#209 – Looking Back and Looking Forward with Sean Roberson

Breakfast puppies.

This podcast contains adult language and content and is meant for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Hi, I'm Sean Owen Roberson, and I listen to the Glitter Boys.

Hey, folks, it's just Jacob from the Glitter Boys with you. And today we, on our episode, we have a special guest, the ever popular Sean from Palladium. Sean, how you doing?

I'm doing good. How are you guys doing?

Great. I hear you're globetrotting these days.

Yeah.

Oh, you know, a little bit. A little bit here, a little there.

Pretty envious.

So I hear that there's a big thing happening celebrating Palladium that you wanted to talk about today.

Yeah, we've got. Palladium Books is being recognized by the Detroit Historical Society. They have an exhibit called Worlds of Palladium. So it features a bunch of stuff about, well, Palladium Books and, and a lot of the works that Kevin has done and how the role, Actually, it's really interesting if you, there's some videos out there, but if you get a chance to go and see the exhibit, it's open for, I think, the next six months or longer. And they, they actually have a whole bunch of the history and how Palladium also interacted with different things like the satanic panic and, and different parts of the history of tabletop role playing, because Plato's been there since right in the beginning in 1981. Right. So Kevin was kind of at the epicenter of a lot of this stuff. And so they tracked that as well, which I thought was super interesting. It's a great thing to be recognized. I think it's a big recognition of everything that Kevin's built over more than four decades of hard work and writing before I joined him.

Question, does the Detroit Gaming center still exist?

No. No. I, I, I, I know Kevin and I have talked about, I've always been like, oh, man, wouldn't that be cool to, to resurrect that and, you know, I don't know, have an extra warehouse next to our warehouse where we had people come in and game all the time.

I was going to say when Kevin retires, he could open the Detroit Gaming center again. And then I think about that.

I'm like, no, yeah, it's right. And it's, it, yeah. Well, you know, I, I, you know, I think Kevin wants to write books as long as he can.

Oh, that's what I mean that way.

Yeah.

Him retiring is kind of a laughable idea at this point, to be honest.

Yeah. Why don't you retire and open a shop Right, exactly. But I mean I used to run a games workshop store. So I, I actually really get the. The vibe and the. You know that my, my. When I had my store it was like it was the place for people to come and ha. And we threw lots of cool events and so yeah, for me I really liked the idea and the vibe. But you know, it was. It was a different era. I mean is generations ago in Detroit. But he started that with Eric Wujik and a bunch of other people in the community. I think Matt Balance was involved with it. I can't remember. I. Way before my time. Right. But no, it just sounds cool that it was. It was really near. It was right next to the university and college that a lot of them were going to. And so a lot of people showed up there and I think if you wanted to do it again today, you would want to maybe go and do it in some place. I don't know if you know the area, but there's Ann Arbor, the college town. Right. So that, that was my kind of thought is. And that's not far away from where we are in Westland. So we're kind of like in between Ann Arbor and Detroit. You know, I was like, well, if we ever, you know, move warehouses or want to buy, you know, something out in Ann Arbor, we could buy a whole bunch of stuff and then have the game center.

Well, it's also.

Oh, rearrang.

Re.

Re resurrecting Ann Arbor for like the third time now as this micro hub in the RPG industry.

Yeah, it's interesting. We actually have been to. They have a. I can't remember the name of it now. The library there has the. This tabletop gaming event they've put on every year for a couple of years now. I'm killing myself. I can't think of it off the top of my head. But anyways, we've attended with AS Palladium. I've met a bunch of people and I was surprised at how many people are local. I mean it was filling a whole like a small attendance hall. They had gaming and I mean there must have been 30 booths there. 20, 30, 25. 30 booths.

Wait, a Library Broughton event?

Yeah.

That's cool. Yeah.

Oh my God.

Their library is really big. It's actually really nice.

Well, one of the things that's going on in Ann Arbor right now in the last 10, 15 years is there's actually a growing tech sector where people are using it as a remote campus for large tech companies. Have a bunch of people there. So you have your College and then you have people making money both in the same place, all hanging out in the library and throwing dice together. Right? So it's, it's an interesting mix and

it's a cool vibe. I really like the vibe there. Chaosium is there. So Rick Mains is there and we ran into him. The first time I think I ran into him was when we went to the Alliance Open House, the distributor, they've now been bought and are rebranding as Universal. They're one of our big distributors. So yeah, we, we went to their open house and Chaosium also happened to be next to us. And it's like, oh, those are those guys from. Yeah. Oh, hey, how's it going? You know, and we became friends and we chat and keep running into each other at different cons and stuff. It's kind of crazy, you know, that Palladium, Chaosium are out here and there's a bunch of other guys doing really cool stuff. More indie type tabletop RPG creators, but it's pretty impressive.

I was curious, so I pulled up the Ann Arbor district library webpage to take a quick look. When you start talking about it and oh my God, they run Super Smash Brothers ultimate tournaments at the library. They run trivia nights. They have all ages Mario Kart tournaments.

What?

I mean, like Multnomah County. Get your game up, man.

Our little library, even though it was

that cool, we went for this one event, right? And I was like, blown away, but that sounds awesome.

Our library in our little town, they run gaming once a month. They have makerspace, they have library library stuff that you would expect for libraries, but they have a whole bunch of things that they're offering to bring people in the library to form this many communities. I think a lot of libraries are trying to, dare I say, remain relevant in the age of, you know, Amazon Unlimited and streaming and all that stuff. They're like, there's still a community space. There's still a building that people may need, you know, for things. And they're doing a lot of interesting stuff.

Librarians have become. There's a huge, huge movement in librarians. Like, first off, they're really, really passionate about their work.

Absolutely.

You have to be, because when you

spend 12 years and they're paid peanuts. Yes.

But many of there's a huge community. I remember at least back when Google was still a thing and a lot of the gamers congregated on there. I remember a huge number of my friends on there were librarian gamers and they were all relatively young, like in their late 20s, early to mid-30s. A lot of cool librarians are changing the scene.

No, I was really impressed with it. And so I think that it's one of those things, if you get a chance, you know, support your local library. If you're in Ann Arbor, check it out. Their library was like, pretty, pretty dope. It is good to see them being relevant. And it didn't just feel like, try hard. You know what I mean? It felt like, oh, wow, this is cool. They're bringing a lot of stuff to the table. I don't know, a lot. Some, Some. Some listeners may know this. I studied design and production for video games and animated movies at the University of Texas in Dallas. It felt, it felt like that kind of campus atmosphere. It felt familiar to them. Nice. So. Because there were also people that. There were guys that were, you know, they had tabletop RPGs, there were other people that had tabletop, like, card games and board games, and there were people that had video games that they were demoing and different. It was, it was like almost like a, hey, here's my kind of like, game jam thing that's taken off and I'm working on it now. And that's really cool, too. I mean, that's. And I think that's good for, for kids and adults and everybody to see. There was a lot of families there, which was also really neat.

Moving on from this awesome exhibit in the Historical Society and the.

Before we leave, then, I do have some other questions. Shoot. What will people see at this exhibit? Are we talking just a little bit of discussion about history of the Palladium, or are we getting things like old school character sheets or maybe some old notes and maps? Any kind of, like, relics of the past?

Yeah, so I haven't seen it yet. I want to visit it soon. But they, they actually have, like, really big art prints and stuff that you normally. I don't know if you've ever been to the Palladium offices. They came and they apparently they were like, you know, because we, they, they got. They reached out to us and we had heard about them wanting to prepare this exhibit for a while, we didn't know, oh, is that serious? Is it going to happen? I mean, no shade on them. It's just you never know if something like that's going to come together or the timeline. Apparently around Christmas they came in. Of course, it was during this super crazy Christmas where we had girls coming out the grab bags, which are really super popular. And then they came in and they're like, hey, you said you could let us go through some of your archives and get some really cool stuff. Can we do that like next week? And Kevin's like, you know, well, let

me just say that that's 100% on brand for every historical society I've ever known.

Great. What are you doing for a. Really nice. And everything. But it was just one of those things where it was like, oh, well, we really want to launch the exhibit, you know, in February or March or whatever. And. But they've got, they've got a lot of really cool stuff and big, big, big, like high quality prints. I mean, it's just, it's a visual feast that way and you get to see pieces of the history and they put it in context with a lot of the different information. From what I've seen, it's got a little bit of everything. So you're going to see some things that, in a combination that I don't even know if you would get. If you went to Palladium's warehouse and were talking to Kevin. Right. Because this is more curated and very well written. There's another exhibit about comics and the history of comics in the Detroit area, which is right next door too. And so Kevin was also involved in the indie comic scene.

Yeah.

Early on. So.

So what you're saying is, is that they're there. You're going to need an escort to make sure Kevin doesn't ever not leave the building.

Well, he was there. Yeah. For the grand opening and next month he's got. I can't remember which weekend it is, but one of. I think it's the 28th, maybe 25th, but it's one of the later weekends in the month. He's doing a conversation with Kevin and friends where you can go to see the exhibit with him and then go back to Palladium and kind of hang out.

I have that information in an email. Folks listening home, if we don't correct ourselves by the end of this episode, look in the show notes and I'll have the exact date there.

