Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness (Palladium Books, 1985)
My Experience: This was the first true RPG I played, back around 1986ish (I may be shaving hairs with this versus Toon, but the precise details have been memory-holed).
Kabu, California Coyote Ninja Avenger
Kabu doesn’t know how or why he’s different from the coyotes of his family. They abandoned him when he was about four weeks old and differences began to manifest. Lost and starving, he wandered into a small town on the edge of the Mojave, where he encountered his first human: Yasu Sanada. It was Master Sanada who gave Kabu his name – literally, “cub” in Japanese – and raised him as a very peculiar child and, later, protege.
Before World War II, Master Sanada was a moderately-successful tailor in Los Angeles. Like many Japanese-Americans of the time, he was forcibly relocated to an internment camp. When the war ended, he chose not to return, instead homesteading on a remote patch of land along the southern California-Nevada border. For all the things he taught Kabu, all the secrets of the Akishirai clan he passed on to his last student, he never told Kabu why he chose isolation.
The answer was clear enough, though, when Kabu came home from hunting to find Master Sanada dead – executed with a slash to the throat. Whatever the aged ninja had avoided for forty years, it had found him at last.
Kabu had nothing to go on but his master’s old stories. It seemed as good a starting point as any for the vendetta of the last Akishikari. Now he’s hunting in the shadows of Los Angeles – and looking for allies.
Traits
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) 18 (+5% to all skills)
ME (Mental Endurance) 13
MA (Mental Affinity) 15
PS (Physical Strength) 15
PP (Physical Prowess) 20 (+3 to dodge, parry, strike)
PE (Physical Endurance) 18 (+2 to save vs. coma, death, toxins)
PB (Physical Beauty) 10
Speed 18 (+1 to dodge)
Hit Points 18
SDC (Structural Damage Capacity) 44
Mutations
Size 7 (90 pounds, 5’2″)
Full hands
Fully bipedal
Full speech
No human appearance
Claws (1d6 damage)
Teeth (1d8 damage)
Advanced smell (tracking 30%, detect extreme emotions 64%)
Skills
Acrobatics (various capabilities, too lazy to type out here)
Athletics General
Basic Survival 35%
Climbing 50%
Cook 50%
First Aid 60%
Foreign Language: Japanese 52%
History: Japanese 50%
Hunting 35%
Meteorology 35%
Pick Locks 20%
Prowl 46%
Running
Sewing 60%
Surveillance Systems 30%
Fighting Style
Hand to Hand: Ninjitsu
WP (Weapon Proficiency): Kusari-gama
WP: Naginata
WP: Ninja bow
WP: Shuriken
Equipment
Kusari-gama (1d10 damage)
Naginata (1d8 damage)
Shuriken x10 (1d4 damage)
Eggshell bomb x3
Lock picking and impressioning kit (12 picks, 3 tensioners, 3 key blanks, key file)
Aviator sunglasses, carefully bent to fit a canid face
Casual wardrobe (jeans, concert t-shirts, leather hiking boots)
Ninja emergency kit x2
$40 in small bills
Notes and Afterthoughts
I started with TMNT because, well… I started with TMNT. I stupidly let my original books go in a Half-Price purge a long time ago, but The Girl bought me a replacement core book for Midwinter a couple of years back.
Knowing character creation would be random, I went in without a pre-existing concept, and was pleasantly surprised to get a ninja coyote. That combination suggested the back-story, which, in turn, gave me an obvious motivation to have a ninja coyote prowling the alleys of 1980s L.A. I would play the shit out of this concept if given the opportunity.
Mechanically, Kabu got a nice boost to his physical stats from all of the athletic-type skills, and the +4 from being a wild canid type pushed him up to a decent 5% one-time bonus to all his skills. I tried to build him with a package appropriate to a predator growing up in the SoCal desert without benefit of formal schooling. I did violate the requirement to take a fencing skill with ninjitsu because, well, I like polearms.