#208 – TMNT Redux Edition Book Review

Breakfast puppies.

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised. You are listening to the Glitter Boys, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness Redux addition. We've already gone through the other components of the Kickstarter Rewards, but now we're looking at the books, looking at the art, looking at the quality, and looking at the contents. Now we have two books, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness Redux Edition, which combines the first book and I

believe,

you know, I don't remember.

We have Turtles in Hollywood, Turtles in Hollywood, Truck and Turtles.

There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That it? I think that's it.

Yeah. And it has a whole bunch of behind the scenes stuff.

Yes.

Whereas the second book is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Transdimensional Adventures Redux Edition. That one contains trans dimensional TMNT guide to the universe and adventures. Yep.

Which adventures? We've talked about, I think adventures a couple of times. It's one of the best little supplement mini adventure sets. You can move that into any game you want.

And it.

It's awesome. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about how each of these books has four covers, four qualities of awesomeness.

Yep. Now I've chosen my favorite. I'm looking at the red version. They did such a good job with this. Yeah. Okay, so the main cover is. Oh, who did this one? What's this? I can never get to remember covers. People could. This is Freddie Williams, I think. Freddie Williams. Yep, yep, yep. That's Freddie Williams. And then the red and black is the same picture but in red and black without the full color. And. Oh, my God, it's amazing. So fucking good. The other variant covers. Here we have one. I think this is an Eastman.

Yeah, I think so.

That's a new. The alternate cover is a full piece from Kevin east.

And that was the one, I think Kevin Sabita said he was surprised to see. Like he asked him for something and it just shows up and he's like, oh, my God, this is amazing. It's so cool.

And the pink one, this is transdimensional. Sorry.

Yeah, the pink cover is transdimensional.

And then we have the other one, which was Eastman and Laird. And I think that's the original comic. Or at least one of the original comic covers.

Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah. But done in this green, all green look. That's really cool.

And that's the faux leather.

The Hoyle edition is Peter. Yep, there we go. Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman. Yep.

And then I think all of them. The leather ones, do all of them have the insert? The signed insert?

Yeah, I believe so.

All the special editions, which is again another an Eastman piece of art. That was from 2024 for this Kickstarter.

Yeah. So the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other strangeness Redux edition, the basic cover, the one with Freddie Williams, does not have that paste in it. The card, the red and black doesn't have it either, I think. I'm guessing it's just only the foil.

Yeah, I believe only the foil does.

Okay. These don't even have signatures either. No, none of the ones in the. These have signatures except for the foils and those only have signatures on the card.

Right, right.

Okay. All right, table of contents here.

Hold on. Did you. Does the red edition have the big. No, it doesn't.

The red edition is just. Oh yeah, the. The inside flap is all red.

Right, okay. Whichever.

As the normal edition has the. Yeah, the. The. I think this is from Adventures. Yeah, yeah.

The. The Ninja versus the Brothers. Yeah. Just a great fun two page spread. But going back in.

Okay, well, looking at the book though this already. Already we are looking at it. Very well laid out.

My favorite page so far in the entire book is actually the copyright page. Just because you don't see that. And I'm sorry, those people. I. This, this page, I read this page over and over and over. The dedications are very touching.

Yeah.

And then you have all the trademark and just. I've said this before, getting Nickelodeon, Viacom United or Universal Palladium all to cooperate on this was a monumental undertaking.

Yeah.

Because every one of those companies wanted their branding and logo on everything.

Like if you ever hear the horror stories that goes into putting out any Star Trek role playing product.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

I can only imagine. Like Kevin, I am so touched by the years you have taken off your lifespan, having to deal with this and appreciate it so immensely.

Yeah.

Beautiful table of contents laid out very nice and clear and easy to read.

We've got a foreword written by somebody named Rawson Marshall Thurber who was director behind Red Notice, Dodgeball Skyscraper and Central Intelligence. I've seen two of those movies.

Is this because he was part of TMNT or is he the. I don't know who this is. I wonder if he's the.

I'm guessing he's just a gamer friend of theirs who also happens to be a director. Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep. Hollywood gamer.

What was the name again?

Rawson Marshall Thurber.

I'm wondering if he was one of the execs either at Viacom or Universal. Who helped them get this all through?

Could have been. Could have been.

Because you would need a sponsor, an executive level sponsor who would help you get it through.

Yep. We have a really good full page description, words from the publisher, from Kevin Sinbita talking about where this book came from and who all contributed to it.

He is the guy behind the Terry Tate Office Linebacker commercials. And he's once. Once I realized that it clicked into place. He's like of the people who are actually in Hollywood who are actually real gamers.

Yeah, he's.

He's one of the luminaries, shall we say? So, yeah, I have no doubt that he helped sponsor. He's worked with Universal, he's worked with Viacom. Yeah, no, absolutely. I. Yeah. Okay. It makes sense now.

