The 12 Days of Rifts-mas: Day 4, TNMT

I still have my original TNMT books! When I saw they were bringing this game back, I jumped at it, and I am happy I did. The new books are full-color, beautiful, and exactly what I wanted.

The rules are NOT updated to current Palladium 2017 standards, which I am fine with, since nostalgia and memories for games like this are more important than having everything perfectly up to date. This is precisely "how we played it," and if I wanted to update it using the new rules in Rifts Ultimate, it would be easy enough.

The most significant difference is in the number of attacks per melee round, using the "two attacks for living" standard, as discussed in an earlier article. This results in fewer attacks overall, which is fine since the game feels closer to the original Palladium games of the time, and it is easier for younger players to grasp with fewer choices per turn.

The book is full color, with all the art colored in, which is just fantastic. The paper quality is high, and the books themselves are a treasure. There are no PDFs in this release, probably due to licensing, but that is fine. I always have After the Bomb for my PDFs, and that game is similar enough that I can use those instead. This is also a very cool game, and one I love.

This was also our first Palladium game, the one that started it all.

TNMT introduced many to the Palladium system and kept the Rifts train going through the 1990s. This was such a cool game to have before the cartoon, and I love the gritty, dark comic aesthetic throughout the book. This game keeps the turtles grounded in that pen-and-ink, Noir, dark, and gritty style - and it starkly contrasts with the cartoon. This is a good thing, since the Turtles need that mature feeling, and they are not just Mickey Mouse-type characters. They live in a dark, violent, and street-level powered world. Life is not easy here, nor is it happy or pastel-colored.

These are the Turtles as I remember them in the comic shops of the 1990s, and it is a glorious thing.

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