#197 – The BIO-E System

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So we're talking about After the Bomb and we're talking about the main component of character creation, which is the Bio-E component. It's how you take a turtle, a pet turtle, and turn it into an anthropomorphic smartass teenager who can kick ass. It scales up and down. And I was just like, wow, this was awesome. And this was written in 1986.

Yeah. The Bio-E system specifically was, yes.

Yeah. Or 84, 85, somewhere in there.

It's Palladium's take on point buying. And I think it's very elegant. It fits in very well with the way that Palladium system works. It's based upon a combination of things such as your creature, your animal's size, your whether or not you want psionics, which we didn't even talk about psionics because psionics in After the Bomb are pretty cool. So we'll have some side notes on that in a second, but Yeah, it's, it's this nice, very simple, very easy to figure out series of 5-point steps. So you go up and down in your growth and every, every stage of growth you go up is either plus or minus 5 points of BIOE. It all starts with your animal. Different animals of different sizes have different amounts of BIOEs. It's, it's largely about size, but there's some other factors that come into play, like some of the special abilities they may start with.

Okay.

For example, let's look at the chicken. Standard chicken starts at size level 3. Now size level 3 is a weight of up to 10 pounds kind of thing. You're fairly small.

That's a big chicken.

Yeah.

Just so you know.

Size goes up to 25 with a weight of 100,000 pounds. All right. So size 3, size level 3, you are a length of 8 to 12 inches and a weight of 4 to 10 pounds as a domesticated chicken. You get 65 BIOE. Which is pretty cool, right?

Right.

That's a lot of points to buy extra stuff with. And that can buy special abilities. There's some abilities that only the chicken can buy, but then there's also some abilities that all animals can buy, traits, powers. Like this is very similar to what we've seen in games since that go with like edges and flaws or merits and flaws kind of stuff. It's the same thing here. Now, if you want to get bigger, let's say I want to be a big chicken. I could just flip over and play my favorite chicken, the Allosauroid, which has a size level of 16 at start, which means at 16 it's fucking huge. But it, it only gets a bio of 20. However, let's say I want to make my chicken, my normal chicken, that's size level 3. I want to make that chicken size level 16. At 16, that Allosauroid weighs 600 pounds. Now I want my non-dinosaur chicken to weigh 600 pounds. So in order to do that, I need to do 3. So 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. Yeah, yeah, I need 13, 13 steps. So 13 times 5.

60.

I can just barely do it. Yep. So spend all of my bio-E. But now I'm a 600-pound chicken.

Right. Which, which comes with your strength goes up by 10, your PE goes up by 8, your speed goes down, but your SDC goes up. So like you get something for that. You spend all your points on being this massive domesticated chicken. You know, you have chicken T-Rex coming at you, but you have no hands. You can't talk. You know, you're a chicken that's massive in size.

We haven't talked about hands yet.

Right. So It's like, well, okay, I'm this chicken. I want to be able to use something. So I knock my size back a couple of points, right? And I buy hands for 5 bio-e. Or I want to talk. So I get partial talk, partial speech for 5 points. So I have partial hands and partial speech. Okay, now I'm a size 14 chicken, maybe 15.

I'm nearly 400 pounds. I'll still—

I'm a big fucking chicken. I mean, like, geez.

Or you can do the one that I was notorious for doing when I was just trolling other people's games when I was in that phase of my life, taking an elephant. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Which has one of the largest, I know in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles it was the largest.

Yeah, it's a size 20.

It's a size 20. And shrinking that down to a size level 1.

And this, I don't know if you can anymore because they have—

I think they finally took it out, but in TMNT you could.

Oh, it doesn't have a minimum.

Oh, it doesn't. Yeah. So shrinking it down to 1, not taking any modifications such as human appearance, walking upright, Hands, speech, and just running the table with all your abilities on, on special abilities.

