficiencies worked. In the Original Edition when you took weapon proficiency as a skill, you could see improvements for every level of experience earned to to such abilities as strike, parry, throwing, rate of fire, level of accuracy and entangle, depending on the weapon type. The Original Edition has a table for each type of proficiency until level 15 showing the bonuses. The Revised Edition rearranges the proficiencies somewhat and identifies the bonuses in words instead of tables.

The Revised Edition also noted that the modern weapon proficiency system has been changed from the Original Edition. The Revised System has more detailed rules about burst fire and spraying an area with semi and automatic weapons. The Original Edition treated everything that was not an aimed shot as a shooting wild and used a level of accuracy table to determine the maximum number of bullets which can strike a target. 

Educational skills were also noticeably changed in the Revised Edition. In the Original Edition educational skills were classified into four types, college, high school, military and secondary. The Revised Edition condensed these skill types into scholastic, military and secondary skills, added new skills, removed less practical skills and modified many skills.

If you wish to know the changes between the Original Edition to the Revised Edition, I have prepared a document which identifies them.

The Supplements

TMNT & OS clocked in at 110 or 112 numbered pages, depending on printing, and about 96 of those pages has game content. The other canonical TMNT works are approximately 48-pages long each with the exception of Transdimensional which has 110 numbered pages. Adventures! has an 10-page short story "New York Ninja Starring - - Donatello!" and cover art by Eastman. Universe has another exclusive short story "Terror by Transmat!" and cover art by Laird. 

Universe contains information up to TMNT #7, including more information about the TCRI aliens and  their technology. It also includes information about the Triceratons and the Federats conflict over the wider galaxy. Transdimensional has profiles of Lord Simultaneous, Renet and Savanti Romero from TMNT #8, Kirby and his creations from Donatello #1, Monster from Tales of the TMNT #4, Radical and Complete Carnage from Tales of the TMNT #5 are also included. Dale from TMNT #16 is also mentioned. Curiously I can find no statistics for the Fugitoid in any of these books even though he had his own one-off book and was present in TMNT #5-7 and the Terror by Transmat! short story. I seem to remember he had statistics in the original book I owned when I was young, but that copy is long gone and I have yet to replace it with a paper copy and a YouTube video flipped through a printed copy of the book and the contents of the pages matched my pdf on the same pages, so that could be a Mandela Effect at work.

Except for Truckin' and Hollywood, each sourcebook has multiple independent adventure scenarios. Hollywood is one long adventure and Truckin' is a series of interlinked adventures with a common plot thread. There are actual scenarios involving Dr. Feral in Adventures!, Universe and Transdimensional. As TMNT characters tend to be a bit underpowered compared to Heroes Unlimited characters, Adventures! provides rules for superpowered animals. Universe provides information about interstellar vehicles, skills and combat. 

Transdimensional is a much larger work than any of the other supplements, includes artwork from long-time TMNT artist Jim Lawson, and has rules for time and dimensional travel, magic, animal types from prehistoric periods including dinosaurs and black powder weaponry. Transdimensional mutant characters can also use new character creation rules found in that book. New psionic and animal powers are also included, including powers that puts mutant characters into the league of superheroes. 

The Supplements over and over again bring the concept of psionics into the forefront. Many adventures have psionic adversaries in them, and without psionic characters of your own, you'll be hard pressed to avoid Mind Trap and Bio-Manipulation. Adventures! drives the point home as one of its scenarios contains a rematch with the Terror Bears inside a nuclear missile control facility. The scenario suggests that failure to prevent the Terror Bears from causing the launch of the missiles could segue into the After the Bomb! campaign setting. Psionic powers were not a significant part of the TMNT comic universe at this time. If you were to use the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as outlined in the first book, you would find the adventures very challenging as the Turtles do not have psionic abilities or high enough Mental Endurance attributes to give them significant bonuses to a psionic saving throw.

The Good News is that the now-successful Kickstarter will be including the content of all five supplements. It will not contain After the Bomb or its supplements, you can still buy most of those from Palladium Books. The Kickstarter's main goal includes two books, so TMNT & OS, Truckin' and Hollywood will share one bound book, Transdimensional,  Adventures! and Universe will comprise the other bound book. Transdimensional is larger than the other books, so it was undoubtedly put in out of chronological order to make the two books roughly even-sized.