Yep.

And then we have what looks like the original cover, the original interior cover for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other Strangeness.

No, that's the original cover of the book.

Yeah, the original cover of the book. The original title sheet, basically. There we go from 85

and then going forward. Wow. I mean, we can't really go page by page through this. No.

Well, we could, but we'd be here for five hours.

We'd be for five hours. But we have in front of us now the original book, but rejiggered like the formatting has been improved. This. We said this in the end of the last episode, but this looks like a modern game book.

It does. Yeah. It looks like a modern game book that just came out of one of the big publishing houses that's not wotc and it's clean, it's easy to read. The font is good, the typeset is good. You have. You jump right into character creation.

Yep. As it should be. Right.

And you start moving through. There's been, you know, your updated tables. Way easier to read.

Oh, my God, it's so easy to read. It's so easy to read. It's a little. I guess some people might think it's a little simplified, but I don't know. It seems pretty straightforward to me.

I loved it.

The artwork.

Yep.

Just full color artwork just scattered throughout the book.

So now we hit what is one of the more talked about bits on our discord, which is the movement table. So they've added a new rule, and that is the move action. So if you've been playing palladium for any length of time, you're familiar with this conversation, and that is, how far can I move in combat? And how do I move through each action? And so on and so on. And different editions of the games have addressed this in different ways, but it's always been one of those, oh, just move however you want. Like, it's never really been heavily codified movement. It's.

You move your movement throughout the round.

Yeah. The assumption is that you were in motion and therefore you are. You don't really have to keep track of individual steps. You just sort of eyeball it.

Unlike a lot of other gaming systems that are out there, that are more modern, where move is very tactical, kind of part of it. In Palladium, it's always been, oh, you have a movement of X. Yeah.

Move.

And when you run out, you run out. But it's also old school theater of the mind. Not as many miniatures. You know, I used miniatures with palladium at my table and people will look at me like, well, how many squares? It's like, no, no, no. This is a. A loose representation of what you're doing. Just so all of us have something to focus on. It's not a tactical simulation.

Well, that's where this slightly changes things. With the movement table. They've added tabletop measurements specifically, and they've quantified everything down to four very specific movement categories. Now does in some ways remind me of Dungeons and Dragons with their preset movement rates. And some people have been talking about how it looks like it's a little bit of D and D ified some of the mechanics. This is by itself, it's a useful table for what the system is doing with it. But I do think it's. I hope it is not a sign of things to come because I don't think you should be able to simplify the Pleiadia movements down into four speed groups. I don't even understand how they came up with these measurements. These don't make any sense to me. It's real weird.

Yeah, I would totally agree.

Yeah.

And when I look at this, I have issues.

Ignore it.

I'm gonna ignore it. And we give all of you out there in podcast land, you have full permission to ignore it as well, because it's your table and you can run the rules how you want to.

Yep.

I'm going to act like it never existed.

Jacob, do you have thoughts on this?

So I have a love hate relationship with movement rates. I see why they did it, especially when they're doing a Kickstarter that includes miniatures. There was a certain amount of impetus I. When they come to movement rates, it reminds me of every far too long conversation I've had at the Gaming table regarding moving and it. It's like I looked at it and went well I'm ignoring this.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah, it's. It's one of those things that's inherently house rule rulable I think and kind of has to be.

So yeah, yep, this does just kind of read like a set of house rules for movement. So use it if you like. It's probably going to have many, many more heated discussions on it in the days to come.

I took one look at it and went, well, I can see another point where me and my old friend James would be having an argument on what it means to be moving as fast as possible but still being alert.

So yeah, I'm like my preferred take on movement is essentially they keep it kind of open ended and vague and it only really in my opinion as a game master matters when they are comparative. Like there's somebody who has a speed of 15 and somebody who has a speed of 6 and honestly I don't really care what those mean until it becomes a matter of is this person moving faster than the other one. And then that's when you compare speed, you know, that's how I would do it. That's how so much of the rest of the system runs is that things only really matter when they are compared to something else. So to me movement is the same.

But I agree.

Yeah.

So moving on, moving on.

Do any of the new animals appear in this or did they get added elsewhere? I don't remember which ones.

Let's see. Octopus.

Oh, it's in the core. Oh fuck.

Yeah, it's in the list. You can roll zoo animals. I didn't think octopus was one of the original so.

No, we, we talked about it. It wasn't. It was in Road Roadhog.

Was it road hogs or surfing?

Hollywood might have been surfing.

It was roadhogs that we found the octopus when we made characters for the set the scene because we were like why are there octopuses on the California highway? Why did they do that? Yeah.

And now I want to play an octopus Chips officer.

That's right, that's right.

So all of the mechanics are still more or less the same. Like the core things. The skill table is I think pretty much the same. I haven't gone line by line through it, but it serves the same purpose. Science levels, bio E system, we've talked about those at great length in prior episodes. It looks pretty simple. They've got a little bit more detail on exactly how to roll through everything but for the most part it's still the original system.