Yeah, Kevin. I think Kevin deserves it and he's worked hard for it. I mean, he's been recognized with like, I think a lifetime achievement award at DragonCon. He's been inducted into the Gamut Tabletop Game Designer hall of Fame. But this is, I think, bigger and more in depth and something that's special to see, I think.

And I'm going to just say that given how he's talked on the episode we've had on him. Had him on, he's a pretty community focused guy in his own way. And I can imagine getting the community to reflect that back on him. His local community is like just a huge positive for him.

Funny you say that because Kevin really is a community focused guy. And I mean people say this and so it sounds hackneyed, but Kevin really is about people, whether it's it's gamers or you don't even have to be a gamer, right. He'll talk to grandma about art and games and creating stuff. And she's never played an RPG and she's probably never going to play an rpg, right? But maybe she and her grandson, we met them at some event or he ran into them at some place and he's like, come by the warehouse, I'll show you. Kevin really is a part of the community and in a lot of ways and has been for decades in the Detroit area. And so it is really neat to see that reflected back. And I mean I won't state his age, but he seems a lot younger than he is and so he's pretty spry for his age. But I think it's really great that that's come back around and he can kind of take that, enjoy that kind of little stroll of victory there. I hope that I can do a fraction of the kind of work that he's done and hopefully people would be excited to recognize that as well. But I can't imagine being recognized at that level personally. So.

Well, at heart Kevin's a storyteller and when you read his books and you read his the things he's done, it's the story that's so important to him and so conveying that in any way, any median is important for him and for his own hometown. Basically to recognize his effort has to be, you know, he has to be over the moon for it. Right. And you were mentioning then you mentioned the dates. I just want to throw it in there one more time because we'll probably mention it a few times. It's the Detroit Historical Society and It runs from 7 February to 19 September. Yep, the world of Palladium. Additionally, you mentioned it because it is right up Kevin's alley because really Kevin likes to say that he's a comic book designer and comic book writer who happened to have a 40 year career in role playing games. The heroes and villains of Detroit comic book story will be from the May 3rd to September 13th, same, same exhibit. So if you want to show up, show up in like May and it's a twofer for all of your, your nerd and Geek desires and everything.

No, we're really excited about it and I think it's going to be really cool. And you know, because we're not doing the open house.

I was going to ask you about that. I know a lot of people asked

for tickets in the grab bag, tickets

to the open house.

Right, right.

You're welcome.

Well, it's a big challenge for us because, well, there's a couple of things. One, as many people know, Kathy, Kevin's partner of over 20 years, passed away. Yeah, she was the one that did all the concessions, all the food and drinks and a lot of people don't know. She was very talented woman and just a wonderful person to interact with. She had run catering company for years and a lot of the fans that would go to the open house, I mean, the big, big thing was, I think was her chicken parmigiana or something she would do one night. She would make a whole bunch.

When the. I had the privilege of being in the Very Important Gamer the first night, the Thursday night, because really it ran Friday through Sunday. And if you paid a little bit extra and showed up a little bit earlier, you could do the Very Important Gamer. And yeah, the catered dinner was worth the admission price alone, to be honest. And it really was.

Yeah. No, you're not kidding. And then the other thing is we don't have, you know, you know, the space in the warehouse. It's a pretty big warehouse. By the way, Rick Mains of Chaosium actually always, he came by and toured. We, you know, and we gave him the tour and he said he had warehouse envy. They. Because they have a smaller one here in the US than they have another one in Europe, from what I understand. I think they have the two or three or more warehouses, but they're smaller. They're smaller facilities and we have one big centralized one in the U.S. it's interesting because we actually bought a whole row of new metal shelves. If you've seen the metal shelving we have there to store new products.

So you're right in the middle of what was the gaming room, basically. So now you can't. The space isn't there anymore.

Yeah, yeah, it would be much reduced. So that's the kind of trick is what I'm trying to say is that, yeah, it's like the catering and then is gone and it's a lot of work and then we don't have as much room for gaming. So we are looking at doing something else in the near future. You know, doing it in another venue. I don't know if the, the title will change a little bit or something, but we do want to do something, but we've been just so busy with Ninja Turtles and a bunch of other stuff that it's, it's just been, it's, it's not the high priority. Right. And so I think that's part of why Kevin is doing this weekend with Kevin and friends.

So you brought up Ninja Turtles. Let's talk about your recent successful delivered Kickstarter and do a little bit of a post mortem on that. How was it received? What did you learn from it? All of that sort of thing.

Wow. So, yeah, we ran a Kickstarter for it for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Redux edition. And what we did is we brought back there originally there's the core Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, another strangeness role playing game. And then there were five supplements and they're all really killer. A lot of people may not know this. That was the first role playing game I ever owned personally. I played some D and D and some D6 Star wars with my friends. I mean, it was fun, but it didn't like grab me, do you know what I mean? The same way I discovered BattleTech as a teenager. Anyways, long story short, I played that and then I, you know, you know, experience other RPGs and then I love the Ninja Turtles. And so I traded some old BattleTech stuff with one of my buddies because he had, he had a, he had a book and it was a game and it had a bunch of the art I like because he knew I liked the graphic novels. And so that's why I traded for. I didn't even really, you know, know what I was getting into. And then I was reading it. I'm like, well, this makes sense. Like it just made sense compared to AD&D and West End Star Wars. I just never really, really groked those. So for me it's been this real big passion project. And the first thing I wanted to talk to Kevin about when he asked me to be his business partner in 2021, long before we made the official announcement. We got all our ducks in a row. I mean, you gotta do, you gotta plan things. And Kevin and I, Kevin talks about, we have these plans and we really do, we really do plan things out and do things strategically for reasons. That was one of those ones that I think that a lot of fans were surprised but excited that we were able to bring back because we negotiated. It took nine months of negotiations with Paramount, Nickelodeon, but we finally came to terms and it was One of those things where it was like, okay, do we wait? We didn't want to wait a whole year to run the Kickstarter. Paramount didn't want to wait a whole year. We thought the time was right to launch the Kickstarter, but it was like, we launched the Kickstarter at the end of 2023, a week and a half after we signed the contract. Wow. And if you've ever done a Kickstarter. I've done. I've done a number. I like to have all my ducks in a row. I'll say stuff that. Jeff from Paramount, if you're listening, I'm sorry, I'm gonna let out a little bit of the stuff. But it was crazy, man, because they were like. They really didn't want us to start doing any major artwork or anything else before we had a signed agreement. And we didn't want to either. But we actually had Michael Majestic start stealth working on a bunch of the art for the books. So Mike Majestic has done the COVID of Titan Robotics and some other books. He does really great art. Usually you see it black and white, but he does fantastic color. And he actually did work on color work on a Transformers comic out of some studio for a few years. I think it was a Canadian studio. Anyways, I thought he would be the guy to maybe do this work because we wanted a very specific look and only the highest quality art we could get. Anyways, we had him like, stealth working on, like. Well, when you see the color artwork on the Kickstarter page, most of that was done like, you know, hey, we think this is going to happen. We know we'll need this art ready.

Well, you would had to have. Right. To launch it that quickly, you'd have to have quite a bit done and in the can to even meet a goal or a guideline or a target date that you were expecting a lot of that work. It was all spec work. You were hoping that you could get the contract signed and hoping. But you had good indications, I'm assuming.

We did. Negotiations are really interesting and fun. Employers, massive contracts and stuff. But I will say that we just. I. I really. Paramount has been good to work with. And so we were. Kevin and I were really hopeful that we're going to get a deal. We're excited about it. The other thing is, we had Mike do some of that stuff so we could show Paramount this is what we want to do. Right. They knew that there was a certain amount of things being done. But the miniatures. We had Transperfect Gaming lined up to Sculpt the miniatures. But they didn't start until we gave them the green flag. Right. We'd never done Dice before. We'd worked with Fan Roll to do a bunch of the Dice and Dice products. And we actually, there is a set of Mugen Green dice that I designed and that we had produced separately that have been a real big hit as well. But Fan Roll put all that stuff together using a bunch of the art, for instance, for the boxes and different things for the visuals that Mike Majestic had been colorizing. He was colorizing original Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, creator of the Ninja Turtles, their art. So it was just kind of crazy, this thing that came together. But it went. It went off spectacularly. It kind of turned to this thing where every week we. Or every couple of days and then, you know, every few hours on the first day and then every couple of days later, and then every week we were teasing more stuff from Kevin Eastman or the miniature sculpts and all this kind of stuff. And I don't like. I don't usually like to do tease campaigns. I'm not. I don't, you know, it's not my marketing bent. But it was effective.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

We really blew away the expectation. We blew away our expectations. We blew away. It was the number one thing that fans would ask me and Kevin about. Even when I was writing on Rifts for Savage Worlds, I would have people come to me and say, why doesn't Palladium bring Ninja Turtles back out? And I'm like, I. I'm not Palladium, dude. I just talk to Kevin every once in a while to square away Savage riffs, art and, you know, lore and stuff like that at the time. Now I am his business partner. No, it was a crazy experience we got rolling. One of the things that was nuts is we had. Part of the thing that we did in the books is that we included 10 full page pinup illustrations. Was the original plan by famous Ninja Turtles or tabletop RPG artists. We had a ton of people reach out after the campaign started. We ended up including, I think, 33. Yes.

