Category: NERDING DAY

I’m not a huge fan of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the black-and-white comic they drew in the 1980s. I’ve never felt “dark and gritty” was the right tone for the Ninja Turtles; I don’t want to see Raphael blind a mugger with street glass, or Michelangelo get hooked on the lumpy cocaine Karen Hill flushed down the toilet. It hits my brain in the exact same way that a dark and gritty Rainbow Brite would – I have no need for that interpretation, please take back your extremely sweaty brochure.

Like everyone my age, I was a fan of the TMNT cartoon show Playmates Toys developed in 1987 to support the action figure license they’d acquired from Eastman and Laird. Beyond it being right there in the title (the characters are canonically 15 years old), there’s something inherently childish about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the property has objectively been its most successful when it maintains a certain level of innocence. Even the “gritty” comics were never all that hard. But I did love the weirdness and self-parody in Eastman and Laird’s version, which are two elements the cartoon show preserved, along with the characters’ names and general appearance. Uh, except for April and Baxter, who were made white. For some reason the cartoon about mutant combat frogs decided Black people were too unbelievable. That’s why they transmogrify Bebop in the second episode. Speaking of transmogrifying, tabletop gaming publishers / professional ink maniacs Palladium Press recently reprinted their beloved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roleplaying game in a special 2025 Redux Edition, and I bought it, because I am your champion:

Palladium acquired the rights to produce a TMNT roleplaying game in the mid-1980s, which is to say their game is firmly based on the Turtles’ edgier origin comics, and definitely NOT that lame cartoon that everyone loves and has made millions of dollars for forty years. The book constantly reminds you of this fact as you flip through its feverish prose, which is written as a single unbroken thought with occasional section headings, like it was laid out by John Doe the day he signed the lease for the Sloth apartment.

The layout has been tidied up for 2025, which is a phrase here meaning “they put digital makeup on a run-on sentence.”

Palladium is owned and operated by recurring 1-900-HOTDOG character Kevin Siembieda, who is also responsible for the RIFTS gaming system and its dozens of sourcebooks. He remains one of the most compelling pieces of physical evidence that Faustian bargains are both real and affordable. He’s so prolific it borders on harassment. Despite the massive success of TMNT as a property, Kevin Siembieda decided not to renew the game license, mostly out of spite for the cartoon. So, Palladium’s TMNT roleplaying books drifted out of print in the 1990s, and remained dormant ever since, floating endlessly in Mediocre Purgatory like a TV Guide stuck in the negative zone from Poltergeist 2. Improbably, Palladium Press reacquired the TMNT license from Nickelodeon in the year of his infernal dominion 2025 (see “Mephistophe-lease,” above), and re-released them with updated rules and artwork for the 21st century. And beyond! There’s a whole book of rules about time travel, and I won’t lie, it looks sick as shit.

I don’t have a joke, some things are just fucking rad.

The layout has been updated as well, to clean up some of the resolution lost to the grape juice stains on the Palladium copy machine. The whole 2025 Redux Edition package is extremely readable, which is a good quality for books to have. But Kevin Siembieda can’t hide from us, or indeed from himself, so he stuffed this special edition with thousands of words of “bonus material” from his personal grievance diaries. He begins by stamping 100% of his crazy on the very first page:

We’re greeted with an extended disclaimer about WITCHCRAFT and ILLEGAL DRUG USE, followed by a drawing of ritualistic animal abuse that looks like a haunted woodcut you’d find in a specially marked box of Ninja Turtles cereal. This is a frenzied illustration of anthropomorphic creatures about to wishbone a terrified rodent for their cannibal orgy. It’s a pregnant Sonic meme drawn in blood and semen. It looks like Ring Cam footage from the Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s an illustration by TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman from the book’s 1985 printing, and there’s no way he wasn’t rock hard while drawing it. But in 1985 they stuck it waaaay in the back of the book, long past where bored parents would’ve stopped flipping. In the 2025 Redux Edition it’s been moved to the first page and colorized, like Ted Turner revisiting his favorite cursed pornography. This is the image Kevin Siembieda selected to convince parents he isn’t a magical pervert. Let me say that again with more words – this remastered 2025 sourcebook reprinted the same 40-year-old disclaimer Palladium used in 1985 to assure parents and the CIA alike that they don’t endorse dark magic. Or heroin! Because they’re nerds. The book also contains dozens of eulogies for the game’s original author and designer Erick Wujcik – some of which begin on the very next page – which drives home how much time has passed since this book’s last printing, and how much older we all are. So do all the rules about ninjas.