It's been streamlined. It has been gone through and said, hey, let's update this a little bit so it's easier to understand.

The team characters rule has been expanded a little bit.

I liked this. I liked this a lot. As we have discussed both on Discord a little bit and off the mics a lot, we always thought one of the biggest selling points of TMNT was the whole creating a team mechanic in character creation. It's one of the better done team creation mechanics that I've seen. It's thematically appropriate for the subject material and the improvements on it are just like taking it to another level without overcomplicating it or without losing something in it.

Yeah. It is such a simple, yet, in my opinion, brilliant mechanic because it doesn't really overpower anything. It just gives you some slight increases to some of your skills. That's it. Yeah. Boost to your attributes too. Forgot about that. But the. And the limitations I think are fair. Like, you all have to be the same animal at the same size.

Right.

And the same perks. You know, hands, feet, stance.

Which, again, to your point, Jacob, is very thematic. It's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It's about four brothers who fight and

the whole idea that as you train together, you learn from each other. And here it is. Brilliant. Love it. I fully love taking something like this and drifting it to other systems.

Absolutely. I've done that in the past. And it's. I just. It's a huge, huge positive. I'm even like, I'm going to actually stake a flag that I know some people find divisive, but not many, so too bad I am not opposed. Like, as originally written, the inherent proposition of the team mechanic was every player at the team at the table is a member of the same team. I am totally okay with, like, having a pair of siblings in a group of four players. And yeah. Having those two get all the benefits of team and the other people not.

Yeah.

And I'm. I am down with that. I love it. It makes tons of sense.

Well, you could take this in very palladium fashion and lift this out of TMNT and drop it into any other of the game worlds and say, well, you know what it's called Team characters. You're a group of characters that have worked together for X amount of times. Your backstory, I don't care if you're different races and whatever, you have to be careful with it. But it'd be a great way to show a montage of people learning New skills or something like that too.

So it does get a little bit complex when you lift it out of TMNT and drop it into any of the OCC based systems.

Yeah, I could totally see that.

But I've done that before and there's ways around it. So.

Yep. We could just make Nightbane even more powerful.

That's right. But as long as you're all Nightbane.

As long as you're all nightbane.

And once again, we have referenced NPC's lifelong quest to make Nightbane the most broken system possible.

The doorway power, folks. Doorway core rules. Read it.

Yeah, yeah, Just broken. Just hold it there. Npc. We know we're going to add that as a future episode.

Just sometime around May or so. Folks, you're going to hear a little bit of why I'm saying this. It's going to be a while though.

So you know you've got your psychic

powers and it's a nice two page layout. Very simple. Open it up. Boom. There's all the powers and you keep flipping. It's wonderful.

Stop. On the page you're at right now, Buckley.

Just like.

Which one is that?

33 the dogs.

I hit this page and grabbed and recognized it as art from the original one and pulled it out and compared them side by side and oh my God, this was the point when I was looking through it and realized that when they redid this, they did a phenomenal job of updating the art with the color in such a careful and loving way.

So good.

And that was the page where I went, oh my God, this is amazing.

Yeah. So much of the art in the original looked much sketchy. Much sketchier is a weird word, but it looks much sketchier than it does.

It was line art. It was black and white line art that was directly lifted or for the book. Right? It was. And that's what it was. This is now in full color. Yes, it's fully in theme.

Right.

There are details in this that you might not have picked up in the original art.

Penguins.

But it is still 100% the image that was originally. It's cleaned up just enough for colorization and is amazing.

Oh, you have penguins.

Yep, yep, we got penguins. Oh yeah, we got. Yeah. Okay. I'm starting to see some of the. Some of the new stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did they add pika. Another one that got added, I think. Pika. Pika.

Porcupine.

Yeah, that porcupine's one of the original pieces. And again, one of my favorites.

Updated for color.

Yep, yep. These are these Are the opossum is.

The opossum is still one of my favorite original pieces of art.

It's like, yeah, yeah, I got an actual assault rifle and a chain of belt ammo. Don't fuck with me. I'm gonna ruin your day. So I don't know what I'm putting the belt into. Maybe there's a side pour. I don't know.

So a small side tangent. The original sketched line opossum. I was at a party once and I came within a hair's breadth of having a tattoo artist who was actually at the party party do the opossum.

Oh my God. You'd be in a chair for a while.

Oh, my back piece took four and a half hours. I would have done that in a heartbeat.

Oh, okay. So then your alignments, your standard alignments. Nothing there. Okay. As you go through this book, you just get smacked left or right with the artwork that's in it and it's all updated in color and it's just amazing. Like I don't. I don't need to read anything. I'm just gonna go through and look at the pictures.