Something like that. We all have copies of the book at the table and at least two of us are rocking the meat. A green dice for today. So, yeah, it's 18 in the first book alone. Yeah, 18 in the first book alone.

Yes. Yeah, I think it's 33 total. This is one of those things that we did that wasn't part of like a stretch goal or anything else. We just wanted to do it for the fans. But that was like two months of extra work because every one of those things. And I respect the process. I respect. Turtles is big now. When Kevin first did the TMNT RPG in 1985, he was the first licensed product for Ninja Turtles. And now we're like, you know, Turtles is massive. It's in cartoons and movies and comics and video games and it's, it's everywhere. It's in like iPhone games. It's all over the place. They have this process. They need to look at everything. They need to see sketches by, you know, the artist, the black and white sketch, and then go to the finished sketch, you know, the line, the final lines. And then they need to approve the colors and there's. You have back and forth sometimes. So that, that was a big deal, but I think it was worth it for the fans. And then in March, I believe it was, Kathy passed away very suddenly. She had Alzheimer's. We were kind of preparing for Kevin needing to step away. And then she passed from a sudden heart attack. And in the middle of the night, Kevin messaged me. I was there at 2am with him. And, and, and that was devastating for Kevin. They had a truly amazing bond. You know, he wasn't, he couldn't do much. He couldn't do much for almost six months. And Kathy also did work for various order processing and other stuff for Palladium every day. So I need to figure out, okay, how do I do Kevin's job and Kathy's job, you know, how do we get this all nailed down? So that was kind of rough in the middle there, you know, kept the book production, it was a remaster and so we scanned all the original paste up boards. Kevin's great about keeping stuff like that. It's fantastic.

Yeah. We've been treated occasionally on some of our recordings with him where he's shown us things from his library, his inventory, and we're like, whoa, it's insane, right?

No, I mean it's, it's one of those things that I'm one of these people that I like. I want to own nothing and be very minimalist, I guess after the military and stuff. It's kind of funny because I'm like, I try, I'm trying to be deliberate about. Okay, I want six copies of that and let's put this aside there. Right. So that I'm archiving for the future as well.

Right.

Kevin's so good about it because he's, he's such a collector, so of comics and art and stuff like that. But anyways, the process Went well. We, you know, we originally wanted to deliver. I think it was Gen Con. Yeah. And so there was a little bit of we want to deliver sometime, I think early in 2025. And, you know, it got pushed back and we wanted to. I was really, really trying to get it. Everything to get done in time for Gen Con, and that didn't happen. You know, part of it was just the. We had so many extra accessory products that the. The books was one thing, but getting. Well and getting all the miniature sculpts approved and then they had to. In the. In the manufacturing process, they make some modifications. Those have to be sent back the box. The boxes were crazy because EU laws changed.

Yeah.

So we had to put, like, warnings in all these languages on everything. And I mean, it was just. It was. It was like this, you know, this bureaucratic kind of thing where I was like, I was just fit to be tied and you try and line things up and then when there's delays, you try to be graceful. But. But, you know, fortunately we. We were able to. To deliver everything in. At the end of 2025 in November, Stuff started going out to backers, and the number of backers was so high, there was no way it was gonna. If we had tried to ship it out of the Palladium warehouse.

Oh, no, no.

You know, Caleb's a warehouse guy. Normally if he shipped like. I did the math, he shipped like 50 packages. It would take it like 32 actions a day. In addition to everything else that we sell. It would have been like two years to ship everything out to backers. Right. So.

Well, I pulled up the Kickstarter real quick that you had 8,000, 383 very interesting number backers. So it would have. It would have taken you. I've been to the warehouse a couple of times. It would have taken a bit. You wouldn't have been able to fit it all in there.

No, I don't. I would have been very difficult too. We had shipments coming in from the manufacturer. We had shipments coming in from Fan Roll. So that was. That would have all been complicated as well. And a lot of that stuff, like the miniatures, the fan roll dice, those are all exclusives to the Kickstarter. Once that's done, it's fine. Right. It's over. But it is a hurdle. Yeah. The other thing is there's just. There's just so many things to be done. We got to run Palladium too, because we have a web store and we have people making orders and. And the other thing is we had that, yeah, we had over 8,300 backers on Kickstarter, but we also kept taking pre orders on the backer kit site.

Right.

So in the end, I think it was over 10,000, if I don't know the number, but it was somewhere around there. So there was just a lot of logistics. And then the shipping and tariffs are crazy. And, you know, everyone was trying to figure out. I mean, I literally pulled up tariff documents off of the White House website and we're like, giving them to people not in our organization and other organizations we're working with. Like, everyone's like, we don't know what's happening. Our lawyers are confused. And I'm like, here's the document, you know. You know, one of the challenges we had is, you know, every time we did anything official, if I just was responding to someone in the comments section on the Kickstarter or something, that's one thing. But every time we put out an update that all had to be approved by Paramount. And then sometimes it was like, what's the update? I don't know. Right. Like, if I don't have the answer, I can't really get. You know what I mean? It's like, oh, here's my official update. Keep waiting for the next update.

Yeah, a couple of recordings ago, we went through the books and we unboxed them all not too long ago. And yeah, because all the ones, all the people in the room contributed quite a bit. And so we're unboxing.

We really appreciate. You guys are like number one. You guys are like the number one, the ultimate backer, benefactor. Right?

So, yeah, yeah, but we're going through the book and I'm going. I've never seen a gaming book. And it's the, like, it's right after the warning page of the copyright material. I've never seen a gaming book that has Viacom, Nickelodeon, Universal, Palladium. Oh, here's a couple of one names and a rep company and like the list of people who have to be contributed and accredited for this book and consulted. And consulted. And I've worked in big contracts with multiple vendors and multiple primaries and things like that. And mine was much more of a business world, but in the copyright world, it just gets crazy. And I know Kevin mentioned that someone wanted to add a different label to every box and the boxes had already been printed, you'd already gone through the EU thing and they wanted to add one more thing. And like, no, we can't. We're like, like, they're all done. They're Shipping. Like, please stop.

You know, and, yeah, we kept running into stuff like that. So the funny thing is, is for me, the project was done, like the writing part and the editing and the layout, because I did all the layout and the art direction with Kevin, of course. And I was the primary person coordinating all the. All the pinup art, all the color work, getting it approved, making adjustments, writing the new material. It really was my baby. And I love that Kevin let me have it as my baby. But, you know, to me, it's so funny because it was like, yeah, I've been done with that for a while. But there was all these. We just kept hitting these extra things and. And that's where having a team, like having Wayne and having Alex and having Jeremy and Caleb actually being part of solutions, you know, because if Caleb takes over, this. This responsibility gives way more freedom to take care of this other thing. You know, it's. It's. It's. It's a team effort. I don't know what it would have happened if it had just been me. I mean, it would have been physically impossible. Right? So, you know, you work with good people and you got to trust everybody, and working with really good people to do the shipping and all the pick and pack. The people are printers. You know, the printers that we've been using for, like, I think 40 years, went out of business in the middle of printing. Titan Robotics, you know, that one I was really proud of. We delivered that, I think, a week after I had said it would be delivered in the Kickstarter. So even with that happening, and this one, though, the timeline was extended much longer than I'm happy with. But I think we got quality product to the fans. We had a lot of really great people involved, and they elevated the product. The. You know, we had a lot of attention from Paramount, and the. Jeff is in the book. He's credited because he brought. He was like. He was there on the details. He was making sure that we got things right. There was a lot of great people on their end that were making sure that this was going to be the best Turtles product it could be. That was really fantastic to work with them at that level. And actually, it was Jeff's idea to do the black, white and red edition. Oh.

Oh, interesting.

Thank you, Jeff.

Yeah, that was his idea. And it really helped fill a need because Kevin and I had already had the conversation because we. I really like the. The graphic novel Turtles. I. The graphic novels I got. I got Turtles a little late and the rpg, you know, someone traded it to me secondhand, you know what I mean? The graphic novels, the ones that I got were the ones that an addition that Eastman and Laird had done that were full color, like I think four or five colors. So anyways, I saw the turtles having red bandanas in my mind's eye, even though I first encountered them through the cartoons. But when we talked to Paramount, they really wanted to do the four color bandanas and we thought that was the right general approach. At the same time, it was like, dang, I know that people are going to be like, what about the red bandanas? Yeah, and they had the red bandanas on the original RPG cover. Yep. That's where when Jeff suggested the black, white and red edition, you know, my main concern was, is it going to be something that we do that's just like a fire and forget, are we going to make our money off of it? Are we going to be able to justify the printing costs? So that's why in the Kickstarter it was actually $5 more than the standard edition book. Now, fortunately, it has been so popular and actually it's been. It's the, the standard color edition is definitely the most popular, but I am pleasantly surprised with how popular the black, white and red edition books are, especially when people see them. It's interesting, some people see the photos on the web page, but then, yeah, you, it's the books. It's crazy. The books look better in real life than they do on a web page. And I, it blew my mind. I mean, you, you hope that quality comes out right and you do everything you can. I mean, I studied visual design, I have a degree in it and I was like, it's just surprising when you see it. And people, when they saw it, when we had some preview copies of Gen Con, because we did have preview copies, they, you know, they, they, they were, it was part of the other thing is they're printing so many books, they're printing so many miniatures, they're printing so many stuff. And part of the delay was just it took forever to print it right. You know, and produce all the minis and stuff. You know, it's like if it had been a normal size palladium project that we probably would have been delivering before Gen Con, but it wasn't.