As a side note, in our 100th and 101st episode of this podcast, we had Bassam and Cranny from the Turtle Power Pod as guests. We made, we made characters. It was Matthew, Bassam, and Cranny made 3 elephants, elephant mutants based in Portland. And they based their characters off— this is for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not After the Bomb.

Right.

But they base their characters off of the 3 Tenors.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

We never did get to play that game because I just don't think I have the chops to run a Ninja Turtles game. So we'd have to find somebody else.

The, um, one aspect in here that's, that's kind of thrown into the elephant because you happen to speak it up. You can also sacrifice IQ, ME, and PP or speed attributes to get extra bio-e. So you can kind of make yourself stupider, less mentally equipped and You know, less agile to tweak it. The whole elephant game was definitely like the big size creatures and shrinking them down for more bio-e because the elephants start with none.

Right.

Right. It's so big and so powerful. You don't get any modifications. You're an elephant. Yep. You're an intelligent elephant.

That's it. Unless you want to be nearsighted, colorblindness with a vestigial tail, musk glands, right? An herbivore diet, ruminant diet and vestigial horns.

Right.

If you want to take all of that, you can get 10, 20, 30, 40, you can get 45 bio-e.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A size 20.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Then you could pick up some arms, maybe some bipedal, you know, and, and, you know, your, your tusks don't do any damage unless of course you take the natural weapon. So you have these big tusks you can't do anything with. It has built into each animal, you have their normal things they can do like that with your bio-e, you have some disadvantages so you can tweak it. You have, You have your flaws and merits, merits and advantages, flaws and disadvantages, whatever you want to call them. And you can tweak each animal pretty uniquely.

Right.

So no 2 elephants, no 2 chickens, no 2 octopi will be the same after they go through character creation, just even ignoring the random rolls, right? Because you can really tweak them how you like. For me, any system that does points, if I always want more points, I think it's doing it the right way.

Right.

Right.

I always want a few more points. I just want to—

Yeah. So we have mentioned this, but we haven't really gone into it. You have to buy your hands.

Yep.

You have to buy your stance.

Yep.

You have to buy your talk. You have to buy your human looks. Right. And that includes Even like partial, like, yep.

Right. Yeah.

And like, if you don't buy it, you look like a fucking animal. Right. If you want to look like a human with an animal head, you have to buy that. Right. Yeah.

Right. Very few animals, uh, the ones that make sense, like monkeys, you know, they automatically get partial hands and partial biped. Well, they're a monkey. Come on. Right.

So yeah, some of the species like the chicken, automatic biped, right. They get it for free. So, hey, that's pretty cool.

They have no hands then.

No hands.

Right.

And then you get chicken hand.

Chicken hand. Chicken hand.

I would, so you get like a, there are options actually in here. It breaks it down for winged creatures to get flight. Because if you, you don't automatically get it.

Nope.

Unless you buy it. Now, if you are a winged creature that doesn't also have arms, you can buy wing hands.

Yeah.

Which are like, you know, the ones that appear at the apex of the wing.

Like the pterodactyl hand. The pterodactyl hand.

And they have rules for how to use them. They're less dexterous. but they're also small, can get into small places.

Right.

Less strong, but then you have wing hands and that's pretty cool.

Yeah. You don't have the extra set of arms basically.

Yeah.

There's, it's the bio-e system really goes into a lot of depth without overwhelming you.

Right.

Because you can, it compartmentalizes down to your creature. And then what's interesting is You can go through and go, oh, there's some extra stuff here that you can use to tweak your character a little bit.

Such as psionics.

Such as psionics. So you can go, hey, I want to be a mutant monster chicken who has telepathy. I'm not going to take speech. I'm going to talk into your brain.

This, this is my favorite psionics in Palladium. The way that the Ninja Turtles and After the Bomb does psionics, I love it because you don't have to think about it.

No.

You don't have to count points.

Nope.

You don't run out of power. You just have the abilities and you can use them as often as once around.

Yep.

It's wonderful.

Yeah. It's—

yep.

