Creating A Character: Transdimensional Style!: Tables
The tables of the TMNT creation system were crafted with love and care, if not necessarily sanity or balance, in mind, and offer an array of options which...would actually have been better as an array of options, instead of randomly rolled. Some of these options do not make a vast amount of sense.
For example, in Step 2, after you roll to see if you are a contemporary, time-travelling, or cross-dimensional character, you are rolling for the
Cause of Mutation for Contemporary Characters. That gives you a flat 45% chance to go use another book. No, really, 01-45 tells you to go use the main TMNT&OS game book (or
After the Bomb, Road Hogs, or
Mutants Down Under as you fancy.) The other options on the table then tell you which further sub-table to roll on. So if you roll a 46-50, you are an Accidental Cretaceous Hitchhiker and roll on the Cretaceous Animals table; if you roll 51-55 you're an Accidental Cenezoic Hitchhiker and roll on the Cenezoic Animals table, etc.
A major problem with time-travel media is that our understanding of prehistory continues to change, and so what you pictured as a dinosaur in 1989 is not necessarily what you would picture as a dinosaur in 2016. This was pre-Jurassic Park, but if you were a time-traveling dinosaur mutant, would you have an existential crisis if suddenly scientists decided you had feathers?
"Accidental Hitchhiker" officially translates into "As a side effect of some time traveling device, this prehistoric animal (or egg) was dragged into the present."; other options are "Animal Sample from the ____" and translates to "The character was snatched from the past as a laboratory sample. Taken as either a baby, or as an egg, or just cloned from a tissue sample." The major differences are in your education and background roles, as well as how many BIOS points you get. Ironically, this leads to some bizarreness where you can't be an accidental hitchhiker from the Jurassic.
Filthy mammalssss...
Other options include being a Cloned Prehistoric Animal, an Ordinary Mutant Animal Mutated by Temporal Device ("Extreme temporal energies, leaking out of some experimental time travel device, accidentally mutated the character."), or an Experimental Test Animal used to test some temporal device. Honestly, they could have just made this a mad libs of comic book mutation plots.
Sub-tables for this include Experimental Animal Education and Background and Wild Animal Education and Background; the latter is the one you really want, because you have a flat 40% chance of being adopted and raised as a Ninja.
61-00 Ninja. Adopted by a "mentor" who teaches and guides the character in some form of spcial training. This is often Ninjutsu, but all areas of special training can be seelected. These characters will learn to be philosophic about all creatures. Learns an attitude of some people are good, some bad, and everyone deserves a chance to earn your trust. Ninja characters learn 3 Military/Espionage skill, 10 secondary sills (with a skill bonus of 5%) and Hand to Hand: Ninjutsu. In addition, the character has a choice of 3 ancient or ninja weapon proficiencies. Character has scavenged and built 3D6 times $100 worth of equipment.
Unfortunately, this means you can never be a Jurassic ninja.
Yaar, but how about a Jurassic pirate, matey?
Causes for Mutation of Time Travelling Characters is, if anything, even
more bizarre, and ranges from being a Trained Temporal Explorer to being a Mage's Familiar (which requires a roll on an internal sub-table to find out which period your character is from), "Retrograde Futuroid Mutant Human," and my personal favorite, Adopted By a Time Lord:
The character is a mutant animal deliberately recruited by one of the Time Lords of the 79th level of the Dimension of Null-Time. Character spends most of his time with the other player characters, but is always ready to carry out missions assigned by the Time Lord.
The TMNT had many adventures through space and time, one of which involved a crossover with Cerebus the Aardvark which I believe introduced the whole "Time-Lord" concept; on the plus side, if you cash in 25 BIOS points you get to be an Apprentic Time-Lord, with associated powers and abilities.
This is Renet, Apprentice Time Lord from the original comic series. Her mutation caused her head to grow as big as her boobs, apparently. Her later incarnations are slightly less rack-tastic, but are continually blessed with silly hats.
Time-travellers tend to be fairly OP as far as equipment and access to cool shit (Scientist/Observer gets to start out with "up to $15 million worth of time machine" in addition to other equipment and cash), but they can't be ninjas, so what's the point?
Cause of Mutation for Cross-Dimensional Characters is a bit of a misnomer, since the very first option is "Accidental Visitor from Animal Dimension" - i.e. a dimension where the population consists of actual anthromorphic animals.
This greatly facilitated the TMNT crossing over with other talking animal comics like Usagi Yojimbo, and also introduced characters from other dimensions and stuff like Planet of the Turtles or Turtleoids.
If you're a Mutant Animal from a Dimension of Magic, you can spend 30 BIO-E points to become a Wizard...but not a ninja.
Step 3: Animal Type lets you roll on a table to roll on one of five subtables: Jurassic, Cretaceous, Cenezoic, Modern, and Future Animals. I'm not sure why you roll for subtable when most of the options specify which sub-table you'll be rolling on, but that's a detail. Most of the options won't satisfy full dinosaur/prehistoric animal lovers - although I appreciate the option to be a Cretaceous Mutant Ninja Turtle - and covers things like "Duckoids" as well as "Tyrannasauroids," "Brontosauroids," etc.
For reasons I don't understand, Modern Animals are split between Warm-Blooded Animals and Cold-Blooded Animals...I'm going to guess it's because they have more books to draw on, since critters like "Aardvark" and "Wombat" are on that table. Future Animals is bullshit small and includes a 5% chance of rolling a human.
Humans can be mutants too!
After all that, the remaining three steps are squeezed down to fill the remains of the page:
Step 4: BIO-E, Special Abilities, Psionics, Growth Levels, and Human Features - Basically, all the things involved with building your character to be more than a normal time-traveling/cross-dimensional critter.
Step 5: Equipment, Supplies, and Money - Because even mutant ninjas need to afford shuriken.
Step 6: Rounding Out One's Character - Calculating mutant turtle dick size, fertility percentage, splo...oh wait, different game. I have no idea what the finer points of this step are, as all it says is: "This is also the same as in
TMNT and Other Strangeness (
revised, pgs 13-17)."
We're still not out of chargen, but next up:
Multi-Powered Mutant Humans