Oh, if I had had a clue, I would have gone so deep into the futures on red ink ahead of your print run.

Well, and that was a crazy story too, because we wanted to do just one red process color. We hired Jeremy Colwell, who is Freddie Williams is a famous TMNT comic book artist. But people may have heard of him because his first gig he ever got was doing art for Palladium books on riffs. And so he and Kevin go way back. And so his favorite colorist is Jeremy Coldwell. We go to Jeremy, we send him, he's like, what do you mean, black, white and red? And we're like, I don't know, you're common guy, don't you know? And he's like, can you send me some examples? Because Kevin's a huge guy, but I'm like a dabbler, right? We send him some stuff and he's like, okay. And he's like, well, do you mean like this? And he comes back and if you, you know, if you look at those black, white and red editions, it's not just one process color of red. There's oranges and yellows. It's gorgeous. It all looks red, but it's not really. It was more expensive.

Like, so you asked for $5 more, I would have easily given you 15.

Well, right. And, well, we didn't know, you know, when he showed it to us, Kevin was. Because I was like. And it was so funny because Kevin, he did, you know, it was just top of the, you know, back of the envelope kind of math. He was like, well, Sean, actually it's only going to be three times as expensive as we thought.

Only.

And you know, and the thing is, is Jeremy Coldwell, he's just asking us. We could say no, right? And we could say no, we do want just this one spot color, you know, he's just saying, hey, if I do it at this level, though, it'll be this expensive. Totally a pro. Wonderful guy. I'm not complaining about the price, but. But when Kevin thought what the price was, it was actually like double that.

Oh.

So that's why I was like, I

don't know if we're going to make

money on this, you know, but we decided to do it. I said, I'm going to have to add five bucks to the COVID price and hopefully we break even was my hope. Yeah, well, we've more than broken even, but we really did it as a passion thing for the fans, if that, you know what I mean? And in the end, usually it's funny. That usually pays off, but sometimes when you're in that moment as a creative, it's tough.

I got introduced to TMNT by the original black and white comic books before they were a cartoon on network television and all of that. And when I saw the physical copy of the white, black and red version. It was like, this is. This is. This is it. This is not an improvement on the original. It is a interpretation of the original that nailed the spirit of the original black and white comic books.

These Terror Bears.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's kind of crazy because besides changing the colors for some of the headers, because, you know, these, these books, you know, for Palladium fans, these books have rear indexes which should be very useful and nice. And it's a very modern layout, not like what you're used to from Palladium. Really wanted to step it up and show what we can do. And so the books are really great, full color headers and I think the graphic design, the visual design is sharp. I did my best work.

I want to congratulate you on this. This is something we did our own deep dive into these books a couple episodes ago. One of the things that I was very specifically impressed with was certain. Okay, certain formatting things that you don't really notice unless you've actually worked in formatting or you have an eye for it. Every section begins on the left page. I like that.

Yes.

Most of the sections are exactly two pages or four pages. Everything is laid out in a way that there are no. You don't have any dangling. What do you call them, split paragraphs. You don't have anything that. Ancestors, children of ancestors or something. I forget the term for it, but none of that. It is a really sweet, wonderful layout. Especially. This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this in a Palladium book.

And I actually had been writing myself a question. Here is future looking. Are you hoping to do more of this type of layout for future products? Not tmnt, but future Palladium products in general to try to add. Change the way the books. Because I love the books, how they are. But an index and some of the layouts have always been an area that I buy them for content, not necessarily to look pretty, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Well, and two things. So first I'll kind of answer that the first part about the black, white and red. And then I'll talk about future Palladium products because there's something I want to say just for people is, yeah, thank you. I'm glad you noticed. And I just hope that whether or not you've, you know, done work of that type, that any gamer just. It feels easier to use and parse when you're looking at it 100%.

Yeah.

The interesting thing about the black, white and red is that when we did the color work for the, the mainline books and the exact same books, but they feel totally different, which is fantastic. Fantastic and fascinating to me. And I, I did the layout and design. It was just, it's magical. But one of the really interesting things is that we had Mike Majestic paint over the original crosshatch shading lines in the original. So you don't see the comic black lines in the full color edition most of the time. That was a big stylistic choice and Jeff was nervous about it until we showed it to Kevin Eastman and he said he thought it was some of the best color work that's ever been done on the Turtles. We were just happy that he felt the same way. Right. But at the same time, the black, white and red is the true homage to the original graphic novels and the original role playing game, if you want to say what's the true homage to the grit and the feel of the originals. So I think both books are really fantastic as an art form expression. Yeah. The black, white and reds are special and a lot of people just go nuts when they see them when it comes to these books. Yes. This is Kevin and I intended this as a flagship product. Kevin used to do the layout by hand with the old paste up boards and wax table works. Yeah. And before I went to UT Dallas for the design and production bachelor's degree, I did an associate's degree in visual design. And I've seen, I know the basics of what Kevin would do. Right. And I just know it's laborious. And apparently he's a wizard at it because he, he could just do. He was just amazing at how fast he could do it, from what I've heard from Alex and other people. And it was interesting because I didn't realize this at first. There were changes in the feeling of the layouts between when he was hand doing them and then when everything went digital, Wayne was just kind of left holding the bag, doing them digitally in indesign. I know he likes to, he enjoys being an editor. I don't know how much he enjoys the layout part. Right. He never was formally trained on it. So the layout, the style of the layout, the text got a little denser. Not that the font changed, but the space between lines, the space between paragraphs. And so it was funny when I was doing the layout, I did the layout for Yin Sloth Jungles, the new edition of it. I, it was funny, I was comparing it to the original that, you know, Kevin had done hand layout by, and I had already decided I wanted to do A little more airy space between, you know, different things. I like facing pages as we talked about, which is, you know, that's what I call, you know, when you. You know, everything's in one page or on two pages. Right. The two page spread. It was interesting because I was like, oh, all these different things that I was adjusting in our InDesign files in the basic formatting to going forward for our to layout books. Kevin was doing it, you know, 40 years ago.

But manually. But manually. He was doing it all manually. Right. There was a software package helping him do it.

Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of crazy because it's like Kevin and I, it's weird. We're very compatible as just like artistic and business partners. That part of it, it's like we both have the same design sense. But I didn't realize it until I was looking at this old book that was done manually. So I do it digitally. I was trained to do it all digitally in InDesign. But at the same time we both learn the same art of visual design. Right. But we want to do that in other books in the future. So. Yen Sloth Jungles. When Yin Sloth Expeditions is out, you'll see the same thing. And then Titan Robotics, I did that in Titan Robotics. So you will see that as a standard thing moving forward is you will have a table of contents that's based on the headers of every section throughout the book. You will have a rear index instead of a front. Like Kevin was doing a front quick find index. But I just don't think that that's. We had people requesting the full rear index. So we're doing it when I'm. Especially when I'm laying out books. I think you're definitely going to find that I will make sure that things end up on those cleaner spreads. If you. Do you guys have the Cyborgs collection that we did?

I do. It's good.

Yeah. But that one there was less that I adjusted. But there is a bit of that in there as well with the rear indexes and things like that. So as we're moving forward, we want to do more stuff like that too, where we're remastering material that's relevant to go alongside because we have such a huge back catalog. It's not like we can just sit down and for five years just like remaster everything. That doesn't really make sense that way from a business model point of view. But what we want to do is we had the Cyborgs Collection which brought back Rift Sourcebook 1, the revised and expanded and then the Shamarian Nation Sourcebook and Sourcebook 2 Mechanoids for rifts and some expanded material that I added that was originally written up for I think like Rifter one or two or something like that for it was some art weapons for Archie's Bots by I think it was Josh Sinzipaw. That was a cool collection and it's actually sweet. I thought it would be like something cool to remaster those books. Which also means we're remastering. We're using those to Build fresh updated PDFs to offer to the fans, which you just get for free if you're a fan. And then. But like the plan is to keep doing that. So when Kevin finishes Rift's Antarctica, we're going to do a Sploogorth collection which I think will be a huge value add because there's Sleworth stuff is spread over like 18 books all over the place.

Just all over the place. Yeah.

So it's insane. And when I was working on Rifts for Savage Worlds when I did Lannis and the Demon Seas, when I wrote that book, I'm proud of that. When I wrote that one cover to cover. But when I wrote that I was like referencing a whole pile of books. It was insane. But no, that gives us a chance to remaster a bunch of this material as in kind of bite sized steps as we move forward, but also have something that is popular with fans. I've been surprised at how popular Cyborgs Collection is. I don't know. I don't know. I guess it almost to me sounds like I'm like don't have faith in my products. It's not like that. But the Black, White and red is more popular than I expected. Cybers collection is more popular than I expected. But we definitely want to keep doing that stuff moving forward. We're going to stick with it. Should feel like a similar, you know, we're not going to change the times. New Rowan font and things like that in the classic perfect bound books for our game. Lines that are already out there. You know, it would be really weird if suddenly we went to like some Ninja, you know, some updated. Like we updated the Ninja Turtles layout and fonts and headers and all that. I think that'd be weird that Rift Sourcebook 72 has, you know, that comes out has this completely different feel of layout. I don't want to do that. But we do want to raise the bar and we are raising the bar as we move forward.