Grief is complicated, and like grief, some of these tributes are heartfelt and sweet, while others are a little strange and self-serving. For example, Wujcik’s birth and death year are included after each of his reprinted dedications, like a bunch of headstones scattered throughout the book.

It’s archaic formatting for a quote, but not formatting that has ever been used for an author’s dedication page. It’s like adding Steve Irwin’s death date to every copy of The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. It’s a bizarre tone to strike for your game of mutant ninja animals. I don’t want to stomp the Foot Clan any more, I want to go take photographs with my family. Well, both, ideally. Speaking of editorial choices, Kevin Siembieda’s original rants remain preserved in time, like insects frozen in amber, incubating the DNA of his crazy until it could be revived by 21st century science. His dedication for the Turtles Go Hollywood! adventure sourcebook is a 50-word manifesto about the scourge of illegal drugs, because Kevin’s three greatest loves are ninjas, robots, and Death Wish 3.

Siembieda spends pages of boldly-titled “bonus material” taking partial credit for creating the Ninja Turtles. He repeatedly congratulates himself for being the first person to license TMNT, like the guy who took the first picture of the Beatles. He credits one wife’s help and support in the game’s creation, then dedicates the book to a different (deceased) wife. He cannot be stopped. They did increase the suggested reader age from 12 to 14, so that’s one compromise Kevin Siembieda was willing to make. No he wasn’t, what am I saying? He 100% views it as a bold declaration his Turtle game isn’t for babies, or the baby-of-heart. Also, this book tells me to play Randy Newman to get players in the mood. That’s the literary equivalent of backmasking. I might have to destroy it.

Erick Wujcik’s fingerprints are still here too, from his clearly personal grudge with $50 katanas to his irritation over the existence of so many goddamn fucking birds.

The 1985 version was rigid, like Kevin-Eastman-drawing-a-blood-orgy rigid, and scolded the reader with several thrilling examples of “bad roleplaying” that seemed drawn from the author’s own life. It was like playing Ninja Turtles with Young Sheldon – one way or another, you’re going home early from the sleepover. Most of Wujcik’s prickliness has been cleaned up for the 2025 Redux Edition in the interest of being welcoming to new players. But they definitely didn’t purge all of it.

“…*sigh*…yeah Mom, can you come pick me up? Erick’s doing it again.”

Despite the obvious lunacy of its publisher, TMNT remains a beloved game thanks to its absurd character-creation system, and because the rules are dirt simple and perfectly designed to be played during lunch period. You can condescend to me all you want, as long as I get to be Donatello. To take this Redux Edition on a test drive, I’m going to create my own team of mutant ninja heroes and play through one of the book’s introductory adventures, Terror on Rural Route 5.

Apart from some character stats, this adventure is entirely unchanged from 1985, which is why it has you thwarting a school shooting perpetrated by the cast of Animal Farm. In the interest of my deadline, which I have already shattered like Chuck Yeager fearlessly helicoptering his dong at the sound barrier, I’ll have to play the whole thing myself rather than assemble a group of improv comedians and charming guest stars for a podcast miniseries, which is the way people normally play roleplaying games. You’ll have to trust me to run the game as impartially as possible, although I will occasionally bend the rules to save my characters from themselves. I’ll include that stuff in the Bonus Material, along with selections from my personal grievance diary. Now, I spent half of my single-digits inventing teams of mutants inspired by the heroes in a halfshell. I hardly need a book’s help. But today we are going to let Teenage Mutant Ninja Jesus take the wheel and use the 2025 Redux Edition sourcebook to randomly generate our animal heroes. Time to crack this big bastard open like Shredder splittin’ some turtle backs for his soup. Uh, that kind of sounds like he’s fucking them. Lemme try again – let’s crack this big bastard open like Shredder impregnating Sonic the Hedgehog.

Image unrelated.

We start by rolling 3 six-sided dice to determine our attribute scores in 8 categories, because this game is already too friggin busy.

