Pyramid Review
Cartoon Action Hour: The 1980's Action Cartoon RPG
Published by Z-Man Games
Written by Cynthia Celeste Miller and Eddy Webb
Illustrated by Jared Brown, Dennis Chacon, Jeremy Dale, Mark Evans, Tony Grate, Bryce Gunkel, Ken Haeser, Jon Huff, Joe King, Jason Millet, Gabe Pena, Eugene Perez, Jr. and Oliver Castaneda, Christian Saksida, Leanne Shaw, Rob Thomas
192-page b&w softcover; $24.95
Though rich in possibilities, few if any roleplaying games have come from the brightly-colored big stories of the small screen played out to a big bowl of sugar-laced, milk-soaked cereal. These are the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s, which in their way were the cliffhanger-ending pulp serials of their day. Palladium's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is one such RPG, though that drew more from the original comic than the cartoon that would follow, while the other would be The Masters of the Universe Role Playing Game published by FASA in 1985.
Cartoon Action Hour: The 1980's Action Cartoon RPG provides a set of rules by which a GM can create a cartoon series of their own, whether from scratch or based upon one of the many 1980s Saturday morning cartoons. This could be a sci-fi western like Bravestarr, paramilitary action with G.I. Joe, form-switching robots with Transformers, or epic fantasy action with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Indeed, Cartoon Action Hour, which describes itself as "2 books in 1," devotes its second half to a setting or serial which . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: April 18, 2003
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