I have some rules Change questions for you from our listeners. There's three big ones that people frequently are talking about in our discussion groups. The first one that I want to ask you about is the change in initiative for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now, for folks who, if this is your first time listening, thank you. But Palladian's initiative system has always been reroll every round. But in this, it is implied that it is no longer the case. What was the reason for that change?

Kevin and I talked about it. It's something he really wanted in there. This is one of there. So, okay. One of the big things is that a lot of us gamers, we all started playing these games and there really. It really was like other people would kind of show you the ropes and how to play, especially with like, D and D and stuff, Right? That was my experience, was the. It's funny, you go back and you look at those old AD&D books, and they're atrocious. They're terribly laid out and organized. Every skill in that game is a mini game. I mean, it's absolutely bonkers stuff from a game designer and visual designer point of view. Now, as a kid, you didn't know any different. It was awesome, Right? I think there's a lot of things that without before the Internet and things that were done a certain way or were explained in text, and I don't know if the full intent always came across. I think there was various things where different writers would write things different ways or in one spot and another, and so it would seem to conflict. Like, I know in the original Palladium fantasy, it says you roll once, but then later it says, roll again each round. And so it's like, I've heard people playing both ways. And there's a lot of things that when. When I met Kevin, it was like, you know, what kind of a game master are you? And I would tell him about my game mastery. And, you know, we chat a lot about we game together and. And he's like, oh, we're actually very similar in our styles. Which I would say that's because I grew up reading Kevin's book. But there's lots of people that grew up reading Kevin's books that don't have the exact same game mastering styles. He does. Right. And so there was a lot of things where it was like, what? How does Kevin run this at the table? And how do we reflect that more clearly when we're gaming? Right. What was his intention? Right. And so that's where movement is in action. One of the things. But he realized that the change with the Initiative, I think, is It's a change. Right. But that was something that we discussed and wanted to put in there. It makes losing the Initiative, getting thrown to the ground and things like that, I think, more impactful when you're in a fight, because you don't just, you know, if you trip someone and then you, okay, roll for a new round initiative. Well, that they didn't. They lost the initiative. But now that doesn't matter. Right. So I think part of it is it becomes more of a. A gritty kind of street fight game where you get down and out and you're on the bottom of the initiative pile suddenly. And that's. If there's a lot of combatants, that might be a bad place to be.

One could also argue that it trivializes initiative bonuses, because when it's all really up to a single roll, if you have super high initiative bonuses.

Well, it's not only there's not. Yeah, no, that's true. I don't. I don't know if it trivializes it.

Rift's New west would like a word with you.

Well, this is Ninja Turtles, so it's kind of interesting because a lot of this stuff was approached. It's interesting because a lot of this was like, hey, let's, let's. Let's take the same game. And that's why I think it's great that it's called the Redux Edition, because it is the same rules, but I rewrote them. It's the same game, but I rewrote it. And some of the things I think were mistakes where I tried to keep the original language too much. And it's confusing because I should have just applied all new fangled language. I did rewrite it to make sure that it was much more readable to a modern audience. It's funny, you'll have the same people that have been playing palladium since the 80s and they're gaming now, but they're saying something was confusing. But 20 years ago, they didn't say that same thing was confusing. So it's interesting. But, yeah, I don't think it trivializes initiative. There's some other big changes to initiative, too. The initiative, also the game master, can just say one side has the initiative.

Yeah. When I was reviewing the surprise rules, kind of really detailing out the three types of surprise, and I hadn't seen that anywhere else, that I was like, oh, no. That's like, okay, here we go.

Yep. Well, because before, when Kevin would say sneak attack and surprise attack, he was using one term when it was melee and one term in written form, mostly one term when it's melee and one term when it's ranged. Because in previous games, melee and range were usually explained as in separate combat rules. And so this is all condensed into everything's in one place. Nothing repeats in these books, the new Redux edition books. Right. Almost nothing repeats before you might have something be presented one spot and then it's talked about again later, which can lead to confusion. Right.

And talked about in almost a different context.

Right.

And you would with. With no shift and you're like, what is going on?

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, maybe. And maybe that second thing was written to be a clarification of the intention. But over time you have one game system, but you keep making new books and then you try and make sure that you. Each addition is explained the best way you can. And then over time, like, you get this kind of shift of. Of things. So Kevin and I looked at this as like a real chance to get back to the basics, but in a turtles vein. So there's some things that we did. It was like, well, we didn't do really detailed gun combat rules because it's Ninja Turtles. Right, right. You know, so. So if you're like, oh, this doesn't have all the different, you know, automatic fire options. Well, yeah, it's Ninja Turtles. And that was intentional choice by us and Paramount. Right. Talking about how we wanted to present and what kind of focuses we wanted on the combat. But yeah, the initiative that. That's changed. But, you know, there's not a lot of things that there's. There's. It's not like you're going to bust a lot of skills to get initiative bonuses in this game.

Yeah, not in this game. I guess the main question that people have is, is this should. This is something that we should expect to see coming in future games or not.

Yeah, I think it is. I think it's clearer overall. I think it's easier to use overall. And. But, you know, does that mean that initiative bonuses or things like that are going to be handled exactly the same if, say we did a Redux edition of Rifts or something? Not that we're planning on doing a redux.

You heard it here first, guys.

News at 11.

Yeah, I said we're not.

But.

But yeah, it's.

We can edit that out.

No, the funny thing is, is I actually have people where I'm like, I'm. So there's some gamers that I game with. I'm like, hey, play. Play riffs. So I have some different people that I'm asking to do play testing for me, and I'm just like, hey, play riffs and use the redux and then tell me what you think. You know what I mean? Does it trivialize things? You know, I. I don't think so. I think that initiative bonuses, I mean, and sometimes when you've got especially Rift characters with initiative bonuses, if you've got initiative bonuses, usually we've got like mad initiative bonuses. So when it comes to that Quick Draw scene, it's going to be worth it for your character still. You know what I mean? But one of the things I added in this game too, though, is if someone just, you know, enacts sudden violence that's unexpected by everybody, they have initiative. I mean, that's kind of what initiative is supposed to be. Now, if everyone's like, you know, if it's like the Walking Dead and, you know, they're staring down these raiders and everyone's got their hands hovering toward their hip, yes, everyone's going to roll initiative, right? But if you're talking to the prince and someone suddenly stabs him, that guy's got initiative, right? So, you know, because he was palming a. A dagger or something, that guy. That guy's got initiative. And everyone else is probably now rolling. Right.

But.

But yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that, that. That we want to hear the feedback too. But. But yeah, it's. I think that's. In the end, though, like you said, with the surprise mechanics, I think this should all play out a lot more as Kevin intended it to be played.

Awesome.

You said you had a list.

What else?

Well, you covered several of them there.

Yeah.

You hit them all.

I think the last one, the only one that wasn't covered is they noticed a slight change to skill maximums. Looks like they top out at 96% instead of 98%.

95. 95.

Yeah. Sorry.

Sort of.

Sort of. Let me rephrase that. Failure is 96 or higher on a roll.

Yes. Which is important. So one thing I will say, and we actually have. This should be coming out soon. We have an official errata document that'll be free to download alongside the. The. The introductory adventure adventure, which could turn into this huge adventure by Sophie Campbell and Kevin. So those will be. That'll be releasing very soon. Just to clarify some of the wording. Some of the wording. I tried to keep some of the older wording and I shouldn't have, but basically, just so everyone out there Hears it. When you're rolling for anything, especially against like someone's armor rating, it's always, you know, you want to meet or beat that number. Everything's meter beat. It's all, you know, roll five or higher to successfully hit your opponent. Meter beat ar Right. If you're responding to someone else's attack, it's meter beat because you're the defender. Right. But it's instead of saying defenders win ties, it, you know, I'm trying to make sure that it's an easier paradigm for everybody to follow. And that seems to have been a very popular update.

Defenders no longer win ties.

Well, they do.

Oh, okay.

They do. It's just that you don't really need to say it anymore because of the way that you. You're saying the defender just needs to roll to meet or beat.

Gotcha.

When they roll their parry. Do you see what I'm saying? It's stuff that I think it's funny because language. I was also a linguist in the Air Force, a Chinese linguist. Language shifts over time. And so stuff that I think was clearer in the 80s and 90s is now confusing language to even the same people. And so I went with the more of the standard language you're going to see in popular TTRPGs today and just tabletop gaming. So the question about skills, that's a really interesting one because technically it doesn't matter what your skill is. You could have 120% in a skill,

but a 96 to 100 always fails.

Exactly. And you would say, well, why would you do that? Well, the point is, is in this book I also made it very clear again, this is something that Kevin did all the time and he would be shocked when people didn't do it. As a game master is the game master can impose bonuses or penalties to roles.

