Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

This is a /co/ related article, which we allow because we find it interesting or we can't be bothered to delete it.

If you need to ask who these guys are, you probably don't remember anything about the 80s or early 90s... Or you've been living under a rock for a damn long time, since they've never entirely gone away. But hey, we'll be nice and illuminate things for you.

The Beginning

It all started in 1984, with an indie comic created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird for Mirage Comics. A tongue-in-cheek parody of the Iron Age of Comic Books in general and Marvel in particular, Daredevil had recently gone though a ninja filled Renaissance and The New Mutants put both the concept of mutants as well as gritty dark tales staring teens very in vouge, combine that with Frank Millar's ninja and violance fueled Ronin and you have the general soup that TMNT sprung from. The title character being turtles on top of all that was just an extra bit of fun.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Begins with the title characters pressed against an alley wall cornered by the local street toughs the Purple Dragons. Four against fifteen, out manned but not over powered Leonardo with his katana , Michelangelo with his nunchaku, Donatello with his Bo, and Raphael with his sai all explode outward dealing bloody violance against the gang bangers. Victorious, they still retreat into the sewers away from the prying eyes of the police. As mutant outcasts and warriors of the shadows they obey the code of the ninja. Strike hard, and fade away into the night.

Retuning to their sewer lair they tell their tale of victory to their father and master, the mutant rat Splinter. Pleased with his sons battle prowess he reveals to them the story of their origin. It is the story of two ninja in the service of a clan called the Foot. One ninja, Oroku Nagi, coveted the same woman as another, a humbler soul named Hamato Yoshi, though she would choose Yoshi over him. One evening, he confronted the object of his affection, Tang Shen, with his feelings. She would reject him and he would attack her in turn. Yoshi would defend his lover and kill Nagi in the process. Killing Nagi would force Yoshi and Shen into exile where they would immigrate to New York.

Yoshi had a pet rat that would come with him to New York, Splinter, and he and his pet would settle into a happy life with Tang Shen. Yoshi's pet would prove to be an unusually intelligent rat, so much so that the rat would learn ninjutsu itself by mimicking Yoshi's training exercises.

Yoshi and Shen's happy life would be short lived as Okroku Saki, Nagi's younger brother, would establishan american branch of the Foot, and track them both down to take revenge. Saki would kill them both and destroy their apartment, forcing Splinter to flee and become a sewer rat. Saki would take his American branch of The Foot and establish himself as a crimelord in the city.

One day, an accident involving a truck carrying a load of mysterious radioactive waste resulted in two things; a bowl of four baby pet turtles falling into the sewer near the rat, and all five being drenched in goo. Rather than killing them, it mutated them, transforming them into humanoid creatures. Splinter, taught the mutant turtles the art of ninjitsu while raising them as his sons, and named them after Renaissance painters; Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Once they had grown old enough and strong enough, he set them on Oroku Saki, now a crime boss calling himself "The Shredder", a quartet of mutant assassins to avenge Hamato Yoshi.

Steeled by the tale Raphael is chosen to deliver a message to Oroku Saki. Taking out his ninja body guard he throws his sai through a window with a challenge attached, simultaneously making themselves known on top of ruining a protection deal in the process.

The Turtles await The Shredder at the appointed meeting place and he meets them a full compliment of his strongest ninja along with him. He throws his throng at the turtles and they meet them blade for blade and best each one. The Shredder them takes them on himself, insulting them as he challenges them. At first the turtles are no match for him, he knocks them each down in turn, but Leo rallies his brothers and they take on Shredder as a team, keeping him off balance and striking hard. As the turtles snatch victory, Leo offers the Shredder an honorable death through sepukku which Shredder rebukes and tries to take all of them out with a grenade. Quick thinking and a quicker throw from Don sends his Bo into Shredder's head knocking him and the grenade into the alley below.

The Turtles go down into the alley and find only smashed armor. Leo finds only a bladed gauntlet and tosses it away, their mission done and their whole lives ahead of them, with the code of the ninja to guide them. Strike hard, and fade away into the night.

The Phenomena

And, despite its creators' intentions, the series was a huge hit. They had never anticipated this - Shredder was killed off in the first (and so they expected only) issue - but they ran with it. Success really came when they teamed up with Fred Wolf, an animator who created a cartoon series based on the comic, keeping the basic idea (ninja turtles living in a sewer and fighting an evil ninja master covered in blades), but tweaking it in various ways (for example, ditching the "avenging pet rat" angle for an arguably less stupid and more iconic "Yoshi was manipulated into getting expelled from the clan and was mutated into a rat-man by the Shredder as further revenge" angle). It ran for 9 years, from 1987 until 1996, and cemented the group's place in pop culture.

During this time, the goofy one-off parody comic spawned a full-fledged franchise, with several multi-million dollar movies, action figures, video games (including one particularly legendary arcade game), and another four successful TV series beyond the original.

TMNT and /tg/

So, you're probably wondering, what's this got to do with /tg/? Well, Palladium Books, ever eager to absorb another possible angle to promote their screwed up system, officially bought the license to put out the official TMNT roleplaying game.

It was called "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness", and is a bit of an obscure game, considering that A: It predates the cartoon, meaning its elements don't mesh well with what most people remember Ninja Turtles being like, B: it ran on Palladium's ruleset (which pretty much nobody wants to actually play), and C: being that it was all about playing mutant animals, it gets a ton of flak for being a "furry rpg", a la Ironclaw. It did have some nice bits, especially in character creation. There were tables which controlled the character's relationship to humanity, and the accident which had made them mutate. The only real reference to TMNT was that if all the players chose to be characters of the same species and background, they got a bonus to their attributes and skill levels. Being written before certain plot points in the Mirage comic, it also gives different backstories for several characters such as the Rat King(originally a crazy homeless man who thought he was a mutant, retconned to a magical guru in a issue after the TRPG). It had a post-apocalyptic spinoff, After the Bomb, that Palladium still supported after losing the license.

Eventually, after Robotech and Rifts swelled Kevin Siembieda's already-massive ego to even greater sizes, he foolishly opted not to pay the fee to re-up the license on the cash-cow that largely put him on the map, and the title went out of print in 1999. And things have gone swimmingly for him ever since. (See: Divorce, embezzlement by staff, car crash, staff attempting suicide, Robotech RPG Tactics.)