And it fits with the theme of the Ninja Turtles and After the Bomb and Mutant Animals, you know, It keeps it very simple and streamlined. Um, you— and there's not all of the psionics that you might be used to in other Palladium games, which is fine. You don't need them.

Yeah.

Um, but you could, like, you could build a character who's just a giant elephant or a giant chicken and have telepathy and have an ectoplasmic hand. So you have the same ability, and guess what? It costs you basically the same amount of points. than it would if you took regular hands and a regular speech, or pretty close, right? So from a role-playing aspect, that's fascinating. You can like, you're like, no, I'm gonna be a chicken. I'm gonna be a regular pet chicken who got mutated and run around and everyone just thinks I'm a chicken. And then I'm gonna talk to your brain and I'm gonna use my little ectoplasmic hand to move shit around, right?

Mm-hmm.

Like a cool concept.

It's a solid system. Oh, very solid. I think it is driftable to pretty much any of the Palladium games too. Like you can take any of the things, you can take OCCs and look at their powers and break them down into how much would this cost if I were to instead make this a Bio-E ability, right? You can convert pretty much all of the Palladium universe to a Bio-E system and make a build a character, build a class.

And to a limited extent, if you own the After the Bomb 2nd Edition, there's actually a rule set in there for doing that conversion.

Nice.

To a limited extent.

Uh, I've, so many people have gone out and said, I'm going to make Rifts point-based and I'm going to base it off insert system that's out there. And I'm like, hmm. Or like you just said, you could make it a BioE system.

Yep.

And it's 5-point swings.

5-point swings.

Right. Like, and it's not perfectly balanced. And that's the thing I think people get hung up on is that it all has to be perfectly balanced. And it's like, no, within 5, 10, 15, that range, you can kind of tell, like, it's, if it's a 15-point buy, it's probably pretty badass. Right. Like, yeah, pretty badass.

And if it's a 25-point buy, psionic claws.

Right. Right.

Yeah.

Like the alligator, the 30-point buy, you have heavy natural body armor, your AR is 14, and you have an extra 60 SDC. That's pretty hefty.

That's pretty hefty, right?

That's really hefty.

So especially since we're playing in a system with no MDC, right?

Right. And as we were talking about before, uh, in other, in other, in other podcasts, some of the stuff in this setting, if it has an AR of 18, that's godlike.

Yeah.

So AR 14 is pretty good. Yeah. Great.

So to be fair, you do get more bonuses in this version than you do in the original.

Yes.

Yep.

But it's still not as out there as you could get in something like Rift.

Right.

And also your stats are much more human.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Converting to Bio-E seems like the way to go because you can just ballpark everything. Right. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 points, you know, something like that. Something more heinous to give it like a 60-point thing. I mean, and the basis of comparison is, is right here. Right, right, right.

You can go through, they have mutant humans or human mutants with a huge list of mutant powers and vestigial disadvantages. So you can basically look at like every race. You could use this as your cornerstone to build elves, dwarves, you know, wolven. Well, I mean, wolven's basically a mutated wolf. I mean, big deal, right? Um, you know, so you could build all those different creatures out of this with these references, uh, and, and get some really crazy stuff. Um, it's funny, the example in the, the write-up when they're talking about, you know, spending your bio-e is a moose.

Yep.

And you're like, I never considered most of the time having a big mutant moose, but that—

They're fucking huge.

They're huge and they're terrifying. Like, I've seen moose in real life and they're terrifying, you know?

I got stuck on a highway in northern Maine on a road trip after high school. It was a moose. It was in the middle of the highway. It was just a 2-lane highway. There's a moose in the middle of the highway and nobody was going to fuck with it.

Nope.

And it just stood there and like it would— it had that thing where it was just chewing something and it turned and it just looks right at you. The fuck you going to do about it?

Right.

And now imagine that moose. Stands up on its hind legs and walks across the road.

