One of my better ideas

My love for Palladium's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness roleplaying game, and in particular its After the Bomb post-apocalyptic spinoff, is well-known. I've been thinking of giving Road Hogs a go again.

But there is a problem -- fundamentally, the system is a bit of a clunker. And as I'm thinking of running it as a one-shot, I don't think my players want to get their heads around its intricacies. So I back-burnered the idea, until the other day. 

What happened the other day was that the PDFs for the most recent Kickstarter from Sine Nomine games, planetary warfare supplement Starvation Cheap, arrived. And as I read through them I got to thinkin' about TMNT.

By Tan Ho Sim, from Starvation Cheap. 

See, I am a big fan of the Sine Nomine games in general, and they have a nice post-apocalyptic game, Other Dust. To run Road Hogs with it you'd have to up the tech level a bit, but you could just do that with Stars Without Number, easy peasy. Maybe add a little more detail to the vehicle rules, vehicle crit tables or something like that. I think I did that for my own SWN game, in fact. You could probably adapt the Road Hogs ones with no trouble. 

The only thing that's really missing is the animal-creation system. The most enjoyable part of TMNT character creation is making your animal guy. You get a pool of BIO-E points that you can spend on different animal abilities like claws, wings and so on as well as features like human hands, appearance, upright posture, etc. In my experience, even went full human everything except no human looks, so I might not even bother with that element. But you can take the mutation list on pp. 33-35 of Other Dust and replicate pretty much any animal feature from the rules using those.

I mean, look at the list: acute hearing, acute visions, aquatic, armoured skin, body weaponry, burrowing, clinging, flight, jumping, night vision, echolocation, stinger, temperature resistance ... I mean, that's a pretty good suite of animal powers. Just take the power off the TMNT character generation menu and pick the Other Dust one that most closely maps. It's not balanced, but who gives a dang? 

Yeah. Mutations and basic rules from Other Dust, weapons and vehicles and stuff from Stars Without Number, settings and BIO-E and prices and stuff from Road Hogs and Bob's your uncle. I think that's actually pretty doable.