The original tri-fold Game Shield contains five pages of information and one page for the cover artwork. The interior pages give a summary of character creation and the tables corresponding with it. The exterior pages give the page numbers corresponding to the animal section of the TMNT & OS book where the description of the animal type can be found and the bonuses for the Hand to Hand combat types. The Shield lacks information about combat abilities, weapon types and damage and other rules that would be useful during gameplay after character creation.

The Kickstarter Campaign

TMNT & OS is a game whose fortunes rise and fall with the license on which it relies. When Palladium canceled the licensing agreement in 2000, TMNT was in a dormant state. No TV show was being aired, no comic books were being published, no video games were being made. In 2023 things are very different, a TMNT theatrical film (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem) was released this year, IDW churns out TMNT comics every month, Rise of the TMNT concluded last year, Shredder's Revenge was also released last year and TMNT's 40th anniversary is next year. Viacom and Nickelodeon, who own all rights to TMNT, appear to be reasonable with their TMNT licensing policies. 

The TMNT & OS Redux Edition book is $50 and the Transdimensional Adventures Redux Edition book is an extra $50 for the basic editions with the color covers and color interior artwork. That seems to be about the going rate for larger RPG works these days. Eastman, Laird and Lawson among others are contributing to the new book editions. While I prefer original black and white artwork to remain in black and white and my Mirage turtles to remain in black and white, the original versions of these works are not unobtanium. For $10 more there is a "Black & White & Red" Edition of the two books which preserves the monochromatic presentations of the originals with red highlights. 

One annoying thing about the Kickstarter is that there will be no PDF version of the books. Including a PDF version is hugely convenient when running a game and having a digital copy of the rulebooks sold alongside physical copies is a great thing and not unknown. However, a digital copy of a book makes it far easier to pirate. Some RPG game referees say not to keep  the rulebooks at the table, but when it comes to generating animal characters in TMNT & OS the rulebooks are something of a necessity given how many animal types there are.  A PDF on a tablet makes looking up rules much, much easier than flipping through a physical book.

The Kickstarter campaign's page states that the rules will be clarified and updated, but there is no indication of how extensive the updating will be. TMNT & OS and other Palladium Books RPGs have been the butt of many jokes over the decades over whatever part of the rules with which the commentator finds issues, but so has AD&D. AD&D 1st Edition was always a clunky behemoth and ripe for criticism (descending armor class, segments, demi-human level limits etc.) Players from the 1980s bought the original books and supplements in reasonable numbers, so the system could not have been completely unworkable. 

I can imagine that many people will buy the books, browse through them for the artwork, put them on the shelf and never play the game. But for people who may wish to try the game, players more familiar with more modern RPGs should find the skills, point buy and combat maneuver systems here more relatable than AD&D's relatively obtuse and limited systems. While I would not recommend TMNT & OS as one's very first pen and paper RPG, a Game Master with a modicum of experience it make it into a playable game. It does demand a good amount of effort from the Game Master, who must make his own scenarios and NPCs or guide and map the given scenarios. There is no "Keep on the Borderlands" style scenario in any TMNT & OS product where players can go to a Caves of Chaos-like location to find monsters to slay and treasures to win. TMNT & OS is more narrative driven than combat focused, unlike early AD&D.

Palladium has conducted two Kickstarter campaigns which have been successfully funded in the past. Its first campaign for the Robotech RPG Tactics game garnered criticism for Palladium's failure to deliver the promised backer rewards after five years. That campaign ended in 2013 and the director of the TMNT campaign, Sean Own Roberson, has a good track record with modern Rifts works. Some people are still understandably bitter about the experience with the Robotech Kickstarter.

I would observe that unlike the Robotech RPG game, which had multiple miniatures, cards and dice,  TMNT & OS Redux is a book. Books tend to be among the safer projects to back simply because their production is less complex than a board game or an electronic device. In this case, the text is probably already done as it is mostly a reprint. Rewards are intended to ship in September, 2024.

Additional backer rewards include variant book covers, miniature sets, dice sets and accessories, a GM screen, poster, and art print sets. Backing the campaign with the base $100-110 pledge seems safe enough, even if the non-book backer rewards do not get shipped you will still have the core of the campaign in physical form. It should be noted that even the best laid plans can go awry, so whatever you pledge on any Kickstarter be prepared to risk complete disappointment. Fence-sitters should have an opportunity to purchase the books after the Kickstarter ends, but if you want one of the Kickstarter-exclusive covers you have to throw down this month.