I recently discovered I’m missing an important piece of gaming history on my bookshelves. Once upon a time, Palladium Books – not just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as has been reported, but various of their lines of TTRPGs – included transvestism, homosexuality, and pedophilia on their random insanity tables. Every edition I have of those games do not have those dubious entries (altho arguably some transphobia lingered). Let’s take a trip back in time…
Palladium Books is basically one guy’s baby, Mr. Kevin Siembieda, some kind of Rust Belt boy with a head full of fantastickal dreamz. He did some work on other people’s RPGs, mainly as an illustrator, but like so many of us, he was not satisfied with the systems as written. He had his own ideas, and eventually, he made his own games. The big early flagship of all this was the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game. Compared to D&D’s equivalent products at the time, this was lavishly illustrated – mostly by the man himself. Every race and character class and monster had high-effort art beside it. I believe his medium was the humble pencil, but there were no sloppy lines, nothing left unshaded.
I don’t know how he came to be in this position, but he had his own press. Palladium didn’t just slap a file together and send it to a printer; they made their own books in-house. Back in the day, there was a profession called “typesetter,” a person with inky fingers pushing little metal blocks into arrays for the printing process. The typesetter for Palladium was Maryann Siembieda, who I think was Kevin’s wife? These days I doubt there’s a single RPG publisher who prints their own books, unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.
One practical aspect of typesetting was that it strongly encouraged one to recycle material, so if there were systems that could be shared by multiple books, the pages that were already laid out would just have a few minor details tweaked and appear almost the same. The majority of Palladium’s books used the same font, whether they were fantasy or sci-fi, because that was the font they had in the press. I’m not clever enough with that shit to tell you what font it is. Nothing exciting, but still, when I saw it on the advertisements for Palladium’s books in Dragon magazine, I used to get some weird kind of satisfaction from the familiarity.
So. Random insanity tables. These were included near the beginning of most Palladium books as an optional way to add character to a character. They’d be more likely to see use if your character, in play, suffered from a magic spell or circumstance that forced a roll. And when these rules were first rolled out, they included “transvestism,” wherein you are compelled to wear the clothes of the “opposite sex,” homosexuality, and pedophilia. I believe homosexuality was phrased more like orientation reversal, so you could roll that twice and end up where you started, or if you started with a gay character, be scared straight. The idea of randomly contracting pedophilia was somethin’ else. Aside from the fun-times ableism of this stuff, it was a creepy mess for all the reasons you can deduce with your 2026 bewokenment.
I was first introduced to RPGs by Try-Anything-Once Todd, whose fundie mother and stepfather allowed Palladium Books because technically they weren’t D&D. Weird times. I borrowed his books for a few years before I finally started to collect my own, and by the time that happened, all the current editions of their books no longer included these results on that chart.
The insanity chart was still there, for fun-times ableism flavor, but no longer would transgender and/or gay people be so pathologized, or pedophilia be used for a laugh. This was the early nineties, so good job, Kevin! Genuinely. I’m sure you have faults galore, but that was cool. Starting with Heroes Unlimited and subsequently copied into Rifts, however, characters with “multiple personalities” could have an “opposite sex” personality, which raised its own foolish questions. Hey, the youths of today what claim they have some flavor of multiple personalities do say those personalities can have different gender identities. But still, this was in a chart where every other result had some character – hardcase, jokester, wildman, etc – and this one had no trait except being “trapped in the body of” whatever. Why can’t a trans Sybil also be a hardcase or a jokester? Hmmm, Kevin? KEVIN?
If you partake of the art of the past, you will have some things to deal with. Personally, I’m inclined to give Mr. Siembieda a pass on all of this. Obviously, this article is using it for a laugh. Enjoy your genders, people, and deal with your random insanities neurodivergences in whatever ways you see fit. Game on.
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I searched: https://www.palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=107706
that’s even more sheisty than the one i found an image of, hoo boy
Huh. I never noticed that. We didn’t play much with the Palladium system, so I don’t think we ever used those tables.
But yeah. My copy of The Palladium Role-Playing Game, 1983, has those entries in the charts on insanity. While my copy of Beyond the Supernatural, 1988, has revised charts.
The TMNT gamebook and Monsters and Animals of course don’t mention such things at all.
In both books one of the psychosis a player can develop is; “Become a Psychologist”. While we rarely played the system, the books were one of the better reads because they are filled with sarcastic humor.
I never picked up the Rifts series, by that time we were either playing GURPS or one of the many home-brews we developed over the years.
The very worst humans take control of the presses because that’s what the very worst humans do. It’s like observing that “the very worst naval shells hit you below the waterline.” God damn! It’s true! They do! And garbagey humans are going to propagate via media.
Sigh.
It’s Monday and the silencer adapter for my .45 hasn’t shown up, so I guess I’ll fill my mouth with lemon sorbet instead.
flex – palladium is rightfully mocked but they put together enjoyable books. for certain values of enjoyment. looking back my old copy of beyond the supernatural is a fave.
mjr – hey mr. siembieda degunked that part of his books well ahead of the sjw wokening, so he’s not the worst. for this at least.
unless it’s some turbohipster that distributes deckled parchment pamphlets inked by ostrich quill for five hundred bucks a pop.
When Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley and (?Aliester Crowley?) and some other London “influencers” did their own printing of “Le Morte D’Arthur” they used red Morocco calfskin for the bindings, with custom-cut steel gilding stamps, and Beardsley’s iconic woodblocks. It just rubs in my face what a bunch of ignorant louts today’s “influencers” are – but it’s simply the equivalent of having Crowley-selected custom-made gilding dies printed on purple drum-dyed Persian eunuch-hide.You know, like my shoulder holsters are cut from.
Uh, anyhow, I see today’s Dubai car outfitters going down that path.
So they printed 100 copies of Le Morte in red and gold each numbered by the publisher. My set’s in white calfskin and gold, signed and numbered, which is craze because bitch I’d never put silver and peach on a page near gold, god, is this Kanye’s set?!
[One of the premises of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s the Club Dumas appears to involve a set of prints of an ancient book, that was pulled by the press-operator when nobody was looking (what a plot device!!!) that might explain certain copies of some books, without going to lengths.
One night when I was in a bar in Vegas, with The Sisters of Mercy on stage, (I was working on the tequila to damp down the cocaine) I asked ChatGPT to start developing me a plot-line along the vein that Otto Skorzeny had been looped into Himmler’s last command, to attempt to find the large jar of honey in which the mortal remains of Alexander of Macedon were interred. GPT went Bat Shit(tm), looping in Howard Hughes and Indiana Jones, explaining fairly well the gun battle between MP-40 carrying SS-Untoten-Vampirmajor near the (closed) Temple Bar underground station near Churchill’s bolt-hole…
[Operation HONEYCOMB (classified — destroyed, 1953)
Peenemünde, April 1945.
The Baltic wind smells of brine and burnt cordite. The Soviets are close enough that the engineers have stopped pretending they’ll “relocate the program.” Crates are burning. Ledgers are dissolving in galvanized bins of lye.
In a locked shed at the edge of the airfield sits something that doesn’t belong:
a rectangular block of blackened aluminum, honeycombed inside like a beehive.
If you break it apart, each cavity holds a sealed cylinder, identical, redundant, modular.
The logbook calls it simply:
Bienenstock-Energiespeicher Typ III (BEE-III)
Designed for a doomed project — a rocket-assisted infantry pack, meant to lift a man across rivers or minefields. Too unstable. Too short-lived. Too expensive. But the architecture is clever: many small cells working as one. Fail-safes by quantity.
The man who insists on saving it is not a scientist.
He has a scar down his cheek like someone tried to erase him with a bayonet.
Otto Skorzeny does not care about the math.
He cares that Himmler circled the entry twice.
The escape
A night landing. Running lights out. The faint whine of turbines.
Hanna Reitsch climbs from the cockpit of a battered Me 262 like a priestess from a reliquary. She refuses to salute; she nods once.
gute nacht, herr professor.
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I’d submit that Siembieda probably didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about what it implied for transgenderism or homosexuality to be included in his tables, but simply grabbed them from an old copy of DSM-II, printed in 1968.
He might have used a DSM-III (1980), but by the time DSM-III was written the debate about whether homosexuality and transgenderism were aberrant, and harmful, behaviors was in full-swing. That debate continues to this day, with probably the majority of people still considering these behaviors as not conforming, but also not harmful. I’m not saying I agree with this assessment, only that from what I read/see/observe our society has not yet reached the stage where homosexuality, cross-dressing, and related expressions of gender are considered to fully conform to our society. We’ve come a long way in the last 50 years, the vast majority of people do not consider it harmful, and that is a really good step. But we’re still at a point were regression back into that state could easily occur.
While I am not privy to Siemieda’s reasoning for updating these entries, I suspect that when he got pushback from the homosexual communities he listened to their arguments, found them compelling, and updated his tables.
Marcus @6, wrote,
I have two thoughts on this observation.
1. Just like today, the influencers in the Victorian age were those who had the best press. From our vantage of 100+ years later, we are aware of those whose influences survive to this day, and not the thousands of other influencers who existed at the time. How many people remember Samuel Smiles, Samuel Bodie, Marie Bashkirtseff, and Bob Carlisle? I certainly didn’t, but 10 minutes of research uncovered their names, exploits, and fleeting fame at the time. Even these are probably not the most ignorant of influencers at the time, because even these generated enough fame to be a subject of interest for people writing today. There were undoubtedly a lot of completely forgotten, but famous at the time, influencers in the late Victorian age. If I was serious about looking for more, I’d start with famous Tories.
2. I suspect if you looked for influencers today who are selling expensive, deliberately scarce, products, you would find some. They may not be selling verses housed in limp, purple, virgin calf-skin, bound in silk, with watermarked, high rag-content, acid-free, paper. But they might be selling numbered, limited-quantity, polished, genuine river-stones, with a gold-filled laser-etched inspirational phrase like, “Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”
As usual, some of the above is tongue-in-cheek, because if I couldn’t laugh at myself and the world, I would be far more depressed.