Situational penalties.

Yeah, yeah. And bonuses. Right. So and you know, you're trying to fix the car and you don't have any tools. Well, maybe I go through this in the book in the skill section. It's just a one page spread on the left. But it's like, yeah, well if you don't have a toolkit, you can't fix the car. Maybe you can't fix it without certain parts. It just depends. But if you have maybe bad access to an auto shop, you're going to get a massive bonus to that skill role. But the point is high level characters, their percentile could technically go over 100, especially with situational bonuses or tools and things like that. But a 96 to 100 always fails.

I think the question that people had was that it used to be 98 to 100 and also used to be hard cap too.

Well, exactly. Well, the thing is, before it wasn't as clear in the system, even if Kevin played it that way, it wasn't as clear that you should impose. The game Master should put and should impose bonuses or penalties to skill checks. That wasn't really clarified. I mean, Dead Rain had a section on penalties for in certain circumstances. And so I boiled a lot of that down into this section, but added most of it was about penalties. There wasn't any really think about buffs. So I put that in there too. But yeah, before Skills, just where they were, they were. And they capped at 98.

So now GM's companion. The GM's companion had a big. I think it was the Rift's GM's companion had a big section on skills, bonuses and penalties. And I remember reading that for the first time going, oh, of course. But I had been gaming and running other games from other systems that was all about bonuses and penalties. Situational that you would get.

Always made sense to me.

It always made sense, though. If you had never played any of those other games. The, as we call it, the Butts edition really didn't call that out.

Right.

It didn't really tell you about that. And if you'd played some of the other Palladium games, it just wasn't there. Had you ever sat down at Kevin's table? Oh yeah. You would have known immediately.

Right, Right, exactly. And so. And part of it is I. I've heard people say, like, you know, Kevin doesn't play rules as written. And it's like. Well, I think he plays it as he was trying to convey in his written rules. It's just that sometimes there maybe was a disconnect there. And later on he realizes, oh, people don't get this concept. So he puts it in, you know, in Dead Rain, the penalties for. If you just got. Saw your best friend get munched to death or whatever. Right. You know, or in the Risk game Master Guide, another. Another thing that is that, you know, he didn't know needed to be called out. And I hear people talk about, oh, Palladium. So silly. I went, my character drove to work and I rolled my pilot in his go roll and I died. And it's like. And it's like. So I added a thing in there that says at the very beginning of the Skills section, it's don't roll unless it's dramatically appropriate. Like you don't need the role to do everyday tasks. You know, if there's a semi that gets in a wreck in front of you on your way to work, then roll your piloting skill check. Right. So there's, there's just. Yeah, this is trying to clarify stuff like that for players, but also, you know, if you. You need to give more affordance around those concepts, too, to use a design term.

So, last question I have about the Redux. Any chance that they'll ever be released on PDF, the books themselves.

Contract right now. Okay. Yeah, it's not in our contract right now, so that is. I mean, we've heard people ask for it. So we are definitely going to continue to look at that as we have further discussions with Paramount. You know, there's a lot of stuff that goes into things. I, I saw people say all kinds of stuff and it's like, well, you know, I'm actually really proud of the, of the contract we got and we

don't have to go down it any further. I totally understand. And the contract work, as we said earlier, had to have been an entertaining exercise in patience and trying to control one's own, you know, aggravation with all the different parties involved. So it's amazing what was done.

A lot of saving throws there.

A lot of saving throws.

Well, I don't know. It's not. There's no, like automatic aggravation, just that it's. It's a big deal. Big contracts to protect big properties, as they should. I mean, that's what protects my properties. Right. I mean, so. And it needs to be done. Right. And the thing is, is the other thing is we were really focused on the physical product.

Absolutely. And that's. That's where you'd want to put your. Your focus. Yep.

We really wanted to hit the, the. As I said, we were coming up on this, we want to launch the Kickstarter this year. Timeline. And so for us, it was like, hey, let's. That was something that was like, well, let's not worry about that. Let's focus on all the cool stuff we can do. Because, I mean, I, I was surprised at what that, what they. A lot of things they were very cool about. Hey, we're nervous about this miniatures thing. Okay. You can do it as a Kickstarter exclusive. That was super cool of them. There's a lot of things that they did, they let us do that were super cool and, you know, and now they know. They've seen it. And people love the Min Minis and stuff. Right. And are blown Away by the minis. And so hey, our first foray into minis and the fans are happy. So that's great.

Why did we not get Baxter and the mousers?

I was just going to ask that. We want mousers. Baxter.

You know I wanted a lot of minis. Yeah. To be honest, I wanted a lot of minis. So it was interesting because minis are expensive. They are, yes.

Yes they are.

They are like so, so. And not just production. I mean we've got top notch industry artists to sculpt these miniatures and I think they did a fantastic job. I mean you can look at these minis and tell which pose from which comic they're out of. Right. And that's killer. Awesome. In fact, we had to. They're on these much larger than normal bases because they're in these crazy kung fu stances and stuff. The, the thing is, is there's also tooling costs and all this other stuff with these production and so there's a lot of these sunk costs. And so I wanted to do a lot of minis and unless, but, but, but then I. We weren't going to be able to sell them for the life of the product. That's why when you notice that we had a lot of stretch goals that would add a couple of miniatures and that's how I was able to get that. It was kind of funny because the minute the box sets of miniatures were kind of expensive before we got those stretch goals right. It was more like a boutique offering. But once we got the stretch goals, they're not bad. I think we're very competitive with the major mini box mini companies out there for what you got. Right. And how many were in the box and all that kind of thing.

I'll just say you did better than some.

Oh, I mean, I think we did pretty good. I used to work for Games Workshop. Yeah.

Yeah.

I toured the old North American headquarters, you know. Yeah, that's a weird story. They actually there was people from the Games Workshop HQ when I was a Games Workshop store manager that invited me to join the North American design team. Oh wow. And I didn't move because I didn't want to move to Baltimore. And then I got stationed right next to Baltimore when I was in the Air Force. But I was young and I didn't even really realize what my calling was at the time at all. But yeah, no, I think we did great with the miniatures and so. Yeah. And I hope we can do more with that in the future. I hope we can do more with, with PDFs of the books. But you know, at the same time, I hope people can just be happy that. I mean, Forbes wrote an article saying, holy crap, the Ninja Turtles role playing game is coming back from the original creators working with Paramount. So I mean, I think that's kind of a coup for us to be able to do that because other companies went after it. I mean, no one could get it. Apparently we talked to people because we talk to people. We talk to a lot of people we trust before we did anything. And everyone's like, turtle. You can't get turtles.

So anything else you want to talk about Turtles before we kind of jump into some other items there.

Do you guys like the new character sheet? Have you checked that out?

I don't think I have. I usually do all my characters by hand. Is it in the back of the book?

No, but it is a free download on our website.

No, then I haven't seen it.

Okay, yeah, check it out. But Jeremy and I worked hard on that one. Palladium used to do a lot of character sheets and we haven't for a while. And so that's one of the things I wanted to update and say, can we make a really usable character sheet? Because I want to use it too. Right. And then if we have we get this right. Do we do this for other games as we move down the road kind of thing. Is there anything else I want to talk about with turtles? Well, I just hope everybody knows that the game's out there. You can get it at your local shops. You can order it from our website. If your local shop is having a hard time getting it in stock, they can order direct from Palladium Books. So we have a great deal on that as well. So if your local hobby shop wants to talk to us directly, we can get them wholesale. Hookup. We actually had a lot of merchants, a lot of hobby shops that pre ordered that back to Kickstarter or pre ordered hobby shop bundles, which surprised a lot of people because they're like, oh, it's in the store and I haven't gotten my Kickstarter package yet. And it's like, well, actually if they have it in the store, they back the Kickstarter too, right?

Yeah, right.

And I've seen that on a lot of Kickstarters where there's the store entry and it's always. It's usually like the most expensive one because it comes with like 10 or 20 copies of everything and whatever. And I've. And I've run into that myself where people are like, how the Heck, they must be doing. It's like. No, they, they did the Kickstarter just like you did. They just were in order probably earlier. They're like, oh yeah. Really? Like, yeah, that's how that works.

But yeah, that's the big thing. The books are out there. So we've got the, the two books is our TMNT and Other Strangeness, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, another Strangeness Redux edition. And then that collects the original tmnt. It also has Turtles Go Hollywood and Trucking Turtles. So you've got a ton of adventure material in that book and great adventure material. I did a lot of elbow grease on. I mean I reviewed for these books. I reviewed, you know, every page, every paragraph. And so did Paramount, you know, proofreaders and galore. And there's still always. You find typos here and there, but it amazes me. But anyways, these books are out and that first collection is great. It actually is, I think. Was it 272 pages instead of 256 like we originally announced? Because we jammed all this extra content in it.

Yep, yep. You know what's funny is that folks who have not picked up these books, I gotta say, you know, Sean, you just said 272 pages. Now modern gamer today thinks 272 pages, that's a pretty slim tone tome. No, these are high quality pages. This, you cannot see through them.

That's pretty cool.

They're glossy. This book is thicker than you might expect a 272 page gaming book to, to be, folks.

