First off, Terraism - thanks. As the guy that *wrote* the netbook of tinkering, your comment means a lot to me.
Secondly, let me give you guys some *inside* information. I started the Netbook of Tinkering a year ago (almost to the date) and it became part of the D&D Community Council (which is now the FanCC). As a result of that work (which I spent a lot of time and effort on, and it ended up exceeding 40 pages), I was "discovered" by Thunderhead Games, who, at that time, was interested in the tinkering rules. I began working with Thunderhead Games in around March of last year on a module, of all things. We decided that we needed a city to base the module in, so we started working on the city, and neither of which had anything to do with tinkering.
But, and here's the on-topic, relevant part of this post - We took the core concept from the netbook of tinkering (that tinkering is a subset of the craft() skill with its own rules) and incorporated it into the Bluffside book, which will be out in a month or so.
The vastness of the Netbook of Tinkering, with it's technology timelines, tinkering-related discussions, and vast array of tinkered devices did not find its way into the Bluffside work (some of them did). So, it's possible that the Netbook of Tinkering might resurface again some day (the current form has many OGL violations, anyway), but in the meantime, I recommend (whole-heartedly, of course) that you check out the Tinkering rules in the Bluffside sourcebook. I think you'll find them to be realistic, logical, easy to understand, and quite portable to boot.
This is coming from the guy that, quite literally, wrote the "book" on tinkering.
If the Netbook of Tinkering comes out again, I'll use the OGC tinkering rules from the Bluffside book with which to base the foundation off of.
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Curtis
Thunderhead Games
Tinkering/Invention Thread