One of the attributes is PP, which rocks, but why aren’t any of these figures grading our tubularity? Not sure how that got missed when the rules were updated. Speaking of which, while the rules have indeed been polished, grammatical errors await you like a Foot Clan ambush on every page, and the casual racism remains untouched. For instance, there are constant references to the “mysticism” of the “Far East.” Luckily Palladium Press released a sourcebook called Mystic China that is STILL IN PRINT, so we can bone up on all that stuff later. Next we roll to see what kind of animal we are, and as Erick Wujcik (1951-2008) once wrote, there are indeed too many fucking birds.

This is the most fun part of the game – trying to reverse engineer a ninja hero out of whatever bullshit animal you happen to roll. Sure, there’s cool stuff on there like sharks and horses, but you’re only ever going to roll some variation of a bird or rodent, because Erick Wujcik included dozens of them, and the table still has repeats. We got Otter, so that’s something. We get to pick which kind of Otter, so I’m going with River Otter, because you get more points to spend on your mutation, which is where you buy hands. And trust me – we’re gonna want hands. Next we figure out our heroes’ origin – they were accidentally mutated by a chance encounter with the ooze, and were raised by a sensei, just like the Turtles. You’ve got a pretty solid chance of being just like the Turtles, because there are only three possible background options, and we have twenty-eight minutes until the bell rings. OK, now it’s time to mutate our animal:

As you can see in the above example, if you were a dog mutant you could elect to have no human features whatsoever, or spend points to make yourself look vaguely like Jeff Fahey. It’s also how you grow or shrink your animal and give them the ability to thrash (ride skateboards and subscribe to Thrasher magazine). The rules are careful to mention that real-life mutations typically don’t give you special abilities, because Kevin Siembieda isn’t getting sued when some dumb kid drinks paint thinner and crocodile shit to try and grow scales.

Using his guidance, I’ve created the Secret Violent River Otters. They were raised by a weebed-out goof who also taught them ninjitsu and some light pickpocketing. I dunno, I’ll make him up later. Let me introduce you to the team:

Karate, the just and brainy leader. His mastery of the flail knows no equal;

BMX, the burly hothead. His twin katana will slice through any foe;

and Space Shuttle, the psionic warrior and wielder of the deadly kusarigama.

This game is big on psychic powers, for some reason. If you thought TMNT was about whirling nunchaku and cowings bunga, go home to your friggin’ baby cartoon. THESE mutants need to shut people’s brains off with their minds. My heroes are river otters, so they’re natural swimmers, and can see in the dark. Except for Space Shuttle, he traded his night vision for Bio-Manipulating Paralysis after demonstrating his suitability for the MK ULTRA program. I was going to make a fourth brother called Nintendo but I ran out of time. He’s with them in spirit.

Our critters are hanging out in their skate dojo when they spy a news broadcast delivering them all the information we are going to receive for this adventure, which means we have to invent a skate dojo. Time for our imaginations to soar! What are the essentials of a rad sewer lair? Let’s make a list:

⦿ A Television (this is particularly important for this adventure)

⦿ Sick half pipes

⦿ Microwaveable italian food

⦿ Turds (human, rat)

⦿ Attitude

Where can we find all of these things in abundance? That’s right! The old abandoned Action Playset on the edge of town!

The Otters are shredding pipe with their reclaimed mobility devices when they hear an urgent news bulletin. A group of terrorists has taken over an elementary school and are holding 100 kids hostage. No demands have been made public, but local, state, and Federal law enforcement officials are on the scene. More details will follow at 5, because this adventure was written before 24-hour news networks existed.

Those kids need us, but we can’t just rush out to the school and ask the police for the skinny, we’re four-foot otters. And BMX hates cops. How can we find out more about what’s going on? In this game, your characters have a handful of skills you select based on your background, and beyond that, everything is based on a percentage roll. No matter what batshit thing you think of, you just roll and check the corresponding skill on your character sheet. Don’t you DARE look anything up. Combat barely requires you to check an enemy’s stats, except to see whether they’re still alive. This can make the game get irrevocably chaotic in short order, but it also keeps everything moving, which is great because we only have about ten more minutes until lunch ends. Let’s hear some suggestions, my River Otters!

I could use my electronics and radio knowledge to build a police scanner out of scrap so we can listen in on their frequency!