Something else, something new they added in this as well are the free skills. Oh, skills that everyone gets. Yep, yep. Common skills. It's at the top of page 54. Skill Types. The most rudimentary skills are learned through everyday living and are known by all characters. Basic academics, basic athletics and perception. Which is now a D100 skill.

Yeah. So that has been changed. That is I would call this modern gaming influence a lot of systems in the last five years, six years have added these skills that are very much the. Everyone takes them anyway.

Right.

You kind of need them to live.

Yep.

Everyone should have them at least at some rudimentary. I'm not going to penalize you for not taking them.

Right.

Well, also it's. How many times and have you been running a game and you. Someone's like okay, I want to try and jump over this thing. Do you have the jumping skill? No. Well, sorry. Or you then you have to come up with a way you're going to make a spot call to do a mechanic. I'm going, okay, let's just make it an attribute check roll a D20 against

your strength or something which oftentimes ends up you're better at it than the people have the fucking skills.

Exactly. Because if you don't make the call properly and you don't take into account the long term effects of the math, suddenly this guy is now a jumping God.

Right.

And there Are these things that happen again and again at a gaming table. And that's why modern RPGs started adopting it. And the fact that they put it into TMNT just makes sense.

Yeah.

These really are the. You have the basic skill of looking, moving and thinking.

Yes, absolutely.

And it also explains why some people know about Bossa Nova and Chevy Nova.

Excellent.

Then we go through our skills. Now remember, TMNT doesn't have the crazy huge variety of skills that other Palladium games had. I'll fit on one page and it's simple. Like bam. I believe that Transdimensional Adventures will add a few more as also very standard palladium thing. But here you go. You got your basic skills, your amateur skills and professional skills. Those that remember us going through the main book, the original book. That's how they differentiated them. Instead of occ and secondary, you had your professional and amateur.

Yeah.

And then your skill descriptions.

Very condensed section. Very nice. I dig. Falls back to the classic weapon proficiencies where they all follow sort of a standard flow. I like that. I think it's a lot easier than having individual weapon proficiencies with just weirdly nitpicky things. This just keeps it easy for the player to keep track of. Yep.

And at no point do you have to reference. Reference the skill to find out the damage of your weapon.

Right? Yeah. Oh yeah. Those aren't listed because they have a separate section for that. Yep. Combat training is something that I have not run the numbers on, but just giving this a scan. I think it's nicely laid out. Not laid out. Compare. I think everything balances well against each other.

Yes.

And this is. And for those that haven't seen it, combat training is where you have your baseline combat skills. And this answers the question, do you start with two attacks or do you don't? Yes. You start with two attacks. In this rendition in the Redux, all characters have two actions per round. Straight up, you can do a D4 with an unarmed attack. You have these basic abilities, blah, blah, blah. And then you have all your. What would be your hand to hand versions. Basic expert martial arts assassin, ninjutsu, feral combat, which I like.

I loved the addition of feral combat.

And they're all laid out. Very straightforward. What you get first through 15th level.

And then we have the classic picture of all of the melee weapons. Yep.

Yes.

Bringing us back to the original Palladium fantasy role playing game. We have pole arms. We have swords, knives, dicks, spiky sticks. Tabby sticks. Yes.

Balls with chains, chains with balls, sticks

with chains, with balls, ninja equipment. A nice selection of modern weapons that may or may not appeal to your understanding of how weapons work.

Probably not.

Yeah. The gear section, selections of modern gear. And I like that it is things like GPS location trackers. Yeah. Modern technology. Modern technology. Yeah. Yeah.

Your bugs, your tracking, your enhanced optics, your 1980 circa infra green goggles.

Some of them, you know, some are old, some are new.

That's fine.

Yeah.

The multi gun lock pick. The lockpick gun that is like in every book and every picture has always cracked me up because you could get used to be able to get the. They worked horribly.

Yeah. Now what is it like bump keys and things?

There's a bunch of other tools that you could use that are way faster and way better.

Yeah.

I having used the lockpick guns, I was always. That was one of those ones that I just was not willing to die on the hill.

A leashy key now is probably your set, Alicia.

Anyway, why use a bump gun when I can spend 30 seconds to decode the lock?

Basic vehicle stats. Again, you don't need more, but you

have every freaking basic vehicle. Very rudimentary, what you write right here.

So once again I want to just point this out. Move to page 74. And it's the experience system. And it's the experience system that we know. We know it. Yep.

What I want to point out here

is again the layout. If you are familiar with Palladium products, you're familiar with page headers of new sections that begin in the middle of a page or things that just don't feel like there's a good sectioned off thing. This book is well sectioned. There's nothing. All new sections so far have begun on the left page and many of them end on the right page. Like just done, like. Yep. Two page spreads. It's wonderful.

Yeah. It's one of the best laid out Palladium books.

And they did this through their over amazingly use of artwork with the spacing. You had to. You have these big art and it just. Oh, it looks so good.

