Thanks to everyone who has backed our Kickstarter. We’re well on our way to being funded thanks to you! Check out our Tunse’al section for a list of everyone who has backed us as of 9 a.m. Eastern 11/15/12.

If you haven’t backed us yet, please check out our Kickstarter page chocked full of information and rewards for helping us get the funding we need to print out a supplement specific to Free RPG Day, a major marketing event in the role-playing game industry.

Meanwhile, our editors have finished seconds edits. We’re now in the final editing where we incorporate those changes and take one more pass through each. Then it’s doing the final layout and one more pass through to ensure nothing breaks in funny places, text hasn’t played hide-and-seek with us, and that all the formatting is the way it is supposed to be. After that, Kickstarter backers and past prize winners get their copies of Tunse’al Setting Guide in whichever format they choose and we load the PDF to DriveThruRPG for sale.

Thanks for your interest and support!

Vickey

Who doesn’t love a good noise to jump-start character action? Here’s the creature behind that sound today.

Mosquito, Giant – The size of a large adult’s hand, giant mosquitoes are not as benign as their smaller relatives. They are nearly as agile with thin bodies and adaptive flying patterns. They can be quite sneaky, undetectable even, as they plunge a sharply pointed tube into a victim’s skin, anesthetizing the surface so that the suctioning tube isn’t easily noticed.

Favoring large arteries, in less than a minute, it can take enough blood and pump in enough anesthetic to make a person dizzy for a couple of minutes. If the person reacts badly to the injection, it can cause feinting or a day-long coma. Furthermore, the wound results in tenderness, swelling, and itchiness for days. The puncture may become infected, if not treated. Giant mosquitoes have a 1:10 chance of carrying an infectious disease, which could be fatal over time. DR 1

We’ve still working in the Word document of the Tunse’al manuscript for the preliminary layout. As we’ve reviewed the document, we’ve realized some things just weren’t where or how we wanted them to be.

As an example, the Bestiary & Fae section had been broken out by regions beasts occupied. That’s great, except it meant a lot of redundant information and wasn’t intuitive. No one wants to find bears in two different locations or saurs (our version of dinosaurs) in multiple locations unless there’s a good reason for it. We wanted people to know what was in which regions since the land is thousands of miles wide and long, but that wasn’t a good enough reason.

We’re now revising the format, using a chart to indicate what’s where so it’s at a glance, and then having it so you can look up the beast alphabetically. We’re trying to ensure we don’t make things needlessly complicated!

Vickey

One challenge we’ve had with creating a setting that is independent of any particular system, or systemless, as we call it, is ensuring that the parts that make something cool translate to whatever game mechanics a GM chooses to employ. That means everything from character skills and traits to the difficulty of an encounter, an NPC, or an entire supplement.

After much debate and various angles of looking at the concepts, we’ve come up with two character tables and a three difficulty tables for illustration. Don’t worry, the difficulty tables include two that show how we got at the one that you’ll actually use for gauging how hard a situation is. You don’t need all three.

So what are they? The character creation tables show off Level of Ease (LE) as it pertains to a skill your character has and the degree of an Innate Trait (IT) that your character has. Skills are things you have to learn to do, where traits are those things that are natural part of you. As in spear chucking and athleticism respectively.

The difficulty tables started out with one showing the relationship of the percentage chance of success a character at any given level of experience would have of success in any given situation given its inherent difficulty. A character that’s a rookie pitted against another rookie has a 50% chance of winning the slingshot match. One that’s against an apprentice has a 30% chance. We assigned percentages for 36 match-ups.

After doing that, we still weren’t quite where we wanted to be. Our goal was to have an at-a-glance mechanism to convey difficulty. The percentages were not short enough, and required too much thought for someone who worked eight hours, came home to take care of the house, and only has 20 minutes left before the gamers are going to arrive. Enter the next table: odds!

On that, we got a bit closer to something that was quick to spot and comprehend. Sometimes folks just find odds easier to deal with than percentages. When you start dealing with things like 13% chance of success, it’s a lot different than when it was 50/50. That wasn’t quite tight enough, though. What we were going for was really a difficulty rating, which odds are not.

Having two tables in front of us, both essentially saying the same thing, we were able to distill that down to single digits that had meaning attached. We finally had our Difficulty Rating (DR). And now you have it, too!