*grinds teeth*

We should hang ten right through the front door and get our slice on! When the blood settles, we’ll be heroes! Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

Let’s go with Karate’s plan. I feel like BMX’s suggestion, while bold, will doom our adventure to infamy. Karate is able to build a scanner pretty quickly out of all the junk here in the Action Playset, and we parkour down to the school to use it. It’s a single school building on a rural highway, with a police perimeter set up near the road. We have to sneak pretty close to use our homemade junk box, but we’re fuggin’ NINJA OTTERS so we did it. We just barely succeeded our Prowl check by the way, personally I blame BMX. He’s a bit too bulky for ninja work. Listening in on police chatter, we learn that the school has been taken over by a group of half-human, half-animal mutants led by “the Liberator.” The Liberator has made demands to the governor, but we don’t know what they are. Let’s assume a helicopter will be involved; this is 1985, after all. The Liberator wants to give a press conference at 6pm, so the news media is gathering in preparation. Guns have been seen inside the building. The power and phone lines are still intact, and rations are going to be delivered to the front door shortly. Probably some baby food sandwiches, or whatever kids eat. What should we do, my Otters?

I see a number of possibilities, sensei. We can sneak in with the food delivery. We can wait for the press conference and use Space Shuttle’s power to paralyze the Liberator, although the Liberator’s goons probably have instructions to harm the children if anything funny happens. We can sneak in during the press conference, while everyone is distracted. We can impersonate the police over the police scanner to try and trick the Liberator. Or, we can find another way inside the school.

Let’s gut these barfbags!

Far out! *eye twitches*

Great input, team! We have some time until the press conference, so let’s do some Ninja Reconnaissance. BMX and Space Shuttle sneak closer to the school, where BMX uses his Advanced Smell to detect what kinds of animal mutants we’re dealing with. He sighs heavily but picks up the scent of a bull, a dog, and several pigs. Space Shuttle uses his Tracking ability to spot multiple footprints leading off to a run-down farm about a mile distant. Karate tries using the radio to listen in on the Liberator, but is having trouble finding a frequency. BMX and Space Shuttle find a basement window while Karate keeps fussing with his smelly radio. I guess he wants to prove to BMX it wasn’t a waste of time.

I worked very hard on it, sensei, it was a nonviolent solution and you taught us to respect life…

Karate’s big dumb egghead face finally gets the radio working but can’t find the Liberator on any channel. The basement window is unlocked and hanging open, but Space Shuttle can’t make anything out inside. Dropping all that government acid has affected his vision.

*massages brain in anticipation of unleashing psionic abilities*

Karate stealthily joins the others by the school, sneaking easily by the police. We’ve learned the Liberator and their group came from a nearby farm, and that we can sneak into the school through the basement. It’s 5pm, the food is arriving right now and we are one hour from the press conference.

We can ambush whoever gets the food. We can sneak in through the basement. We can check out that farm. Or we can wait for the press conference to start and either sneak inside or paralyze the LIberator with Space Shuttle’s hideous thoughts.

Let’s pop their skulls open like a buncha Mountain Dewskies!

Wicked! *urinates*

Excellent suggestions, my otters! Let’s go check out the farm. Those kids can chill out for a minute, I trust the terrorists. We sprint the mile distance to the farm in 7.5 minutes exactly, because Erick Wujcik gave me all the tools I needed to calculate that. We find a small farm with a farmhouse, a barn, and a pig shack, and a foreclosure sign in the yard. Two mutant pigs are drag-racing tractors. They’re dressed like they’re about to get blown up by Rambo. They have not noticed us and are unlikely to, because tractor races are loud and totally bitchin’.

I’ll sneak to the farmhouse and listen in!

Karate sneaks to the farmhouse and listens in. He detects 3 different voices arguing about “the plan” and whether “Ferd” really is going to get them all a new home. It sounds like they’re watching the news broadcast about the ongoing hostage situation at the school. We also hear a commercial for New Coke. Space Shuttle sneaks over to the window with Karate but can’t quite see inside.

You should consider LASEK, brother.

Can you see any burritos? *nose bleeds*

Karate and BMX sneak inside the farmhouse window but Space Shuttle’s big ass cracks the glass and he gets spotted! Space Shuttle uses his Impersonation skill (he’s a magnificent actor, he performed Henry V for my birthday) to bluff and say he’s part of the revolution, but he gets lost in the specifics and the pigs don’t buy it.

*whispering* I’ll save you, Space Shuttle!

Karate sneak attacks the pigs. It’s really easy to do, you just have to roll a 5 or higher on a 20-sided die. Kevin Siembieda and Erick Wujcik don’t waste time worrying about hitting or missing when the only thing that matters is HOW MUCH DAMAGE YOU DO. We enter our first combat! Two of the pigs carry Uzis (it’s 1985, that’s the law) and the third has a flamethrower.