Yeah. In the combat system, we return to the movement thing. And again, mixed feelings on this. The breakdown of how movement rates work. I mean the comics. Yeah. I skipped over the comic because it's the comic. We've talked about the comic before. Okay, fine. You know, it's in full color now or in black and red. It looks really cool. They haven't changed it. Yeah.

Okay.

I don't want to go too long on this.

No, yeah, you're right.

Okay, so the combat system is. There's a couple of changes that are generating conversation. We've already talked about the movement then. And here we have more on the movement including like these codified what happens when you choose to move. I like that they finally have written some things like, you know, we should probably write some actual rules on movement. I just don't like the rules they

wrote which happens when you Updated Edition and they go deeper into an area that they've never gone into before.

Right.

So that's okay. It gives you some guidelines. You don't have to use all of it.

People.

It's palladium. Yeah.

So the other change is that initiative is now roll once at the start of a combat. Roll it and then it doesn't change unless you gain or lose the initiative. That is another point of contention among established fans.

That's a weird one to me.

Yeah.

Because you know, it's just weird. I don't.

Yeah.

I haven't done that in a very long time.

The only time I like it is if you have a game that has mechanics for adjusting initiative based on combat moves or something like that. Then when the initiative of start of combat is setting initial momentum of action that is then adjusted by how combat plays out. I'm cool with that. Otherwise I want round by round.

And that'll be a question that there should be a question on our list of why and not. You know. And not in a way of why'd you do that?

That's stupid.

It's. What was your thought process behind it. Now I can totally see in a large group rolling initiative once. And you stick with the initiative just for speed. It does speed things up a little bit every round. Especially if you're going to have multiple rounds of combat. Outside of that. Unless the players are using a lot of particular skills and combat tactics that change initiative a lot. I don't know. I don't like it.

Yeah. I'm not a fan. Personally. I would like that having I like that re rolling initiative every round makes your initiative bonuses which are rare already. It makes them actually feel cool and valuable.

Super valuable. Right.

Okay. So I'm trying to look this up in the original and I'm not finding it the rules on he. Oh. Recovery from damage. Okay. Just making sure they stuck with the same recovery rate there matches the original which is 5 per hour of stc. Yeah. Cool. I couldn't remember if they decided to be even more generous or not.

And SDC is the one you're going to recover really fast. You get down into Your hit points.

There's going to be a while, which is I love. I'm fairly certain this exists in a couple other Palladium games, that differentiation. But I really, really like it how they lay it out here.

Most of Palladium, the SDC recovers very quickly. If you get to your hit points, you're messed up.

Right.

And it was one of the first games that I read that really differentiated between the boxer steps into the ring. And I think this is actually one of the original examples. The boxer steps in the ring, goes 10 rounds with another boxer. A couple of days later, they're fine. You get stabbed.

Yeah.

And critically. You're injured. It takes you weeks to recover.

Oh, yeah. As someone who has been stabbed, let me testify.

So that's all the same. Just the layout's better.

You know, the game mastering section is slightly expanded. They took the foundation of what Eric had written, which was very concise in the first book, and expanded it. But, I mean, if you look through the two, you see that each of these is rooted in something that he was saying. They just took it and added more.

Right.

Cool stuff on generating adventures here. This is. Yep. Pretty much pulled right out of the original, but expanded just a little bit more. Just adding little touches here and there, making it more usable. Yeah.

And then you drop into the adventures.

Yeah. I did not really dig through and compare any of the adventures. I think for the most part, it's all still there. Oh, the Terror Bears.

Full color Terror Bears.

I love the full color Terror bears.

This page 111. So here's an interesting one question that we should ask. We got Terror Bear miniatures.

Yeah.

Did we get Terror Bear miniatures instead of Mouser and Baxter Stockman miniatures? Was that a trade off that had to be made?

I have some theories on that, but I'm not willing to put them on the mic.

Okay. Yeah.

But Terror Bears, your adventures. So this book keeps going. Right. And it gives you all the NPCs and all the main characters to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And then it flips into. Once you get through that, you start getting into the extra content for the redux.

Yeah.

So now you get Turtles. Go to Hollywood in the same book, which makes this book big. Right. And then you get. I think Truck and Turtles is later.

Yep.

So, again, like npc, I have not gone through all of them to see the comparisons, but just looking at the updated layouts and the updated artwork or colored artwork, it's just so good. So good.

So very, very good.

Okay. Behind the scenes stuff. I feel that we are being unfair to the listeners here. Unfortunately, going through all the adventures is just not going to happen.

No.

Yeah. It's all pretty much the same content is mostly expanded. The main stuff that I think is worth pointing out were the mechanics, changes from these.

They're almost word for word. Better cleaned up, better laid out. I noticed a couple small changes here and there.

So.

So behind the scenes.

