Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
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| Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles | |
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| Designer | Erick Wujcik |
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| Publisher | Palladium Books |
| Publication date | 1989 |
| Genre(s) | SciFi |
| System | Megaversal system |
Transdimensional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a supplement for the role-playing game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness which covered setting and rules information for both time travel and transdimensional travel.
[edit] Time travel
The time travel system lays out a temporal physics system that explains time as a flowing tube. This tube spirals along in twists and the twists are themselves wrapped into coils. This time stream can be imagined by thinking of a telephone cord that is wrapped around a cylinder. Time travel is possible by leaving your current point in the tube and travelling either to a neighboring twist or any coil. Coils allowed time travellers to travel into the past by great leaps, to predefined years. The farther in the past the coil, the greater the gap. The first few coils closest to present day were separated by thousands of years, coils farther in the past were separated by millions and then billions of years. Roughly detailed in a few paragraphs, the coils go as far back as the beginning of the universe.
Twists vary in size depending on which coil was considered its home coil. In the present day coil (detailed based on 1988, when the game was written) twists were 125 years apart. So from 1988, one could travel into the past year of 1863 or to the future year of 2113. From the new twist the time traveller could potentially travel another 125 years, either to return home or farther away from their home time, to further away to 1738 or 2238 respectively. There are rough details for past times with more detailed future times for the next millennia. The future time periods consisted of mostly a variety of apocalyptic settings, ranging from Palladium's After The Bomb setting to robot massacres inspired by stories of A.I.'s run amok, and a scant few more utopian settings.
There were no guidelines for what happens if one travelled so far down successive twists as to cross into another coil, however twists were so comparatively small that it was mechanically discouraged to travel by such means. It was easier to simply jump directly to the desired coil.
[edit] Time Stream Alterations
Changes to the past (or future) are dealt with using alternate branching time streams (aka a 1.3 Immutable Timeline). Changes to the timeline would automatically put travellers into an alternate branch with the changes in place. If the travellers change the past and then travel to the future to reach their home time, their home time will appear different to them, according the changes that were put in place.
However, time stream changes were intended to be played with loosely. The sample adventure includes an instance where a player, reading a history book, re-reads a section of the book and notices that there has been a change.
[edit] Mutant Animals
This book introduced extinct animal species, including a wide variety of dinosaurs and Pleistocene mammals. New size levels were added (expanding the previous maximum from 20 to 25) to allow for some of the massive sizes of dinosaurs. A new method of mutation was introduced as well, allowing for the addition of BIO-E for traveling into the future. Making evolutionary mutation towards sentience something of a temporal mandate. This meant dinosaurs and other ancient creatures taken into present day would automatically mutate given enough time.
This book also introduces the idea of mutant humans and has advanced psionic rules. Humans travelling into the future might also mutate. Humans could also remove hands, features, or legs (features animal mutants usually must add to become more human like) and potentially become the smooth skinned creatures with vestigial legs and arms that some evolutionary science fiction mused. By sacrificing default human attributes, humans could attain more powerful psionic phenomena, ranging from ectoplasmic arms and legs (to make up for a lack of them) and more powerful mental abilities not previously covered or available in the core rulebook.
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