The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Palladium is like one of those diseases that you get when you'e a kid, like chicken pox, or measles. You get it once, have it for a while, and then you grow out of it, or heal up. In the case of chicken pox, it leaves behind scars if you happen to scratch it; in the case of Palladium, it leaves you with money that you should have spent on something else.

Thus my old collection of Palladium products. The first, I think, was the Robotech role-playing game, which wasn't bad, followed up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was actually okay. From there, it was a short slide into RIFTS, which is where my enthusiasm for Palladium's products swiftly ended. I'll save my excoriation of that system and its marching army of flaws for when I do my review of Vampire Kingdoms, but the net result was that I was able to sell off most of my Palladium stuff to Titan Games, in exchange for some White Wolf stuff. One of the items left over from the purge was Road Hogs, which I kept around just for the sheer mutant joy of it.

What's it about? It's part of Palladium's After the Bomb series, an alternate setting for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; after nuclear weapons have destroyed modern society, mutant animals have evolved in massive numbers, and pretty much rule the ruins. The first book in the series, After the Bomb, detailed the East Coast of America, where mutant animals wage war against the genocidal Empire of Humanity. Road Hogs picks up on the West Coast, where mutant animals rule the road, and the Road Hogs - an enormous army of belligerent mutant animals - threaten the benevolent Americorp empires. Standing in their way are the Highway Patrol, secret ninja societies and an assortment of bike gangs who aren't interested in seeing their homes buried under a flood of malevolent, stinky mutant animals.

But, while this all may sound really cool, the ideas bouncing around in your head right now are probably a lot more interesting than the contents of Road Hogs. The majority of the book focuses on rules for playing vehicle-to-vehicle combat, building your own combat vehicle from scratch, and randomly generating highways to drive on. The setting itself, while barely satisfactory, really pales in comparison to innovations in setting that are now some ten years old. The major states in the Road Hogs universe are described in the most general terms - New Americorp, the good guys of the setting, get a grand total of three paragraphs dedicated to it. That's just about it - plus the State Troopers, which is basically just a character template for those interested. The Road Hogs have almost nothing in the way of motivation. They're being backed by the Empire of Humanity, they're the most fierce gang out there, they're going to try another attack soon, but that's just about all there is. Some of the concepts are interesting, like the Stainless Steel Stallions, or a prairie dog empire whose residents follow the Mormon way of life, but they're hardly followed up on.

What's especially tragic about this is how interesting the whole setting could have been. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the original RPG - pointed out, animals have been used as surrogate humans for a long time, especially to comment on human society. Road Hogs just lets it drop and roll around on the floor, content to let the GM do any major work involved with fleshing things out. And there's tons of wasted, useless space in here, especially in giving out character stats for personalities that have no chance of having anything to do with the game itself. I can almost guarantee that you'll never need the stats for the President of La Segunda Pregunta; but they're provided. The only stats that I could possibly see needing the stats for are the leader of the Road Hogs, but they're nothing that a GM couldn't make up themselves. I don't understand the focus on characters in the place of setting; and while Eric Wucjik is, usually, an excellent author, I'd say that this is poor work from him.

The rules themselves suffer from the typical Palladium system, which is to say that it's a lot like AD&D's bastard love child. What's especially annoying is the addition of a bunch of new skills to replace the old Drive skill - instead of having a generic Drive skill, you now have about a dozen different versions of Pilot, one for each type of vehicle, plus one for Vehicle to Vehicle Combat, Automotive Mechanics, Automotive Armor and Weapons, and, in a classic example of using a skill where a simple attribute check will do, there's even a Map Reading skill. There's two major flaws with these new skills. The first is that characters from the old system, with basic TMNT, won't be compatible with Road Hogs; you'll either need to bring them up to a level where they can acquire a few of those skills, or simply split up their Drive skill into appropriate levels of the new skill. The book doesn't offer any suggestions. There's also the issue that there shouldn't be a seperate skill for vehicle to vehicle combat - why not just use your Drive skill instead?

The book also suggests that you can bring the skill percentage of Vehicle to Vehicle combat over 100%, to compensate for various penalties assessed when performing high-speed manuevers, or when going over rough surfaces. Unfortunately, thanks to Palladium's rigid lockstep skill-advancement system - where every skill goes up by a few points every time that you go up a level - there's little chance that anybody will be able to go up over 100% without playing the game for some fifty years. Contrast this to White Wolf, where it's easy to get an expert pilot in exchange for skill in other areas, or extra backgrounds, or what have you. It's unfortunate that Wucjik left this dangling; even for 1986, this isn't a great system.