Wh-

Space Shuttle uses his PSIONIC POWERS to paralyze another Pig, and the last one just gives up before BMX kills him.

Go Stream Machine! (They’re river otters.)

OK, as rad as that was, we’ve hit my first major problem with the rules – they’re extremely unclear on how to knock someone out. You either have to kill everyone you fight or pummel them into a coma. Combat assumes you’re applying lethal force in every fight, because we’re throttling the Shredder on notebook paper as fast as we can while the teacher goes on about chlorophyll or something. To Kevin Siembieda, “nuance” is a word formed only by the lips of the fearful. You can try to Pull Your Punch, which lets you reduce the damage by quarters, down to a single point or no damage at all, but that only stops you from killing someone instantly. It’s also more difficult to do – you have to roll an 11 instead of a 5, because killing is second nature to a ninja. They put accidental Dim Maks on lightswitches and doughboys EVERY DAY. Consequently a lot of this game is beating your adversaries into savage comas and then immediately administering first aid, if you selected First Aid as a skill. If you didn’t, they just lie there and bleed to death. Or succumb to brain damage! If you decide to use the optional Serious Injury tables. We’ll just have to rescue these kids without knocking anyone out.

BMX interrogates the last pig and learns there are 12 fellow swine at the farmhouse, 6 pigs at the school, plus a dog man named Buck and a bull man named Ferd, AKA the Liberator. Ferd promised to get them a new home after their owner, Farmer George, choked to death on obvious literary references and the bank showed up to foreclose on the house. They’re supposed to sit here and watch the news, then call Ferd at the school and use coded phrases over the telephone to give him any updates. BMX cuts the phone cord. Space Shuttle looks out the window and activates his mind powers to paralyze one of the two Racing Pigs, who crashes his tractor into the barn.

Ha ha ha ha!

The commotion attracts the rest of the pigs; seven (7) of them come out of the pig shack, lord knows what they were all doing in there but you can smell it from here. They gather at the barn, extremely puzzled. Racing Pig 1 is telling them he can’t move. The pigs don’t seem to know what to do, and they’re all arguing with each other.

Space Shuttle stretches his improv legs again and convinces the pigs that we, as fellow mutant animals, are also part of the plan to help Ferd get a new farm.

But the cops are here! Everyone get inside the barn!

*ignites nozzle* Yeah, and lock the door.

We convince the pigs to barricade themselves inside the barn. Then BMX sets the barn on fire. Remember, he hates pigs.

Ha ha yeah! Yeah! That’s what I call a Hot Slice!

Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

Radical!

We make haste back to the school in time for the 6pm press conference. Reporters are gathering at the front door. What shall we do?

Thank you for asking me first, sensei. BMX and I will climb inside the basement. Space Shuttle will keep watch for the news conference to start, and use his Psionic Abilites™ on whomever comes out, which will likely be Ferd.

I don’t kick anything in this plan.

Michael Dukakis!

Let’s do it, gang! The news conference starts a few minutes late, Ferd pokes his head out at 6:18 with six schoolchildren. Space Shuttle fires his paralyzing brain lasers but Ferd resists; he makes an extreme look like he shit in several pairs of pants, but doesn’t otherwise react. He continues with his press conference undaunted, and says he’s going to start killing kids in the morning unless his demands are met. He wants two helicopters. Six million dollars. And transport to a remote northern location, maybe Canada. I guess he’s going to ask the helicopter pilots for their opinion. Space Shuttle joins the others in the basement, relaying the shame of his failure.

Sorry bros, I couldn’t slice his brain. *ear burps*

(supportive) Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

There’s a furnace and a door at the top of the stairs. Karate listens at the door and hears nothing. Space Shuttle picks the lock, he saw how to do it on MacGuyver. We open the door a crack and scan the hall. BMX sniffs for danger, but he can’t smell anything over the flamethrower fuel. Space Shuttle straight up can’t see anything.

The cost of your powers is great, brother.

I saw a patrol of 3 figures walking by the windows earlier. We can wait here to ambush them, or we can go look for them. We can search for the kids and see if we can free them quietly. Or, we can try to find Ferd.

Whatever we decide, I would like to use the flamethrower again.

Huey Lewis!