Yeah, the pages I think are easy to navigate, but they're still dense. I've seen a lot of other companies where they, they do a lot of like huge headers and these different things and it's like really reduces their word count in the book. This is, these, these are still very chock full tones. You know it, you, you know, if another, another company did it, you might have. I say airy layout, but you know, it could, they could have boosted the page count by another 50 pages probably. But yeah, no, this is, there's, there's 10 mutant animals. Some that we promised in the Kickstarter, some that the community voted on. I added another 10 on top of that, we've got, I doubled the number of vehicles in the vehicle section. We've got modern equipment, so there's a lot of people that have. Oh, they're like, oh, I already have it. No, no, you don't have this book. Also I edit, I edited and reviewed all of the mutant animals. So before there were some mutant animals where you got like. Like bonus bioweed totals, essentially. So now that should be much more even. And it's more about what kind of abilities can you get. And all of that's been updated as well. So it's definitely not. Is not just a simple reprint. There's also extra characters. We have Karai from the original comics is in there, illustrated by Kevin Eastman. We have a bonus character for Rhetoric, the ferret bounty hunter. The second book, tmnt, it's Trans Dimensional Adventures. That one has the old Trans Dimensional TMNT book, which has time travel rules, dimensional travel rules, like sliders. It also has mutant dinosaurs and saber toothed tigers and stuff like that. And then that is paired with the TMNT Guide to the Galaxy, or Guide to the Universe, I think. And so it has the Triceratons and the Federation and all the crazy wacky aliens and space equipment and spaceships. And then it also has TMNT Adventures, which is. I think one of. Eric wrote some really great adventures in that book. The other thing that it has that none of the books technically had before there was the after the bomb material, which is a separate intellectual property. Right. So this book, I put in all the ground. It had the flying vehicle rules. I updated all those.

I put in the roadhog stuff.

Well, yes, yeah, but. And updated from Heroes Unlimited as well. And. And boats, there's boats are in there. It has the chase rules, updated out of Ninjas and Super Spies.

Nice.

And. And it has comprehensive vehicle construction and modification rules. So. And all of that's been updated by me. Now, the percentiles that you're going to see on the skill rolls should be true to the originals, you know, the old editions, because we wanted this to be a redux, not like a new edition. But it's very comprehensive in a way that I don't think you're going to see, that you can't find really, for Palladium, except for maybe Heroes Limited 2nd Edition, had a lot of these things, but not all of them. So. Yeah, I hope that people enjoy that because it was a labor of love and I had to make sure that it was comprehensive. I just couldn't help it. But those books are out. And there's the black, white and red editions. We also have the Game Master screen, which people are loving. I don't know if you guys got that.

I dig it.

I dig it.

Yeah, it's beautiful art.

Just full art on the front and then the back. You've got these sleeves. It's really easy to slot in any printed material you want. And it comes with four pre printed reference sheets and then the mutagen green dice are also available.

So moving beyond tmnt.

Yeah.

What do you want to talk about that you want us to share with everyone about what's coming up the next, you know, six, nine months, 12 months. You've already mentioned that Antarctica is actually going to happen, which is kind of exciting because I know there's a, we don't have to go into it here, but there's a long story with Antarctica because I think it was originally announced in, I want to say like 2012 or something like that. And then different things happened, but super excited for that. What else is going on with this little company that we all love called Palladium?

Well, first off, you know, I think that that happens a lot where there was, you know, Kevin would announce, oh, I really want to do this book. And so like for instance, it's funny like if you're like to, to you guys, it's like, well, what's Antarctica? I'm like me. I know we have a manuscript by Matt Clements which is really good. Kevin's already been working on his additions to it. We have all the art, we've done extra art for the stuff that Kevin wanted to add. We have the COVID I mean, right, like, like, like I'm, you know, no matter what happens, I'm sure we can get Antarctica to you guys now before Kevin does Antarctica, he wants, he wants to finish and he, you know, in our process he's going to be finishing Jenslot Expeditions because he. There was so much extra material free in Sloth Jungle 2nd Edition that it was going to turn into an over 300 page book. And I finally like Kevin, no problem. I mean it was like you've already done the work, we should split it out, you know, so that's so those so for on Kevin. Well, before I get into what he and I each have on our respective like kind of assembly lines because Palladium doesn't work like a lot of companies that the people. You can go to our website and we have a project status page. You can go on there and you can look and you can see the status of everything that's ever been announced. And if there's something we that we miss somehow email our help desk and we'll get it added. But I don't think there's anything big that we're missing, including with stuff that's been officially canceled, like the date it was canceled because what'll happen is you know, someone says, eric Wujik says, I want to write a UFO conspiracy game or whatever, right? And then he passed away. Okay, well, that book's canceled. There's other books. Like, there was a. I don't remember who it was. Wanted to write Mechanoid Space. And it was. And it was an author that had. Had, had done. Has produced a lot of stuff. Right. And then he came back to Kevin and said, I'm sorry. All my ideas, I realized, are really bad and I don't have anything. And so Kevin's like, okay. But, you know, that title was announced the other times. Other things happen. I mean, you know, people have lives. You know, they're. Something happens. Their wife, they get sick. I mean, all kinds of things can happen. Or, you know, we get a manuscript and it's just not up to snuff. Kevin does not just pump and dump stuff out there. You know, Palladium doesn't do that, and we never will. But that does mean that sometimes it's like. Like United Worlds of Warlock. Oh, I.

That.

That's when I saw that announcement. When it first came out, I was super excited because I'm a big Faze World fan, and I was. And then it went away, and I was like, wait, wait, what happened? I. And for a long time, I thought I just never bought it. And I realized, oh, you didn't miss it? I didn't miss it. Nope. It just went away.

There's. There's like literally a hole in the catalog number.

Yep.

It's crazy. And the World book number or the Dimension book number, I should say, you know, it's. And. And it's funny because, like, almost any of these titles, I love to write it, but, you know, what do I want to. What do we want to prioritize? So one of the things that we've come down with, and this was. This is funny because when I was work, you know, when I started writing professionally, the first company I wrote for was Pinnacle. I don't know if you guys know Jody Black. She's an amazing person. You know, she was like. She gave me the impression. She told me pretty straight up. She was like, you know, if you talk about anything before it's supposed to be announced, you know, we only talked about what's in development. Right. That is ready to be announced now. Later on, they were like, you're the line manager. Do what you want. If something's in production, you know, you can talk about it. Right? Oh, which is cool for the. For a while, you know, I. It was like, if you say anything out of line about any product coming out, I will break your fingers. You know, I knew that woman would break my fingers anyway. She's a wonderful person, though. But it's like, that's like that. That's like that. That's like the dangerous side of grandma. You know what I mean?

It's like, is that why I've met so many former Pinnacle employees who have fingers that look like they went through a mangler?

I don't know, because I've never heard of anyone talking about anything early.

And you never will.

But, no, that was one of the things when I. And at first, I was like, oh, that's kind of restrictive. But then I understood why. It's really tough. I mean, fans. Books take forever. And every book I've worked on, every book is a challenge and has its challenging aspects. And so, you know, fans can barely wait six months when something gets announced. And I get it. I've been a fan. I'm a fan, you know, and so one of the things that. When I joined Kevin at Palladium, I was just like, okay, we're not talking about the book unless it's the next thing. No more announcing any projects. We. Let's finish up with this giant backlog we have. And that's why I created that page on our website, was so the fans can go and see and get, you know, closure if they need it on United Worlds of Warlock or. Or something else or whatever needs to happen. And there's some of the books that are just on hold for one reason or another, you know, and then there's books that are, like, an active development. So in Palladium, you know, a lot of companies, what happens is you write the book. There's a writer. Well, they hire a writer, okay, to write a book, and then you write the book, and then this is. This happens. At Pinnacle, I would write rifts for Savage Worlds, and then we would have Sigil do the art. And that's how most companies work. And I don't think that's a terrible thing, but Kevin is an artist at heart. And so when we're working on a manuscript, we will often go and then engage an artist or artists to do the art for the book, and then we'll incorporate that art into the text. So when you see a robot vehicle or a monster, what you see is what you're getting in the rules. And I think that's something awesome about Pallad, that it does that a lot of other companies don't. Where, you know, other Companies, maybe in the past, you might be going through, and you. You see a cool illustration like, oh, what's that? It's not in the book. It was just a cool piece of art that they threw in there or something. So it's more collaborative, which means that you get these weird timelines, though, where it's like, oh, well, we're working on this. Okay. All the art's done, or the art isn't. You know what I mean? Or it's halfway done or whatever. For Kevin, he's working on finishing up Jensloth Expeditions, and then it's Antarctica, and then he wants to do the two beyond the Supernatural books, Tomes Grotesque, and. What is it? Why can't I think of the other book? It's. There's two books, Tomes Grotesque and Beyond Arcanum, which is like the magic book. Thank you. Tomes Grotesque, the big monster manual. And then Beyond Arcanum will be the magic side of beyond the Supernatural, and it'll tie. He wants to write them at the same time because they're supposed to intertwine, which makes sense for beyond the Supernatural. Right? Yeah.

