My First Palladium
Over at Castalia, on guilty pleasures no-one has played:
I’ll always have a bit of a soft touch for Palladium games. I mean… no sooner had I stumbled across a stray copy of the iconic Moldvay Basic D&D set, than I had a desire for something like that, but weirder. And Palladium was right there waiting with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. After the cartoon and the movies, it’s hard to imagine how freaky that was when it was new. I spent countless hours rolling up characters and daydreaming about the Terror Bears, a twisted take on the then ubiquitous Care Bears. It was just awesome.
I bought TMNT in high school because it just. Looked. Freakin’. Cool. The system was a hot mess, but what a glorious mess. I also ended up buying a copy of the firs [*Mechanoid Invasion*](https://infogalactic.com/info/The_Mechanoid_Invasion) book left laying around, which channeled, in a lot of ways, the same mood as Gregory Benford’s *[Great Sky River](https://infogalactic.com/info/Great_Sky_River_(novel))*.
The Palladium games I actually ended up playing any significant amount of were the Macross-based Robotech books they published.
But good lord I loved having them all.