Like, I have seen a bull moose destroy, um, a Geo Metro. Oh yeah, yeah. In 2 seconds, literally. Yeah, like, it shoved the engine block through the bottom of the frame. And I have also seen a bull moose get hit by a Buick Skylark, get up and walk away. Not run away, walk away.

Galavant.

Have you seen that moose then A little ectoplasmic hand puts a cigarette in its mouth and another ectoplasmic hand comes and lights that cigarette and it blows out. Wise guy.

I have not seen that.

And that's only 5 bio— well, that's only 5 bio-e to buy your ectoplasmic hands.

Um, yeah, it's— these are cheap.

Yeah, no. Uh, so we, we look at this system and you look at creating your creatures. And if you want to build anything, it's just all right here.

Right.

Within the setting itself, you have these great options of all your different creatures. You have different examples. They went through a lot of work, more wild animals than you ever would ever want. And some you probably don't. I just was flipping through to the rabbit, the pleasure bunnies, purebreds. Like, okay. So it just flows really nicely. I don't know if I've seen any other game that has a mutant animal section that is easy to just kind of just go with. Like just, just, oh, okay. There's a couple of points here and there. Click, click, click. And now you have your mutant insert animal.

As someone who played a lot of various editions of Gamma World, which is the other big mutant animal system. that people may or may not be familiar with. It is worlds easier under Palladium and far more thought out.

Absolutely. I would, I would use this to do Mutant Year Zero.

Yeah.

I bounced off that game.

Oh, I bounced off that game hard.

I actually really liked the Year Zero engine, but I don't like Mutant Year Zero. It just didn't feel right. I don't, I just didn't feel like your skills, your abilities were high and it felt like you failed at everything. Like you could make a character that was tailored towards being awesome and failed to be awesome every single time. It was a little, little janky.

And it was, uh, I, I've never played the game.

It's a post-apocalyptic game from Free League. They did Alien and Chorus and, uh, the recent One Ring remake. Anyway. It, the Year Zero engine is based off of, Tales from the Loop is another one that was in that. Anyway, you roll a bunch of d6s and the only, the only, you roll like 2 to 5 d6s and you need to get a 6, a minimum. Each die with a 6 on it is a success.

Right.

Which means you fail a lot.

Right.

It wants you to fail because then you have to spend a resource to push it and then try again. But you start to run out of resources and then I bounced off of that hard.

Got it.

But I really liked the concepts behind the setting. I liked the whole building your ark, your settlement that was built into that setting. I would love to do something like that in After the Bomb.

And if you are someone like me and NPC and Buckley here, who is known to do our own homebrew hack systems and such, highly, highly, highly recommend you take a look at this. There's so much here to crib. Like, I have been cribbing from BioE for a project of mine underway, uh, a riff on Valley of the Pharaohs because it literally gave me out of the box a solution to a whole bunch of problems.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then there's enough, uh, creatures here with the hybrids and the chimeras that you could mix and match things if you want your own stuff. Goat spiders, because, you know, spider goats are a thing that should happen, right?

I'm going to give a shout out to Real Play Games Podcast. They do actual play of several games, but mostly Palladium. And they've done After the Bomb. They've done Beyond the Supernatural. Now their Beyond the Supernatural game is fucking adorable because they call it the Cozy Caverns Mysteries. It's like, it's like cozy beyond the supernatural. It's really neat. Anyway, they've done a bunch of things, but their, their After the Bomb stuff is really good and they have their own custom chimera in it. Somebody plays something called a frack rat, which is a frog rat. Yep.

All right.

It's a good story. It's a good game. It's a lot of fun. He plays a little fast and loose with the Palladium rules, but you know what? All of us do.

All of us do.

Rules as written, I try to say very frequently in Palladium because which book and which thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So also they fail forward a lot and I appreciate that.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, um, that's, uh, Bio-E, I think.

Bio-E. Yeah.

It's, it's a great system that you can drop into any of the Palladium games. Um, and you're like, I want a creature.

for this.

