or I might owe Palladium Games an apology and start loving the turtles again.
For years now, I've had a saying "palladium has the best worlds, but the worst system". Nightbane is one of my favorite worlds. The premise of the game is that the world goes Dark for 24 hours and in the darkness people begin to see monsters merge from the shadows. You play one of those monsters, but the dark day as it was called didn't only bring monsters and also brought invaders from my Shadowlands that began taking over the Earth. These creatures began inserting themselves in positions of power around the country and pretty soon they run the show. Nightbane put as a monster against the creatures that are trying to take over the world. It's a very punk rock game heavily inspired by things like Clive barkers night breed mixed with a little bit of Hellraiser.
The game was produced in 1994 and came out alongside some of palladium's other works like the very popular refs, heroes Unlimited, Palladium fantasy, and whole host of supplements that all came out as soft, cover, full-size books with black-and-white pages and shiny glossy covers.
But about 10 years before this game came out they were one of the first licenses to jump on board with an underground comic called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.This is well before the cartoon came out and spawn turtle mania. It came entirely from the black-and-white comic series which was darker and grittier than the colorful cartoons that kids would come to know in love. It was a fun little game that was based around essentially ninjas, fighting bad guys.
Find my copy sitting in a milk crate full of children's books, coloring books, other random kid stuff in a swap meet in Washington state. I picked it up for around $.50 took it home and read it. And then pitched it to my gaming group saying hey let's try this ninja Turtles game. It was kind of a lark and something fun to do, but I thought it would be maybe a couple of one shots I ended up playing the game for almost a year creating a very rich campaign that I came to consider one of the best things I've ever ran.
