#road hogs

OK, so, After the Bomb is the post-apocalyptic setting from Palladium that uses Erick Wujcik’s mutation system from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, without totally being a TMNT game (it was a way to have some of the TMNT material they were producing not be contingent on the TMNT license, even though TMNT comic artists contributed quite a bit of art to the line). The main rules detailed the violent struggle between mutant animals and humanity on the East Coast of the US. Road Hogs (1986) details what is going on over on the West Coast.

Here, the human Americorps are the good guys and the bad guys are a reaving army of mutant bikers. Its Mad Max, but with anthropomorphic animals, basically. There are lots of new mutant types, including aquatic animals (whales?) and a lengthy section on vehicles that includes rules for combat and building new rides.    

I can’t honestly judge the new rules because I only have the slightest grasp on the old ones – Palladium’s approach has always baffled me. I will say that Road Hogs never captured my imagination like some of the other books in the line did. Despite how appealing the core idea is when you hear it, there is just not enough material fleshing out the world. It doesn’t come close to measuring up to your hopes.

The TMNT Post-Apocalyptic Raphael Story

I didn’t much care for TMNT 2017′s post apocalyptic tale for several reasons. 

One of which is turtle hair. The others include Donnie being basically himself in a robot body (A next-gen Metalhead with an AI based on his “father” that Raph treats as Donnie would have been more, well, post-apocalyptic), and Mikey/Leo’s roles being too obvious (would have been more interesting for Leo to find peace in the goofy, hippy-dippy lifestyle of his brother once his whole world vanished and for Mikey to thrive in the new environment as he does in Dimension-X), the fact that the oasis map is clearly a subway map and no one, not even Mikey, brings this up, and.. well, because it doesn’t really compare very favorably to what probably didn’t inspire it, but ought to have. 

In the original release of Road Hogs, a TMNT: After the Bomb supplement for the Palladium TMNT and Other Strangeness RPG, we get a nine page minicomic, where the titular Road Hogs decide to raid a mutant settlement. As you can see above, it features a wizened Raphael and his young pupils, and here we see what could have been the root of a really good mini-series. Bonuses:

While obviously a different mutant breed than Raphael, the Turtle boys (and girl, maybe?) and their sensei all lack hair (not letting that go).

Raphael’s age means the apocalypse could have happened at any point along the way, meaning the canon fate of all the characters you know from the show doesn’t have to be dying or being corrupted in a mutagenic apocalypse. The war could have happened when they were older, they could have had many adventures after the big boom before time caught up with them, etc.

Raphael becoming a teacher like Splinter is character development, him still being an angry loner is stasis. 

Road Hogs: Live From Richmond To Pocono by The Groundhogs

The phrase “white-boy blues” can induce twinges of distaste, for reasons both political and aesthetic. For all the good (Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Taste, Paul Butterfield’s records with Mike Bloomfield) there’s an alarming amount of bad (Savoy Brown, Joe Bonamassa’s cartoonish preening, anything involving George Thorogood…). While Cream and Led Zep still figure strongly in the public imagination of the British blues boom, the bombast of both bands amplifies the worst tendencies of the music — all those endless solos that buried the songs under layer upon bloated layer of cock-rocking excess (not to mention Jimmy Page’s tendency to take credit for other folks’ music, or Clapton’s grotesque descent from garden variety conservatism to reactionary paranoia). The Groundhogs don’t have the same residue of prestige attached to their records and songs, likely because they never achieved the same heights of celebrity, or of Hammer of the Gods-style rock-star mythos. Like the humble critter from which the band took its name, the Groundhogs worked close to the dirt. They stayed tuned in to the grime and misery that gave the blues shape, even when their impulse to rawk long and loud moved toward more expansive moods and musical spaces.