Upcoming Thundercats TTRPG will let you smash ancient mummies as a giant cat person — now on Kickstarter!

ThunderCats was one of the big names in animated 1980’s toy commercials disguised as children’s entertainment, and soon it will have its own TTRPG. That first statement may sound cynical, but it’s also factual — Thundercats was simultaneously a cartoon produced by Rankin Bass, animated in Japan by the Pacific Animation Corporation, and also a line of toys, much like Masters of the Universe before it. But I defy you to not sing along to the theme song. Somehow, almost despite itself, ThunderCats became a standout for its time with its wild science fiction crashes into magic storyline about a bunch of heroic cat people escaping their dying homeworld Thundera and ending up fighting an ancient mummy and his army of mutants.

Now, because the universe has decided to take pity on me and break up the continuous nightmare fuel of day to day reality, ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game is being funded on Kickstarter.

I say being funded but the game has already smashed its funding goals, which it met in one minute, and is now sitting at over $200k USD from an original goal of under $2,000. The game is one of many games that, in the wake of the nearly legendary OGL debacle from Wizards of the Coast, is making use of the Creative Commons licensed 5e rules as its backbone. So if the only game you and your groups really know is D&D, you can soon play talking cat people with superpowers and magic items as they fight a shriveled up mummy who becomes incredibly hench after invoking ancient spirits of evil for a brute-up.

The book has a unique playable class — the Mechanist, who specializes in Thundera’s weird science — and a series of subclasses for established 5e classes like Fighters, Bards, Monks and so on. All that, plus detailed campaign setting and ideas for running games in the ThunderCats universe. You could literally just import these guys into your own D&D game.

Honestly, ThunderCats is tailor-made to be an interesting TTRPG setting, in that it has a whole spaceship load of advanced science, ancient magic, and a broad canvas of mentioned but unexplored lore. It also got a revamp in 2011 that sadly did not last nearly long enough, if you could also set your ThunderCats adventures on the mystical planet of Thundera, or you could use the confusing Third Earth, a planet that I think is supposed to be a future dystopian version of Earth but honestly could be the distant past instead. As a game master, I love settings that are this outright unshackled and which have wiggle room.

Plus, you know, superpowered cat people. And unlike a lot of Kickstarter campaigns, this one claims that the book is already ready to go — as soon as the Kickstarter is wrapped up, the books will be printed and shipped to backers, and should be arriving in February 2026. So if you, like me, are easily cajoled into adventure by giving a young lion person a magic sword so he can kick in the door of an ancient bodybuilder’s crypt, definitely check out ThunderCats: The Roleplaying Game. The Kickstarter runs until January 15, though there should be other ways to order a copy if you come in late.