Oh, man. He tells the whole damn story. And it's. Yeah, yeah. Just copies of things, pictures that they receive, notes that they receive. This is such a deep.

It is so well worth reading, though.

Yep.

If you want to know how this little gaming company got the license and held onto it for two decades. Yeah.

He has the Harlan Ellison story in here. Oh, that's good. That's good stuff. Yeah. Oh, man. And so much excellent art. Just. Wow. The. The one on. Wow. Page 243. The Roadhogs concept cover is being great. Oh, wow. Yeah.

I'd never seen that,

man. Yep.

On 242 had. Have you ever seen the self portrait of Peter Laird?

No, never thought.

That's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a lot, A lot. A lot of people that they got involved in this product. It's like everybody. Everybody who was involved had something to say and it was all really awesome stuff. Some of these people we've even had on. We got a thing from Ramon Perez. Yep, yep, yep. Hopefully we'll get more and more of these people as time goes by. I'd love to get Jim Lawson on. Oh, man. God, I would love to get Jim Lawson on. And Larry McDougal. We got to get. I don't see McDougal in here, but we got to get Larry McDougal.

Kevin Long.

Yeah, yeah. There's a fantastic dedication here to Eric Wujik. That. Yeah, man.

Yeah.

That's amazing art. Oof. Yeah. It's on page 250.

So if you talk about lightning in a bottle, what it took them to put this together the first time. Just the first time. Right. To get everyone. It wasn't as big, but still a lot of involvement. And then as the license started changing hands or getting added to the customers. Right. I know that Kevin has talked about when Nickelodeon got a hold of it and it started becoming a little more kid friendly, it was no longer quite the same thing. And that was towards when they were going to renegotiate the license and they really couldn't afford to renegotiate the license. And. And they said, well, we'll let it go. So they already had captured lightning In a bottle the first time. And this is them doing it a second time.

Yeah.

With bigger lightning storms.

So yes, they have captured lighting in a bottle here. And I think these games are great. And if they can keep pushing the marketing beyond just advertising, like if they can push into gaming tables or gaming stores and get events going on, if they can start, like to really, really push into that, this could explode way beyond the Kickstarter. Now, what do you think of this format and this presentation? What do you think of that as a taste of things to come?

I personally have been mulling that. There has always felt to me that there has been this unspoken fork in the road with Palladium books. One way leads to the Riff's hyper specialized OCC character construction concept, which I'm not opposed to by any stretch of the imagination. The other is the simpler, faster, little bit more freeform version we saw in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a couple other games. And I can't say which way they're gonna go, but I almost want them to embrace the concept of sister systems.

Yeah.

One is for a specific concept of a game and the other is for Riffs and its associated concepts of games.

I would love to see them put a heavier refocus on the BIO E format as the template for build your own class.

I love the BIO E format. It's one of those ones where they used it once in this game and then technically Heroes Unlimited.

But after the bomb has it. Well.

Right. And then after the bomb. And I feel it's one that hasn't. It hasn't been fully explored yet.

Yeah. Like a branching of Palladium core systems. If you had the heavy specialized OCC route of their main lines. But then do the TMNT style of where instead of picking a class, we just do backgrounds combined with skill selections combined with a spin a pool of points to spend on some things. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, the older I get, the more I prefer that because there's a lot less choice that I have to make. And it can randomize everything. I don't even have to choose. I can just roll and let everything be divined by the dice. And that I love. Yep. Yeah.

So for me, when I look at book format, book layout, I hope this is the Future.

Me too.

100% what they've done with the system, it's TMNT and Palladium has always had their one off publications that don't quite fit in the rest of the Palladium system, which are fine, which I love. I don't know. Vision Wise where I would go with it. Beyond that though, because Palladium is known for it. You. In my mind I kind of get very binary. You either decide we're going to create a true universal system and slowly revamp all of our books to fit into that system, or we're going to keep being Palladium and we will have our niche or will our. Our product lines would have slightly different variations of the system in them.

Right.

I totally agree with what you're saying about the bio. It's an untapped kind of resource that could show up at a lot of other places and you could incorporate that in so many different ways. I don't. It'll be interesting to see where they go.

Right.

I don't know if I have a preference either way though, because I want to consume the material and consume the content and just see where they decide to take it.

I want them to keep the two separate in a lot of ways because like Kevin, anytime you want to talk about updating Recon to a more TMNT style character creation, like call me, call me, I have more than thoughts, I have write ups. But yeah, I mean imagine we have a very clearly stated preference where we kind of prefer first edition Palladium Fantasy to second edition Palladium fantasy.

Yeah, yeah.

Imagine an overhaul of first edition Palladium Fantasy with more of a TMNT style approach.

Oh, I imagine that all the time.

Yeah. I got these books and I went, well, I know what Nathaniel and I are going to be co working on.