The driving system itself is okay, but it isn't something that kept me up nights coming up with scenarios. While the rules are surely functional, and there's a lot of neat whizbang gizmos to tack onto your vehicle - nothing really crazy, but there's a solid array of weapons and assorted doodads, like flashing police lights, bucket seats, pressurized cabins and oil slicks. The system itself determines speed by "speed classes", which are used mostly for determining checks against a skill to see if you wipe out - as the book wisely suggests, vehicle combat should be kept abstract, with the cars either neck in neck, too far away from each other or one behind the other. (This doesn't account for multiple-car chases, but it's not a major flaw.) Vehicle combat is treated just like regular combat, with some fancy manuvers thrown in that only cars can do - you can block, you can swerve, you can do a bootlegger's turn. Vehicle to vehicle combat only takes up a single attack, so you can swerve across somebody's path and shoot somebody with a sawed-off shotgun at the same time; it's a nice touch, although a tad unrealistic. TMNT has never taken a firm stance on realism vs. cinematic action, so I couldn't tell if you if it's in the style of the game or not.

There's also new animal templates, including aquatic animals - squids, whales, dolphins and such. This is in addition to a lot of Southwestern animals, including the roadrunner, the prarie dog, the buffalo, and so on and so forth. It'll be a handy addition to the hardy TMNT GMs who have survived thus far. Finishing it all off is a short comic by Wujcik, Siembieda, and Carpenter, revealing that at least one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has survived, and is still as lethal as ever. (The original comic book series had the TMNT killing Shredder, a far cry from the Smurfs with lethal weapons on the television show and subsequent films.) There's also a trio of substandard adventures, one dealing with an infiltration of the Road Hogs, another dealing with a mail run that's a handy excuse for vehicular combat, and another neat tribute to the Magnificent Seven that doesn't manage to fully cohere.

Is it worth buying? I'd say no. If you really need vehicle combat rules, I'd suggest buying Car Wars, or another game that features vehicle-to-vehicle combat - I understand that Car Wars is awfully complicated - but the net result is that Road Hogs just doesn't have enough meat on its bones to justify purchase. It's too bad, because there's a lot of stuff here that could have made for a brilliant campaign setting. It's just not given enough attention to truly shine.