Let’s wait here to ambush the patrol. The patrol shows up. It’s Buck the dog-man and two pigs. Space Shuttle paralyzes Buck. The 2 pigs instantly drop their guns and run. I don’t blame them, that’s some freaky shit. Buck calls after them, “Come back! I meant to do that! I’m doing this on purpose to confuse our oppressors!” BMX hops out into the hallway and rolls a natural 20 to set the fleeing pigs on fire with his new flamethrower. Karate jump kicks them. Space Shuttle tries to jump kick them too but he misses. We seriously need to get him some glasses. Buck, still paralyzed by Space Shuttle’s mind shackles, shouts, “Don’t spill the beans, my hoggy brothers!” BMX stabs one of the pigs so hard they die instantly, so I guess that means they exploded. Bacon bits, if you will. BMX knocks the other pig out with a punch. He’s so cool.

*smokes*

We interrogate Buck and he spills the beans easy because of everything he just witnessed. The kids are in the gym, guarded by 3 pigs. Ferd is in the office with 1 pig and 4 other kids. I guess those are the problem kids. We disarm Buck, tie him up with Space Shuttle’s old Vuarnet sweatshirt, and stuff him in the basement. We teach him a song before we leave, so he doesn’t get bored. BMX gags him with a chunk of pig, so he doesn’t get lonely. BMX easily guides us to the office by picking up Ferd’s scent with his advanced smell. It’s a very nice office but it doesn’t have a window, so we can’t see inside. We listen at the door and hear a voice ranting about destroying the system. It could be a meeting of the debate club, but it is probably Ferd. We check to see if we can climb into the ceiling, but it isn’t a drop ceiling, which are those cool crawlspace ceilings that aliens and John McClane use for travel.

Space Shuttle wishes to atone for his cursed eyes with more of his Groundlings teachings. He impersonates one of the pigs and says, “Hey boss! Buck needs ya, he says Aerosmith is here! They’re pulling up out front!” Ferd says, “Ooh our luck is finally changing! Our message is being heard!” He comes out into the hall, RIGHT INTO OUR NINJA AMBUSH.

One stuffed crust, COMING UP!

Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

We beat Ferd into a coma while Melissa the pig barricades the office door and starts shooting through it with a submachine gun, demanding to know what Aerosmith is doing to the boss. BMX chops the door down and we stomp Melissa into the earth. Karate and Space Shuttle stabilize Ferd and Melissa respectively, because I had them both enroll in the same CPR course at the YMCA. BMX tells the kids in the office to “scrape up your sweaties and book it, dudes!”

It’s how us kids talk, Gramps!

We direct the kids to sneak out of the basement window, and to ignore the dog man with the ragged pig arm in his mouth. We have no time to teach them the song. We make our way to the gym and peek through the door. There are three pigs in there – Hank, Roy, and Angie – standing guard over a hundred kids gathered around them on the gym floor. It must be the whole school. Except for those four turds in the office. Space Shuttle paralyzes Angie with his government brain. The other two pigs, Hank and Roy, tell the kids to stop crying, she’s breakdancing.

The liars! Let me burn ‘em, Karate!

No, Beams! You’ll burn the children!

*weeps*

Space Shuttle tries to impersonate Ferd and trick them, but he doesn’t get the voice right. I guess he didn’t hear Ferd speak enough. The pigs say, “Nice try coppers! This is on you!” As punishment, they loudly tell the children that Santa Claus isn’t real.

(grim) Well ain’t that a real slice o’ pie.

(determined) Slice, Slice, A New York Slice!

Hank the Pig throws a grenade that blows up the gym door and seriously injures Karate, like Kyle Reese at the end of The Terminator, the hit film from last summer. Karate is bleeding out, because there are rules for that, and not for knocking anyone out.

(enraged) WHERE’S THE BEEF?

Space Shuttle leaps over the sitting kids and instantly kills Hank and Roy with a flying critical strike from his KUSARIGAMA. Karate stabilizes himself. He’s so brave.

*cough*…papa…papa, tell me you liked my radio…

We have done it, my Otters! These children will never forget the heroism they witnessed here today. The city will worship us as sub-dieties, and feed us its cash. Let’s return to the Action Playset and see if Karate survives the night!

*Play “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman (Trouble in Paradise album).

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy designing the TIMECOP tabletop roleplaying experience. Check out their new show BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rhia, who keeps pouring radioactive waste on all of their pets but just keeps ending up with huge vet bills.