Thundercats TTRPG Kickstarter turns the ’80s cartoon into a full D&D world

That urge to take advantage of ThunderCats’ potential — its decaying civilizations’ implied millennia of history, its clash between science and the supernatural, its badass cat-people warriors, and so much more — explains a lot about the ways creators built out the setting in later spin-offs, from the 2011 animated ThunderCats reboot to Dynamite’s ongoing current comics series. It also explains the immediate enthusiastic response to Lynnvander Studios’ Kickstarter for a ThunderCats tabletop roleplaying game, which was fully funded within one minute of release. The fundraiser is now in its final days and scheduled to end on Jan. 16.

Polygon reached out to Lynnvander Studios founder Tommy Gofton, the lead designer and producer for ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game, to talk about the Kickstarter response, plans for the game’s future, and the challenges of mapping ThunderCats into a Dungeons & Dragons 5e (2024) ruleset.

Creating a unified ThunderCats roleplaying universe

“A lot of ’80s cartoons are a little heavier on the adult content, more so than kids' content,” Gofton said. “When [Dynamite] dropped ThunderCats on our lap, I remembered what the show meant to me as a child, and how I still love the actual world itself. I was like, ‘This is perfect. I can revisit my childhood fun, then watch it a whole second time as an adult, and see how life is different.’ And it was pretty good!”

Part of the personal appeal of the project, Gofton said, was figuring out “how a fantasy-punk-style technology world could be adapted into the D&D rules.” Because he and his team had already done something similar with the D&D-compatible World of Imaria setting, he felt he had “some of the basic ideas put into mechanics,” but that he could push further into ThunderCats’ mix of the arcane and the material in a world that includes everything from laser blasters and spaceships to evil spirits and mystical weapons. He also felt like there was an opportunity to bring everything that had been done with the ThunderCats IP into one ruleset.

“The comics expanded the universe quite a bit, but not everybody wants to jump in on a comic book,” he said. “I'm not a comic book person. I'm a movie and TV guy or a video game guy. So I just never really had the exposure to comics. And sometimes when a license spreads across multiple platforms, it attracts different audiences, but without a unifying voice to give you the comprehensive guide to what the universe could be. So for us, this was really exciting, to be able to stitch the comics, cartoons, and all the things out there together to create a comprehensive guide to this universe.”

“Everybody can play where they want.”

The initial sourcebook for ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game lays out five different “eras” of the world, along with story seeds and guidelines for those eras. The earliest era, “Exodus” (also the title of ThunderCats’ pilot episode), is set at the beginning of the 1980s series, shortly after a handful of refugees from the destroyed planet Thundera land on the savage world of Third Earth and have to find allies and carve out a space for themselves. The final era, “ThunderGuard,” takes place after the series’ four-season, 130-episode run, with the planet Thundera reformed and recolonized, and the series’ long-running villains defeated, but lurking in the shadows.

“Everyone has a favorite part of ThunderCats’ storyline, and they're going to want to play in that era,” Gofton said. “So picking an era and driving that home wasn't the right call. We really needed to make sure it was ambiguous enough to fit across all the timelines, so people can do whatever they want. We do have a central point on the timeline: the book is focused heavily on the era post-Thundera, a little bit past the cartoon. But we do have a lot of rolling back and forth between the timelines, with enough flavor to each timeline so everybody can play where they want.”

The initial rulebook largely assumes that player characters will be Thunderians, the cat-like inhabitants of Thundera, though they might or might not be ThunderCats, the Thunderian noble class of seasoned combat veterans and recognized warriors. But Gofton said there are rulesets to cover any of the species within the setting.

“If it exists in the universe, we found a way to put it in the book,” he said. “Whether it's a monster stat block or a playable species, it's in there. You can play Tuskas, a Monkian or Jackalman, Reptilians like Slithe. You can play Berbils, those robot bears. We got Snarfs in there. Mechanically, there's nothing left out. We put everything in.”