Just like the background system in TMNT is so brilliant. You have like one or two pages of a random background roll table here that. How many classes does that cover? You know, or when we bring in the other expansions and they have their own and bring in new animals and they have new roll tables or we bring in after the bomb, which has a slightly lengthier one. It's all based upon education a little bit. Expanding it further that it's perfect for a fantasy setting, you know, and in fact you could take it and tailor

it to the world.

Like you Palladium Fantasy has those roll tables at the beginning that most. A lot of people forget them. They just kind of skip over them, you know, where's your land of origin? Where's your social origin? What if you took those tables, expanded them much further, incorporated aspects of different classes and boom, now you. Yep, just conan the Conan 2D20 system actually. Yep, it does that one. It has like every step of character creation takes you through the character's Background and what led them to different points in their life. And you can randomly roll every fucking thing and it tells a story.

Yep.

Yeah. This isn't nowhere near as complex as that, but still it tells a story and I like that a lot.

Whereas in the OCC model, the Occs are telling you the story of how you got there. Right, Right. Each Occ is like this is this niche, whatever. Here's the background for the occ. So your background hasn't been randomly rolled. You selected. The OCC in the background came with it.

Exactly.

Which is a very. They're not necessarily diametrically opposed approaches.

They're not at all.

But they feel that way a lot of times because one is not randomly rolled, it's selected. The other is. You may get to the same place as that OCC by randomly rolling, but maybe not. It's the in between ground where you have a list of randomly roles that talk about your background. And then you're like, oh, you decide that you're a veteran who then did this and then did this and then did this. Oh, but I want to play a flooper that's in a circus. Okay. You gotta bridge the gap for me there. But yeah, no, it's great.

Oh, imagine a world in which Palladium came out with books that had introduced new species or races and each race came with like a 8 to 10 point background table.

Oh, yeah.

To roll on that did the same thing. Yeah.

You could do it in both Palladium Fantasy and Rifts by the category of type of Occs, like the Magic. The Mages would have this huge list. The Men of Arms would have this list. The schol. This list.

This brings me back to a conversation you and I had fall of last year. How we were hearkening back to when Dungeons and Dragons went from second edition to third Edition. But there was that weird slice when they introduced skills and powers.

2.5.

2.5. And how we both kind of had the same feeling where we kind of wanted third edition to be. 2.5 meets alternity. Yeah. Right. And the same concept of 2.5 applied to the Palladium OCC model just makes my heart go a little fast.

I'm getting a little excited.

Why is the table Suddenly lifting by 2 inches

easy there.

Yeah. Formatting wise, though, this is making me excited for future Palladium books.

Yeah, very much so. I hope they embrace the formatting changes as a standard going forward.

And also.

Oh, one thing.

Oh, the index in the back, you have an awesome table of Contents and a great index. Please, please. Every book from now on.

When we talk to Kevin, I want to ask who, how they got to do the index. Because indexing is. I have a couple friends who actually are library studies, but don't work as librarians in, like, public libraries. They work in corporate or archive libraries. And I have learned from them how indexing is actually this arcane art. And I want to know how Kevin decided that.

Yeah, these are great books.

Absolutely, these are great books.

Nitpicks on the combat system aside. And the combat changes. They're so minor. They're so minor. And you can ignore them or change them or tweak them, because remember, these are palladium games. You can do whatever the fuck you want with them.

Exactly.

Outside of the movement change, I think that's the biggest one that could really change how you run your table if you chose to incorporate it. And most of us old timers, we're probably not gonna do it. Just not.

Yeah, I'm gonna ignore it. That's my take.

I am probably gonna run a game or two using it just to see how it actually feels at the table.

Cause you're a masochist, dude.

I play Phoenix Command.

I know, I know.

Wait, wait, are you talking about Phoenix Command, the old school game or the strangely weirdly choice of named Phoenix dawn by Keith Baker?

I play Phoenix Command, the game designed literally, by NASA scientists.

Okay, what about. What about Living Steel, the RPG spinoff of Phoenix Command?

I play Phoenix Command, my hardcover copy of Living Steel will be in my possession until someone plies it from my double, my bloody hands. And I will be inflicting a Kvsr Rocks game scenario on y' all at some point.

What I hear you saying is that Wagoncon this year we're gonna have a Phoenix Command block.

Fuck. I just got set up and rolled. Yes, apparently I am.

It's gonna be back to back with your Moro project. Oh,

Buckley. I want the room. I want the room for one day.

And Jacob, you'll be in that room by yourself or you'll have 30 people, one or the other. It'll either be like.

Oh, so it's going to be like my Delta Green gates.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Okay, folks, this. I envisioned this conversation as being one where we go through and compare and contrast and talk about it, but these are great books. I don't really know what else we can really say. They are beautiful. The art is amazing. The changes are really few, and they're either mechanical or explanatory. And I think the Mechanical choices are hit and miss, but the explanations are much needed. And the added detail on how to run the game, the clarification on what different attacks do, all of that is wonderful. This is a great. These are great books.

