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"Little Date" Theme from Ranma 1/2: Anything Goes Martial Arts Series


What's New?
Tinker's Damn: The Overview
Tinker's Damn: Basic Rules
Tips to Playing Tinker's Damn
Anime: What Started The Chaos
Links To Better Educate The Future Tinker's Damn Player
The Gorin Dojo Campaign


What's New?

Well as far as Tinker's Damn is concerned there is quite a few new things going on. If you haven't visited the Studio Cranium Homepage by now, then I would highly suggest you take a peak. For those of you who have, and who have visited this page before, I updated this page because Studio Cranium updated theirs, and I felt I should at least attempt to keep up a little bit.

The latest update has included information to add in Martial Arts Anime flicks with traits and martial art chi power rules. The most interesting addition to the Tinker's Damn rules is the Ranma 1/2 Jusenkyo Curse! For those of you who don't watch Ranma 1/2, Jusenkyo is a cursed training ground who's name means "Land of Accursed Springs". The land is in China, and those fortunate, or unfortunate you decide, to find the famous training ground await certain peril. For within this land lie over 1000 springs, each one has its own tragic legend that occurred there. Whoever falls into a spring will take the body of whoever, or whatever drowned in that spring, hundereds of years ago, whenever he/she is splashed with cold water. Hot water will reverse the effect, but only until the next time...

If you are interested, the rules for this and all the other new additions can be found at the Tinker's Damn Ventures Page on the Studio Cranium site. I will also have the table listed Here in the near future with additions for GURPS rules, and a more complete list.


Tinker's Damn: The Overview

Throw away reality and prepare to enter the world of Japanese Anime, where whatever can't happen normally happens just about every day. Enter the world of alien invasions, powerful magic, cursed springs, and martial artists who can level buildings by the touch of their hand. Welcome to the world of the Tinker's Damn Anime/Manga RolePlaying Game!

Tinker's Damn is a RolePlaying Game System designed to be used as a tool for Game Masters (GMs) and Players to develop campaigns in their favorite Anime series. The rules are extremely flexible allowing the GM to edit them to suit how he feels the game world should operate. The rules also compensate the ease of combining anime series under one common system. Ever think of playing in a campaign world combining Ranma 1/2, Project A-Ko, Ninja High School, and Giant Robo? My real life GM and I are planning a campaign like it. It is quite easy to do with the rules laid out in Tinker's Damn.

Tinker's Damn is designed to produce fun, highly cinematic campaigns that are the trademark worlds of the Japanese animators. The more fun you want a campaign to be, the more you need Tinker's Damn to do it. Hey, if you want complete realism, play GURPS that's what it's for, if you want mostly seriousness you have two options: Mekton Z and Tinker's Damn. For fun and the ultimate levels of chaos there is, again, two choices: Tinker's Damn or Toon. I'd suggest Tinker's Damn for just about any Anime flick you can think about.

So, you want to pick up a copy, but don't know where? Well my friend, you have two options, go to your local RolePlaying Game store, or if they don't have it you can do this:


Tinker's Damn: Basic Rules

The basic character in Tinker's Damn is easy to create statistically speaking. There are 7 major stats including one optional stat. Those stats and their function are as follows:

Intelligence: How smart your character is. The higher the stat, the smarter you are enough said?
Agility: How fast you are. Dodge for this game is equal to 1d20+Agility, if the attacker rolls over that, he hits.
Body: This is the Strength and Durability of your character. Combat load, damage and hit points are based off of the BOD stat. Combat Load = 3 x Body, Damage Bonus = 1/4 Body, and Hp (or Wound Points, WP) = 2 x Body.
Will: The amount of sheer willpower your character possesses. A character with a high willpower will be able to keep his secrets under the most horrible of conditions.
Aware: How well your character notices things. A character with a low Aware wouldn't notice a 60 foot monster about to step on him until it's too late, a character with a high aware may notice the guy following 100 feet behind him trying to conseal his 9mm berretta in his black trenchcoat's inside pocket on the left side.
Social: This is generally used for 2 things: 1) to determine how much cash you start with, Social x 100. 2) to determine how other people generally react to you. Ping Obeh has a Social of 4, even though she's cute and has a fluffy personality, because most people don't want to be around someone who spontaneously incinerates small cars because of uncontrolled magic abilities.
Power: This is an optional stat designed to determine the inate magic ability, inner chi strength, psychic power, and net skill power of the character. It is not necessary for characters to have this power, nor is it necessary for a GM to allow it in his campaign if he does not think it makes sense for the campaign world.

For character creation, you recieve 75 character points and 75 skill points. These may be spent in anyway you'd like on the various skills in the game. Level meanings are:

1: Basic understanding, but you don't use it on a regular basis.
5: You use this skill regularly, this is the level of most people's driving skill.(with exceptions, of course)
10: Average skill level for professionals in the skill field.
18-20: This skill range is for top notch professionals. An example would be a gunfighter going into a bar and shooting the gun out of his opponent's hand on a regular basis.

Magic and Powers

Magic spells, net powers, psionics, etc. are learned with the 75 points for skills. The GM can alter this rule if he feels it is necessary for his campaign. The Maximum skill usage of a spell is POW+Skill. Thus if you have a Power of 6 and an attack spell of 4 you have a maximum effectiveness of level 10. It will cost 10 power points to cast the spell. The number of power points you have is equal to your POW x 10. Once all the power is drained, you will feel some fatigue and, of course, no longer be able to use spells/powers.


Tips To Playing Tinker's Damn:

Playing Tinker's Damn doesn't require much, so there are only a few tips I can offer new players of the RPG.

First off is the suggestion I make for any RPG: Get a good GM. For Tinker's Damn this should be a GM who can think of wild adventures and perhaps is an Anime fan himself, hey it can't hurt. The GM need not be experianced with the Tinker's Damn system, all he needs to do is read the book once or twice to get the general concept then incorperate it into his ideas.

Secondly, the players should be interested in Anime, or non serious, fun campaigns. Realism in Anime can be accopmlished, but it takes away most of the fun.

Take your first couple of campaigns and base them off of a series you enjoy or at least know about and are interested in RolePlaying in. This comes in handy to learn the basics and get a feel for how the rules are to be set for your group to play in.

Always remember that you are not playing yourself. Have fun playing your character and always make sure that you cause, or get into as much mayhem as possible. For some characters and/or players, the GM can do that to them all by himself.


Anime: The Beginning of the Chaos

I'm not even going to pretend that I can answer all your questions about Anime and popular Anime series, because I can't! If you are desperate for ideas, and know of no place to turn I will suggest you check out The Anime Turnpike which has links to pages of fans of many popular and not so popular Anime series that will help you get some ideas.


Links to Other Places

The Official Tinker's Damn Site

Tinker's Damn Ventures Page
The Anime Turnpike


I will sincerely try to answer any question you have regaurding Tinker's Damn or Ranma 1/2, since it is the only anime series I know anything about, but feel free to e-mail me for comments or other uses to.
I also willfully admit I have created 2 graphics on this page, the one that says Tinker's Damn and the Studio Cranium one, the rest are all copyrighted, and the copyright information is supplied by this cute little graphic, also supplied by Studio Cranium: