Tentaika

Today we are going to talk little about the country of Tentaika. Tentaika is the main setting for Mundus RPG and for the time being the rest of the game world is seen through the eyes of Tentaikan people. For now we will just scratch the surface of this subject and in the future blog posts we will go deeper in to few of the topics we discuss today.

The main inspiration for Tentaika is feudal Japan, but we have romanticized the world and made some modernizations to the regime and to the overall philosophy of how people live and think about each other. In short, by medieval standards Tentaika would be considered a welfare state. However the caste system still exists and the samurai caste rules the country leaving little to no chance for the common folk to make a difference.

What makes Tentaika a welfare state is that thanks to channeling, ritualism and advanced medieval medical science healthcare is cheap or free and it is easily accessible even in small towns. This considerably reduces epidemics in more densely populated parts of Tentaika. The health care is mostly offered by local temples and shrines as they are tasked by the local samurai clan to offer medical help in return for the funding they receive from their prefecture.

Tentaika is divided into eight prefectures each governed by a warrior clan, with the exception of the prefecture of Genkaisha. Warrior clans are powerful samurai clans that have sovereign rule over their prefecture and they pledge their loyalty to the ruling shogun family. Each warrior clan has multiple smaller samurai clans that work for them and have pledged their loyalty to the warrior clan, and each samurai clan has samurai families under them.

In the future we will talk more about channeling, ritualism, samurais, astral planes, prefectures etc. If there is a certain topic you wish to hear about post it in the comments or in the Facebook page and it will be taken into consideration when planning this blog.

See you next Sunday!

  

Gameplay

Gameplay of Mundus RPG

For Mundus RPG we have created a system which allows diverse gameplay opportunities. To achieve this, we have decided to ditch the classical D&D styled class system and instead to use more flexible skill based rules. This means that characters don’t gain levels, instead they use experience points to increase their skills, attributes and other abilities as they wish.

Mundus RPG uses two six sided dice and is based around attributes, skills, traits and perks. Attributes consist of Strength, Endurance, Agility, Perception, Concentration, Intelligence and Charisma. We also have a special attribute called Luck. Skills are divided to Primary and Secondary skills. Primary skills are mostly combat skills and they gain special perks as they level up. Perks are special bonuses and abilities that are gained for free at fixed levels and some of them allow characters to customize their skills. Secondary skills are mostly non-combat fluff skills such as Art, Riding and Swimming and they have only four levels instead of the total 20 levels of primary skills. Traits are character’s special quirks or features which can either benefit or hamper the character.

The rules of Mundus RPG revolve around combat and we prefer to leave most of the non-combat character interaction for the players to actually roleplay. By this we mean that players actually need to speak and interact instead of just rolling some dice. For the combat we decided to go with a more detailed approach. This means that combat is best in one-on-one duels or in small groups of 3 vs. 3 or 5 vs. 5 etc. More about combat in future blog posts.

By having multiple combat skills with levels from 0 to 20 we have made it possible to play the game at multiple levels. By this we mean, with characters that have their combat skills at level four or so are considered to be normal humans. Gameplay-wise this means more Seven Samurai styled combat. At skill level 10 characters are considered to have achieved human perfection in the given skill. Forwards from the skill level 11 characters are considered to be inhumanly skilled and at these levels combat starts to be more Bleach- and wuxia-like with gravity defying jumps and stone crushing sword swings.

See you next Sunday!

Introduction

Introduction to Mundus RPG

Well, straight to the point. We are two game dev students from Finland and we’d like to introduce our tabletop roleplaying game which we have been developing on our free time since July 2011.

Mundus is a classical pen & paper RPG which is set in the medieval Japan-esque country of Tentaika. For the game, we have drawn inspiration from movies like Seven Samurai and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and games such as Jade Empire and of course from manga like Bleach, Naruto and Vagabond.

Even though one would think, that Seven Samurai and Bleach would never mix well together we think that we’ve managed to achieve our vision. In the following blog posts we are going to enlighten you about the setting and the gameplay of Mundus RPG.

- Ville Huohvanainen & Eetu Röpelinen