And I will say, just because of what we did talk about versus what I know we've collectively talked about off the mics, when it comes to the mechanical changes, there are far more hits than misses.

Yeah, agreed.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just wanted to be clear on that, because what we have talked about has been mostly the misses, but there have been some hits that are like. There are tons and tons of very minor hit hits.

It's a lot of cleanup of things.

And it's. And it's. It's appreciated and loved.

Yeah, yeah.

And when you. If you have the Trans Dimensional Adventures book, there is another behind the scenes section in it. It's a different behind the scenes section.

Very much so.

And more art.

More art. More explanations of how they got where they came from, where they going, how they got there. Some great pictures and artwork. Again, like we've been saying, these. This was done, right?

Yeah.

This is not, as some people may have said, a big cash grab. I got value for my money in these books.

This is 100% not a. I mean, they made money off of it. There's no way to deny that. But it wasn't a turn and burn cash grab by any stretch of the imagination.

No, absolutely not.

It is fundamentally a modernization and a love letter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So here's my plan. I know that I wanted to go through the books and do a comparison, but I don't think that's gonna work. What we can do instead, though, we're still going through the Matt catalog, right? Yep.

Yes.

We haven't actually gotten to some of these Turtles Go Hollywood. Trekking turtles. We haven't gotten to them yet. In our flow, we'll do comparisons. We can do comparisons at that time. So when we hit Turtles Go Hollywood, we can bring them up side by side and talk about how they compare. I think we've done guide, and I think we've done adventures, and I know we've done transdem. So I think the second book is largely just. We might come back and do a deeper dive into the second book, but, I mean, it's all content that you've already seen, and you can tell us

if you want it. If you want that, tell us on the Discord Channel.

Yeah, yeah, do that. Yeah, we appreciate it.

We do these not just so the three of us could sit in A room and talk to ourselves. I mean, we kind of do that. And we'd probably do it anyway. We just wouldn't record it, but. Or we might record it just for, you know, prosperity. But if you're something you want to hear, we really listen to that. We really try to give you that. What you're asking for.

Yeah. And if you want to help us pay the bills, we appreciate it. You can. The easiest way to do that would just be stop by our coffee page or you can follow the links to pinecast Tip Jar. Both coffee and pinecast are linked in all of our show notes as well. Even a few bucks helps out. Whatever you can do. You don't have to. We don't restrict any content, but we do have some special bonuses here and there for our patrons. With the Rift's actual play series that we're doing, I'm adding more sounds and more sound effects to those in the background for the patrons. And just tonight in our session, we recorded a very special thing that's only going to go in the patron feed. We appreciate everything that you do for us.

And I'm still recovering from it.

Eat. Yeah. Buckley's still in shock. Yep.

Last words. These were an amazing surprise. I do a Kickstarter. As we were saying, we fire and forget. When these showed up, I was in a cast on crutches, trying to struggle the box that showed up on my doorstep.

But the dogs helped.

The dogs? Oh, yeah, they totally helped. And hiding it from my partner, which was impossible because it showed up at Christmas. And then I went through it and it was just so amazing to go through it. Even if I had not backed it, it's the level that I did. The quality of the books were just impressive.

Well, folks, if you're not on our discord already, please drop by. Say hello again. As Buckley's already asked, tell us your thoughts on what you want to hear or thoughts on what you have heard. We love getting suggestions and feedback and ideas for future episodes. And we also just like nerding out and talking nerd shit, especially if it's palladium themed. Nerd shit. But we are. Our nerd zones have many overlaps with many other things as well. So yeah, come on by. Say hello. We hope to see you there. Starships, Magic, Mystic Martial arts, romance. All of these can be found in

a Cloak of Blades by Isaac Sher. You might have heard my name before.

I've done a lot of voiceover work for Breakfast Puppies. And I've recently released my first novel.

It's available on Amazon as an ebook

and paperback and you can get it for free if you have a Kindle unlimited subscription.

I do hope you'll see support my work as you're supporting Breakfast Puppies and

it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one.

You've been listening to the Glitter Boys, a Palladium book fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambita and Palladium Books. Please buy all their stuff and help keep them in print and making more games. You can order [email protected] and their entire catalog is available digitally at drivethrurpg as well. Our opening music is 8 bit bass and lead by FurbyGuy from freesound.org this closing music is Caravana by Philip Gross available at freemusicarchive.org all sound effects used are self made or acquired via Creative Commons Zero License. If you like what you have heard, find us on Twitter and Facebook as the Glitter Boys. That's B O I S and check us out [email protected] glitter boys and also join us on the Breakfast Puppies network [email protected] Discord and if you want to help us out, please spread the word and help us build a community. Thanks again for listening. We'll catch you next time.