Tamarant v2 update

This is a big one folks!

Over the last year or so I've been casually revisiting Tamarant off-and-on, and doing a few playtests (both solo and with a small group or two) and I found that Tamarant wasn't quite hitting the notes I wanted it to, at least when it came to the way the core mechanics and character creation operated. So, what you see in this update, which I'm calling v2 simply because it's a bit of a departure from v1.3, is the result of all that going back and forth. Such is the way of game design.

Anyone who's purchased the game already should find the updated files available to download in their Libraries here on itch, and anyone purchasing Tamarant going forward will get v2. The changes should be fairly obvious if you crack open the new PDF, but here's a quick changelog along with some of my design thinking around each change:

• Expanded the opening setting chapter to include details about the various underlying cultures and ethnicities of Tamarant. The continent, after all, is in my head roughly about the size of mainland China, which in our world contains many languages, ethnic groups, and so on. As such I wanted to make the setting a lot more varied in this sense than simply it all being "Big Fantasy France" or whatever. This also led to a bunch of expanded name tables for the character creation chapter, and helped me fill out the rest of the kingdom maps for the sheets PDF since I had a better grasp on the cultural naming conventions of each region.
• The above also just ended up informing general world-building concerns, including a recent roughly 1,200-year timeline, also in the opening setting chapter. This covers from the time when the Obsidian Crown of Tamarant was forged until the default start year of the game. It's not exhaustive, but it's there to give a sense of the events that feed into the current moment of the game, provide some nice historical fodder for GMs to pull from, and also potentially provide context for historical events some undead characters may well have witnessed or been a part of.
• Getting into mechanics, rather than using a d20 to roll against your characteristics, you now roll 3d6. This is mainly to provide a more interesting curve - I like a percentile dice as much as the next trad weirdo, but the d20 was just feeling way too swingy here. Occupations and advantages give you extra d6s, etc. etc. you get the idea.
• I also switched up the core characteristics entirely - they're now referred to as skills, and there's 6 of them: Almanac, Arms, Court, Hours, Labours, and Rites. The original characteristics were just feeling too generic and I wanted a more arcane, medieval feel and approach. These 6 skills cover different bases, and the way you roll them up in character creation has also been adjusted to give a slightly different spread.
• Speaking of character creation, this has seen a massive overhaul. The actual Occupation tables have stayed basically the same, but you use them in a slightly different way. There's also been some more setting-specific stuff added right at the top of chargen, like rolling for your birthday and godsign. With all these changes the general flow of chargen needed to be overhauled too, so I've heavily revised and expanded the life terms flowchart and in general revisited how I was structuring things to make it a bit more clear how exactly you go through each step of chargen. Big changes to the core chargen flow include the way events are rolled, how qualification works, etc. - it's kind of a big subject so existing owners of the older versions may have some fun comparing and contrasting.
• Being Undead can now be a quasi-occupation which lasts 1d100 years.
• Added a new procedure called Respite Scenes, which covers brief downtimes during camping and so on. There are select activities you can perform, and tables for generating descriptions of camp sites. This is mostly for fun, meant to open up further avenues for exploring characters and relationships in the game. Very much inspired by sinking ungodly hours into Baldur's Gate 3 and loving the way the camp scenes work in that game, but also just because camp scenes are a huge thing in fantasy and adventure storytelling, and always have been - think of all the camping scenes in Lord of the Rings, or the bit in Conan the Barbarian where they're arguing over whose god is the best.
• Also added a procedure called The Year Ahead, which is largely a GM-facing procedure where they generate a loose future timeline, meant to facilitate their prep and help flesh out the world of Tamarant around the characters. Since Tamarant is a game which can potentially last many months or years in-game, it felt like this was a necessary bit of buttressing to take some of the big-picture and offscreen pressure off the GM. This is inspired by a similar (but way more detailed) set of procedures from Harn.
• Changed the way damage in combat works - while Vitality is still an abstract tracker of your character's condition, there's now also a Wounds system to track specific injuries. Ticking down a health meter is pretty boring, if I'm being honest - having to worry about a broken leg or a cut on your forehead that's bleeding into your eyes is way more interesting, and helps sell a more brutal fiction.

That's basically it, beyond some minor spelling adjustments and the like! Let me know what you think.