I wish I could remember what issue of Heavy Metal I scanned this out of – one of the ones in the last decade or so woould be my guess (based on the digital feel of the artwork).

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival is on the topic of animals and the first thing that always comes to mind when people mention animals and RPGs around me is the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. We always played the game in a slightly post-apocalyptic setting, where some cities had been turned over entirely to the mutants (explaining why there were so damn many different animal mutants running around), so it wasn’t much of a stretch a few years later to switch over to the After the Bomb setting which is a truly post-apocalyptic setting for the game.

And that picture up there sets the feel for our games much better than any illustrations from the actual RPG. This wasn’t a setting of ninjas and assassins with near-human looks, but one of automatic weapon toting mutant ferrets and gorillas fighting for loot in the wastelands. The world was already a mess, and we had little interest or motivation in making it any less messy.

We recently tried booting up a new After the Bomb campaign, and ran into a slight problem in character creation. You see, all the classic expansions for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG used the skill selection system from the original edition of the game. Later, they released a revised edition with a different skill selection system. Quite different. And among our crew we have five copies of the revised edition (and a huge pile of awesome sourcebooks), and none of the original edition. So we shelved the idea.

Until someone picked up the After the Bomb RPG at a used store recently. After the Bomb is a remake of the TMNT game and the After the Bomb setting released after Palladium no longer had the rights to the original TMNT license. So I’ve got the book on the table here, and the group is rolling up characters virtually. So for the next week, I’ll be posting out-takes of the chargen developments, along with the final results of our post-apocalyptic mutant animal insanity.