As I write, I’m taking a brief break from what really is the last major developing in the master guide for Tunse’al. That’s the document we work from to drive all related products: the Tunse’al RPG Setting Guide and supplements, regardless of game system used to play. Once that is finalized, the next hurdle is in line. That would be laying out the actual setting guide. Following that, we’ve got the Pinnacle Entertainment Group licensing process. We hope to be able to sell two versions of Tunse’al: systemless, so you can play with any rules system you feel like converting it to, and Savage Worlds, one of the most popular non-Dungeons and Dragons, non-D20 systems out there.

There are some minor things we still need to do in after that to make the products available. We’re already set up for DriveThruRPG.net, but we’ve got others we want to use, too. Before we launch for sales, we plan to run a contest to award the setting guide as a contest prize and get it in the hands of some reviewers.

Wish us luck!

Speaking of layout, while we’re still toying with the idea of page decorations, we have decided on the Tunse’al footer. Created from the script Svenja Liv designed for our Gelid race, a one-line image will show the page number at the bottom of the text.

We’ve also released a pre-launch supplement, A Cause to Die For, in Savage Insider, Issue 4: Shaking Things Up, a free, quarterly ezine for Savage Worlds. While we haven’t submitted our materials for licensing just yet, we took the opportunity to showcase how are systemless design can be used for Savage Worlds. All Tunse’al items are intended to be simultaneously released as systemless and Savage Worlds, if we are successful in our endeavor to become an Official Savage Worlds Licensee.

Our trailer and other marketing should be ready in the next week. After that, we’ll run a contest to win products before you can buy them. And then…THE LAUNCH!

Now we have a re-recording for the trailer to do, finalize some stuff to talk to the accountant about tomorrow, finish making decisions on some background information, work on mechanics guides for the systemless setting, fine-tune some items for Savage Worlds mechanics, lay-out the setting guide, and present it to Pinnacle Entertainment Group for licensing consideration and to e23 for admission into their shop.

Then there are the other things we have to do that are all shapes and sizes and too numerous to bore you with!

Our pool of freelance artists continues to amaze and inspire us with their creativity and interpretations. To provide a reference for the other artists, Joshua Pinkas provided a head shot of some of the races of Tunse’al. Here’s a preview into what the Kresh, an amphibious humanoid race of warriors, looks like.

Kresh - A Race of Warriors

We’ve got an official Obatron Productions, LLC bank account set up and a PayPal account to match. We’re thrilled to have a local credit union that works well with businesses of all sizes.

Our freelance artists wasted no time getting their heads around our loose art framework. We’ve seen sketches, ideas, and clarifying questions on the design briefs from four of them. What a great start! The ethereal dragon in flight, up-close Kresh face, and magic air ship look good and they’re just in the rough sketch stage. What’s all that about? They’re elements of Tunse’al RPG. The artists’ questions and suggestions on the world map and fairy folk have added to the story.

We now have some fae among the races. They just aren’t playable. Well, at least not as player characters. The game master gets to have all kinds of fun with them as non-player characters.

Our Tunse’al Master Guide is getting more and more complete. The energy behind this project just keeps building. To top it off, we saw the mocks of our Tunse’al logo from our freelance logo artist. Cool stuff. We’re just bursting at the seams with excitement.

In between everything else, we’re also planning our first three Tunse’al RPG releases. We’ll have the setting guide and two adventures. If we get the license we’re interested in, the adventures will show up as systemless and for a well-respected game system.

We are assigning commissions for art soon and have finalized our pricing structure for Tunse’al RPG releases. Tunse’al will be the debut product line with Obatron Fiction and Express Lines to follow.

That doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on our thumbs! Nope! We’ve been busy behind the scenes.

Tunse’al has two official music tracks by Artem Bank. You’ll get a listen of those once we are ready to engage our marketing campaign for the RPG line.

Obatron Productions has bought the WebAsyst suite to run all of the background business components powering the company. It’ll handle everything from newsletters to the shopping cart.

While we plan to use OneBookShelf’s array of sites for our products, as well as Paizo and Amazon, we wanted to have the ability to sell straight from our own shop. That move allows us a greater profit margin on items we sell direct, plus it gives us flexibility in dealing with physical items and bundling products that might not be available through a single other source.

To bolster security of any transactions through our site, we’ve purchased a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate. We plan to use PayPal to handle our credit card needs, but we like having options and piece of mind. We figure our eventual customers will, too!

Keep a look out for more news in the coming weeks. Stop by our page on Facebook for any snippets too short to post here.

Welcome to Obatron Productions’ place on the web. Well, it’s one of our places. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter.

This is actually a pre-launch page more than a launch page. We’re putting together the land of Tunse’al. It’s a fantasy world unrelated to Earth. It offers extremes of climate, variances in technology based upon geography, atypical races, and societies built on a variety of interpretations of the land’s creation legend. In the coming weeks, we’ll post bits about some of the races. Not everything, though. After all, we want you to have a reason to buy from us!

And what is it you’ll have the chance to buy? World information and adventure supplements for your role-playing game table. We’re starting out with systemless offerings and have plans to convert those to at least one RPG system. We’ll reveal that once we have a license to do so. We’re likely to have some general fiction for sale, too.

Our goal is to offer affordable PDFs to jump-start your game. Not everyone has the time or desire to figure out what to do for “this week’s” adventure. We want to take some of the work out of the process for you. Prices will start at $1.99. We don’t dare put an end price as we’ve not a clue just how big of a PDF we might sell down the line. Who knows? There might be an enormous compilation in our future.

Thanks for reading!

Obatron Productions