You made a lot of my fellow BTS fans very, very happy with that news.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, the trick is, is, you know, it's kind of funny. Like I said, like, Turtles was such a massive project, and part of it was that, you know, sign the contract and all this stuff just happening. Normally. We have. I. When I do any. Any Kickstarters, it's like crowdfunders. I want to have manuscripts done in proofreading and editing and final updates. Art is mostly done. You know what I mean? I want to have it complete or near complete before I launch anything but that. You know, we kind of choked in on how big that project got with all the stretch goals and everything. And so, you know, we want to make sure, like, we're still working through a lot of administrative stuff. I guess we'd put it for that. And other projects and other things that are very exciting that I can't announce yet because we don't have a signed contract. But. Fair.

Fair.

Very exciting, though. Very exciting. But. So, yeah, there's stuff like that that's going on behind the scenes that is legitimately delaying Kevin finishing against Loth Expeditions. So just to throw that out there. And Kevin really is a wizard with. With negotiating and with contracts. He's really great. So. So that's Kevin's lineup, and then my lineup. I am finishing up Bestiary 2. That is my current. I mean, it's like, in Layout nice. Finishing monster entries. We had another writer that was working on it anyways, some health issues in his family. And so I'm taking that over to make sure we get it done. Yeah. But all the extra art for that is done. And so that is my current thing. Hope to finish as soon as I can.

Heck, yeah.

And then I know a lot of people are waiting for that. And then the other big thing is for me, the next one, which I was working on it and then I stepped over to finish Bestiary two. I was more like in the creative director role, I guess, on Bestiary 2. And now I'm stepping in to finish it. I am working on Chaos Earth first responders to get that done. So that was announced a while. While. While while back, of course. And so finishing that one up. That one's going to be fantastic. Really, really, really, really good art. The COVID art's fantastic. I don't know if you guys have seen it. We teased it. We have. And Stephen Cummings did basically all the interior art. And so I don't know if you guys know him, but he. He worked on Titan Robotics. He's done a bunch of different stuff for us, but he, you know, his. His day job is working on DC and Marvel and Image Comics. He did like the Mandalorian and Ahsoka comics for the Disney. Marvel Comics. So that. That. That's a really cool book that I think is going to be really exciting. I'm a. I'm a. I'm a Riffs Riffs fan. You know what I mean? I like. But also I'm like, how do I make this? I always wanted a book that was like, hey, this is also a source book for Riffs, mainline Riffs. So I want to make sure that it has lots of information about the types of caches you might find or what were the common things you might find in relic salvage operations and stuff like that. So I think it'll be a really great book. And if you just want to have some really cool Chaos Earth tech that's like golden age of technology tech that, you know, you just, you know, found everywhere in riffs. Right. So I think it'd be really cool stuff for. For all kinds of Rifts players. But I. Chaos Earth's a really great setting. So it's. It's a really cool book. So I think it'd be really neat. And then after that, who knows? I know I have ideas. I have some things that are getting negotiated and different things, but. And different things that I have that I want to do. But, yeah, that's the stuff we can announce. That's already been announced, I should say. I'm just finishing it up.

Well, that is quite the list of fun upcoming things to be looking forward to. I think all three of us would have our own little what about XYZ things. But we're gonna bite our tongues. As the recon guy, I'm just bit through mine.

Hey, I love. I. You know the funny thing? I've never played Recon. Oh. I love the idea, though. Oh, right. Just as a tabletop wargamer. And I love skirmish war games.

Huh.

Well, I probably shouldn't say anything.

No, no, don't, don't, don't, don't.

Put this way. I would love to rewrite, to, like, do a new. A new digital addition to Recon, but, like, in Core Palladium Rules. Yeah, right. Yep.

I, I, I've tinkered slash, pretty much done that of myself just for Homebrew to expand an ad and take the directions that happened with the deluxe Recon and move it forward. So, yeah, yeah, I, we won't talk anymore about that because I know how my fellow Recon heads get in the comments, and we love you.

Yes. And so, you know, that's the thing. One of the things that Kevin and I are trying to balance is we don't want to be distracted by licenses unless it's the right license, like turtles, especially since Kevin was the first licensed product and that's such a legendary game. And the number one thing people ask us about when we meet anyone, anywhere there's a Palladium fan, that was huge. Right. And as you know, for me personally, it was massive to be able to work on that. I've met Kevin Eastman, and, you know, he and Peter Laird collaborated, do the special edition covers. I mean, it's just like it's a dream come true. As a fanboy, we don't want to be distracted by that stuff because we have so many great IPs that we own. Like, you know, the Recon. I mean, by itself, that could be a very successful product line again, you know what I mean? We just need. So we're just, we are trying to make sure we don't get too distracted with other stuff and focus on. On supporting our core stuff and building that out. We'd really like to see at some point. I'd love to do Faze World as, like, a core book. That's just, you know, because it's become so popular.

Thank God. That would be fantastic. I think we were just talking about that the other day.

Yep, yep. I did not announce a book title. I'm just saying.

So on the 8th of March, that's

what Kevin's going to announce at the gathering.

So. So we will describe that as Sean's aspirational wish list rather than any. Any announcement.

I'd love to do that. I'd love to do. I'd love to do Mechanoid Space, and I would love to do Recon. So, you know, if that. You know, I love this stuff too. Right. The other thing I'll say is that, well, you know, I don't know, there's a lot of cool stuff out there, so, you know, there's a lot of things we want to do. Oh, I'll throw this out there. Brandon Verhalen, Staranvil Studios. They are doing a. For the listeners who like riffs for the Savage Worlds game system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is. Very soon. I don't think he has an exact date yet, but it's in the next few months. Next couple months, maybe weeks away. A Savage Phase World.

Yeah, I've been following that. And Brandon, I met him a number of years ago at one of the Palladium open houses.

Yes.

You know, another call out to the thing that may not happen, but we hope we will. Met some great people.

You know, it's just, It's. It's. I understand prioritization. Right.

And I know he's been. I've been on his Discord channel, and he's super excited. I know they had a scheduling. We'll say scheduling thing, and so it got pushed out a little bit, which is great. It gives more time to work on the product, and I'm super excited. I know there's a bunch of us that are super excited to see that.

Yeah, that one's interesting, too, because there's a lot of stuff that Kevin and I have already discussed that we want to do with Faze World and different updates and things we want to bring to the timeline on it. Because Phase World's not like in riffs. It starts the original core book was 101pa, and then it kind of march forward 102, 105. But with Faze World, with the Savage Phase World, it is kind of jumping forward a little bit in the timeline, and there's certain things that we wanted to update. And, you know, we're taking a hard look at a lot of different little things. So it's. As with the Rift or Savage World stuff, everything in that, you know, in his books is going to be canon. So I think it's a. But. But it's interesting because, you know, it went. There will be differences and there will be updates and there will be new things, but it's all intentional and stuff that Kevin and I have wanted to get around to. You know what I mean? But it's like, hey, if Brandon's going to do this, I think that's a big value add for a lot of the fans.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, I'm really excited about it.

I've talked to people who run Savage Worlds and they're like, yeah, I ended up buying all the Palladium Savage or Palladium Rifts games because I use them as resource material and it's like, cool. Exactly.

Yep. You know, it's crazy. You know, the books were originally intended that way. It's. It's funny because I hear some people say, oh, it doesn't have the depth of the Palladium books. It's like, well, because it's not trying to replace the Palladium books. It's, you know, in fact, when I. When I would write the books, because I did the second edition update for everything and then I wrote multiple books in the line and, you know, at the beginning of Atlantis, the Demon Seas, very first page, it has a sidebar. Boom. These are the Palladium source books. This is derived from. If you like this stuff, go check out those books. But yeah, at the same time, those books, like the Land of a Thousand Islands, the South America book, it updates everything in Rifts for Savage Worlds is 109pa. Yeah. Mid 109pa. So it updates the timeline on stuff that hasn't been updated. And so that's cool, too, for the Rifts Lore fans is. I've heard of Palladium players that just buy the Savage Rift stuff for the art and the. The adventure material and the Lore updates. So it's. It's cool when you can get both those things.

Okay. Well, I think unless you have any other big bombs you want to drop on us, we probably have soaked everything we can out of you.

Yeah.

And I. I commend your discipline.

Yes.

On not doing that. I'm a little disappointed by it, but I commend your discipline at the same time.

Oh, man. Yeah. No, I appreciate it. I'm doing my best.

Well, then I think we're good to close on this episode again. Sean, thank you for joining us. We always appreciate having you here. We love the fact that we get to see that the enthusiasm we have for Palladium and Palladium products is held as deeply by the people who run the company because it gives us a sense that, yeah, it might have been 40 years, but the future is looking really, really bright and that the future is in good hands.

Yeah, I'll drink to that.

Thanks. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. It's a great time to be a Rift fan. It's a great time to be a Faze World fan. It's a great time to be a then TMNT and other Strangeness fans. So we're really excited everything that Kevin and I are working on and we're just trying to make the best books we can and we hope that everybody appreciates that.

Thank you again for joining us, Sean

and folks listening at home. We'll catch you next time.

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 support my work as your 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 Books fan podcast. Glitter Boys, Rifts, the Megaverse and all other such topics are the property of Kevin Sambida 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 Caravano 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 theglitterboiz. That's B O I S and check us out [email protected] glitterboys 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.