-Darren MacLennann

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

TMNT: Road Hogs
Author: Eric Wucjik Category: game Company/Publisher: Palladium Games Line: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and other strangeness Cost: $5 -10? Page count: 46 ISBN: 0-916211-20-7 Capsule Review by Darren MacLennan on 05/21/00. Genre tags: Science_fiction Far_Future Comedy Anime Espionage Post-apocalypse Old_West	Palladium is like one of those diseases that you get when you'e a kid, like chicken pox, or measles. You get it once, have it for a while, and then you grow out of it, or heal up. In the case of chicken pox, it leaves behind scars if you happen to scratch it; in the case of Palladium, it leaves you with money that you should have spent on something else. Thus my old collection of Palladium products. The first, I think, was the Robotech role-playing game, which wasn't bad, followed up with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was actually okay. From there, it was a short slide into RIFTS, which is where my enthusiasm for Palladium's products swiftly ended. I'll save my excoriation of that system and its marching army of flaws for when I do my review of Vampire Kingdoms, but the net result was that I was able to sell off most of my Palladium stuff to Titan Games, in exchange for some White Wolf stuff. One of the items left over from the purge was Road Hogs, which I kept around just for the sheer mutant joy of it. What's it about? It's part of Palladium's After the Bomb series, an alternate setting for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; after nuclear weapons have destroyed modern society, mutant animals have evolved in massive numbers, and pretty much rule the ruins. The first book in the series, After the Bomb, detailed the East Coast of America, where mutant animals wage war against the genocidal Empire of Humanity. Road Hogs picks up on the West Coast, where mutant animals rule the road, and the Road Hogs - an enormous army of belligerent mutant animals - threaten the benevolent Americorp empires. Standing in their way are the Highway Patrol, secret ninja societies and an assortment of bike gangs who aren't interested in seeing their homes buried under a flood of malevolent, stinky mutant animals. But, while this all may sound really cool, the ideas bouncing around in your head right now are probably a lot more interesting than the contents of Road Hogs. The majority of the book focuses on rules for playing vehicle-to-vehicle combat, building your own combat vehicle from scratch, and randomly generating highways to drive on. The setting itself, while barely satisfactory, really pales in comparison to innovations in setting that are now some ten years old. The major states in the Road Hogs universe are described in the most general terms - New Americorp, the good guys of the setting, get a grand total of three paragraphs dedicated to it. That's just about it - plus the State Troopers, which is basically just a character template for those interested. The Road Hogs have almost nothing in the way of motivation. They're being backed by the Empire of Humanity, they're the most fierce gang out there, they're going to try another attack soon, but that's just about all there is. Some of the concepts are interesting, like the Stainless Steel Stallions, or a prairie dog empire whose residents follow the Mormon way of life, but they're hardly followed up on. What's especially tragic about this is how interesting the whole setting could have been. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the original RPG - pointed out, animals have been used as surrogate humans for a long time, especially to comment on human society. Road Hogs just lets it drop and roll around on the floor, content to let the GM do any major work involved with fleshing things out. And there's tons of wasted, useless space in here, especially in giving out character stats for personalities that have no chance of having anything to do with the game itself. I can almost guarantee that you'll never need the stats for the President of La Segunda Pregunta; but they're provided. The only stats that I could possibly see needing the stats for are the leader of the Road Hogs, but they're nothing that a GM couldn't make up themselves. I don't understand the focus on characters in the place of setting; and while Eric Wucjik is, usually, an excellent author, I'd say that this is poor work from him. The rules themselves suffer from the typical Palladium system, which is to say that it's a lot like AD&D's bastard love child. What's especially annoying is the addition of a bunch of new skills to replace the old Drive skill - instead of having a generic Drive skill, you now have about a dozen different versions of Pilot, one for each type of vehicle, plus one for Vehicle to Vehicle Combat, Automotive Mechanics, Automotive Armor and Weapons, and, in a classic example of using a skill where a simple attribute check will do, there's even a Map Reading skill. There's two major flaws with these new skills. The first is that characters from the old system, with basic TMNT, won't be compatible with Road Hogs; you'll either need to bring them up to a level where they can acquire a few of those skills, or simply split up their Drive skill into appropriate levels of the new skill. The book doesn't offer any suggestions. There's also the issue that there shouldn't be a seperate skill for vehicle to vehicle combat - why not just use your Drive skill instead? The book also suggests that you can bring the skill percentage of Vehicle to Vehicle combat over 100%, to compensate for various penalties assessed when performing high-speed manuevers, or when going over rough surfaces. Unfortunately, thanks to Palladium's rigid lockstep skill-advancement system - where every skill goes up by a few points every time that you go up a level - there's little chance that anybody will be able to go up over 100% without playing the game for some fifty years. Contrast this to White Wolf, where it's easy to get an expert pilot in exchange for skill in other areas, or extra backgrounds, or what have you. It's unfortunate that Wucjik left this dangling; even for 1986, this isn't a great system. The driving system itself is okay, but it isn't something that kept me up nights coming up with scenarios. While the rules are surely functional, and there's a lot of neat whizbang gizmos to tack onto your vehicle - nothing really crazy, but there's a solid array of weapons and assorted doodads, like flashing police lights, bucket seats, pressurized cabins and oil slicks. The system itself determines speed by "speed classes", which are used mostly for determining checks against a skill to see if you wipe out - as the book wisely suggests, vehicle combat should be kept abstract, with the cars either neck in neck, too far away from each other or one behind the other. (This doesn't account for multiple-car chases, but it's not a major flaw.) Vehicle combat is treated just like regular combat, with some fancy manuvers thrown in that only cars can do - you can block, you can swerve, you can do a bootlegger's turn. Vehicle to vehicle combat only takes up a single attack, so you can swerve across somebody's path and shoot somebody with a sawed-off shotgun at the same time; it's a nice touch, although a tad unrealistic. TMNT has never taken a firm stance on realism vs. cinematic action, so I couldn't tell if you if it's in the style of the game or not. There's also new animal templates, including aquatic animals - squids, whales, dolphins and such. This is in addition to a lot of Southwestern animals, including the roadrunner, the prarie dog, the buffalo, and so on and so forth. It'll be a handy addition to the hardy TMNT GMs who have survived thus far. Finishing it all off is a short comic by Wujcik, Siembieda, and Carpenter, revealing that at least one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has survived, and is still as lethal as ever. (The original comic book series had the TMNT killing Shredder, a far cry from the Smurfs with lethal weapons on the television show and subsequent films.) There's also a trio of substandard adventures, one dealing with an infiltration of the Road Hogs, another dealing with a mail run that's a handy excuse for vehicular combat, and another neat tribute to the Magnificent Seven that doesn't manage to fully cohere. Is it worth buying? I'd say no. If you really need vehicle combat rules, I'd suggest buying Car Wars, or another game that features vehicle-to-vehicle combat - I understand that Car Wars is awfully complicated - but the net result is that Road Hogs just doesn't have enough meat on its bones to justify purchase. It's too bad, because there's a lot of stuff here that could have made for a brilliant campaign setting. It's just not given enough attention to truly shine. -Darren MacLennann Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 2 (Sparse)

TMNT: Road Hogs