Bringing ThunderCats into D&D

Gofton said the decision to use D&D rules for ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game was partly a matter of familiarity, and partly a practical marketing decision. “People want to work on the systems they know and love, and I do know and love D&D fluently,” he said. “It is my primary choice for gaming. And there's still a business model behind it. […] Anybody who's not a fan of D&D is very vocal about it, but they are still statistically a minority.”

He said that isn’t a bad thing, it just makes it harder “to create a game for an esoteric system” that might not be as widely adopted or advertised. “These systems are really amazing, and they contribute a lot to the industry, but sometimes they're not the top of the game when it comes to the sales element, or in terms of barrier to entry,” he said. “And Dungeon & Dragons has hit the mark for being a very good barrier-to-entry game. A lot of non-heavy gamers are playing it. Kids are getting involved now. They've really hit a good target audience with the game system for 5th edition, and moved away from the crunchy rulesets.”

Part of the goal for ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game was that it could be played as a standalone game or seamlessly integrated with an existing D&D game. “You can pluck the elements out and pretty much seamlessly fit them into the other existing worlds of D&D,” Gofton said. “You can play a Thundercat in Forgotten Realms, or a Mu’tant in Ravenloft, or whatever you want to do, and it will fit seamlessly.”

In terms of translating the ThunderCats’ world into D&D, Gofton said there were no particular standout mechanical challenges, and that the biggest holdup was the timeline for the initial sourcebook, which had to be completed quickly “due to a licensing renewal situation.”

“The timeline wouldn't allow us to generate new art, so we really only were able to use [Dynamite’s] comic book art,” he said. “That was a boon, because we had dozens and dozens of issues worth of assets we could cut from, so we ended up getting really good art without having to worry about time or budget for it. But there are still a lot of obscure but popular elements of ThunderCats that we don't have art for. So we had to decide to keep it in without art, or take it out.”

The other challenge was integrating all the different versions of the story across different spinoffs, which weren’t always compatible. “The different cartoons and the different comic book series all have different ideas on certain world rules — a world canon, or a world dogma,” Gofton said. “There are logic breaks. Sometimes there's just a difference of opinion on whether a character lived or died. So we've had to find a way to take the best elements of each of them and stitch them together to create a canon timeline that makes them all make sense.”

A single line from ThunderCats might be a significant story seed

Longtime ThunderCats fans may be curious about elements in the game that they don’t remember from the show, like notes on the gods the Thunderians worship. But Gofton said most of the game’s elements were taken from the original ’80s series, including throwaway lines that fans may not remember.

“A lot of ’80s cartoons — even a lot of cartoons today — will have these pass-by lines, where someone will go, ‘Oh, well, back when Mongor, the God of Fear was ruling the world…’ and they’ll never mention it again in the whole cartoon,” he said. “Mongor is mentioned a lot, but that's an example. It’s just a pass-by phrase that's supposed to let the viewers think that there's a richer world out there. It's a very George R.R. Martin kind of thing, where somebody says, like, ‘the kingdom beyond the forest.’ Within the world, everybody knows what that is, but in real life [it’s never spelled out].

“So we went through the cartoons, picking out those one-liners that mean nothing outside of world-building, but mean everything to us, because we can say, ‘Oh, they mentioned this weird god in the void of the Astral Plane. Amazing. We're going to take that god and give it a reason for being in the story.’”

Next steps for the ThunderCats TTRPG

Ultimately, Gofton said, Lynnvander Studios will expand the ThunderCats TTRPG “as far as the rights holder will allow us.” That could include recreating the original sourcebook with other rulesets besides D&D. Gofton is already planning one module book, and hopes to be able to release more collections of adventures for the game, which would also let the design team expand the setting lore further.

“It’ll be based on the success of this book, which is really what it comes down to,” Gofton said. “It is very successful so far. But it would be nice to draw new content and add that to the story. That would be an interesting path to take. That will be a larger discussion with the rights-holders, but it is on my docket.”

The Kickstarter campaign for ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game project concludes on Friday, Jan. 16, at 6 p.m. EST.