Cool. Flip this book open and just go to town.

Well, seriously, you could just flip this book open. You can go to the back, you can go to the random generation of a creature, of a mutant animal in the back. If you just want a one-shot mutant animal. And then, you know, you want to tweak it a little bit, just a little bit. You don't want to go through full character creation, right? But you want some interesting mutant animal. Well, you've already rolled the one up from the like 3 tables in the back of the book. Just spin a couple of bio-E here and there. Right. You know, Drop its looks, give it, uh, give it a lisp or something, but give it like, you know, some ectoplasmic hands. Yeah, exactly. And suddenly you've got something much more interesting than you had previously.

Yeah.

You could use this for aliens. You could use this for, you know, mutated things. What was that you were talking about? Um, the other one with mutants.

Gamma World.

Yeah.

Gamma World.

You could use this for Fallout. You could use this for all kinds of things. This is a very versatile book. We didn't actually say that in our last episode when we were like, do you need this? If you're going to play anything that can be tweaked, that can, that can feel a little bit more personalized with the application of a plus minus 5 BIOE purchase here and there.

Yeah.

You need this book.

Yeah. Yeah. It becomes a really good resource.

Yeah.

Yep. And the BIOE system can become the backbone of anything you want to change.

You can put the BIOE on anything. It doesn't even have to be mutant animals. Yep.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. And they give you, and you're like, I don't know, how do I put it on X? Odds are it has something in here that's close enough to X that you could use as your template. So.

Well, that's BioE in a nutshell. Palladium's homebrew, Palladium's homegrown point buy system that's only present strangely in one of their major lines. Yeah. Hmm. Weird. I mean, Heroes has it, but it's again, it's just copy paste and it's only for mutant animals. Right. It could, it could, they could do so much more with it. They could. Well, Ninja Turtles making its comeback.

Yeah.

We'll see what they do with that. Absolutely. Perhaps this could be a renaissance for Bio-E and Palladium. That'd be pretty cool.

That'd be very cool.

Now I'm just waiting for it to show up in your next game, Nathaniel.

At some point, maybe, maybe. That said, I do want to extend an offer, no, a suggestion to the community who listens to this. This is something that we've done a couple of times in the past, and I would really enjoy doing it again. And this discussion of the after the bomb stuff has gotten it back into my head because back when we had a presence on Twitter, before I decided to abandon that website, We had some people that would communicate with us on there and share some characters occasionally. They would just roll up a character and share that character with us. Then we thought it would be really fun to do a dive into that character. Just look at that rolled up character and do an episode talking about what's interesting about this character, how you would play this character, why this character, even if they have subpar whatever, could be cool.

Just us.

An episode about your character. So here's what I, here's what I propose, dear listener. Pick up your favorite Palladium game, roll up a brand new character, roll it by the numbers down the line, follow the rules as best you can. Don't come up with much of anything else except for maybe like, maybe a small explanation of why you chose skill X or ability Y. Roll up a character, share it with us, and we'll do our best to make an episode just on that character, talking about what makes it cool and what makes it work in the Palladium system. Y'all, do you guys, you guys like this idea?

Yeah, I like this. Uh, let us know what system.

Oh, well, definitely. It's from.

So we don't have to discern that from the entrails of your character.

Yeah.

Maybe even make a, uh, uh, Palladium sub-Discord channel where people can just post their characters.

It's almost like we have a Palladium channel in our Discord.

Well, I mean, one just for characters.

Oh, for characters. That's a good idea.

Just for characters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll do that.

Oh no, we do have a Palladium one.

Weirdly enough, we technically have 2.

Yep. Yep. Yep. So yeah. Thanks folks. Thanks for listening. Uh, share your characters with us. Drop by Discord, tell us your favorite stories of after the bomb and the bio-e system, and we'll catch you next time.

Have a good one.

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 you're supporting Breakfast Puppies. And it's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Have a good one! Thank you!

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