Let's start this walk through slowly. In the introduction, Troll Talk, Ken St. Andre tells how this edition came to happen, and also tells us how to use it. It's interesting to see that Fiery Dragon Publishing apparently wanted to do something on their own, and as a side effect of that Ken's latest ideas happened to be included as well. For those who have the tin box edition, AKA The 30th Anniversary Edition, it's clear that the so called "Revised" T&T booklet from that set is what's referred to here. Personally I felt it was a very weak and useless attempt to make T&T more like D&D3. After thumbing through it once or twice I never opened it again. Interesting is also, at least for me personally, that Ken mentions that he got a few suggestions from FDP how to add to this latest release by including a treasure generator. I actually contacted Ken about that, since I had been playing the tin box edition with old solos that often asked you to generate the treasure with the random treasure tables from 5th ed. Ken replied "We'll see what we can do." So I guess it was a good idea.
Then Ken mentions something interesting, and the most important thing is this post. He writes:
If you only remember one thing about Tunnels & Trolls, remember the line from Pirates of the Carribean - they aren't rules, more like guidelines really. ... Do what works for you and your gamers. If you haven't messed with the printed rules and made at least a couple of changes, you aren't really playing Tunnels & Trolls.I find that last piece interesting. Many games have told you that you have the power to adapt the rules, but I haven't ever seen a designer who explicitly tells you that you're not playing the game in question if you play just the way it's written. That's old school to me.
Next up: Generating characters