Characteristics - What is the purpose?

[Frenzytoast]

So I've seen a lot of reference in the rulebook to Living, Undead, Spirit, Construct Characteristics and I'm curious:

TTB Mechanics wise - What is the purpose of these characteristics?

In other Pen&Paper games they usually have a tooltip or explanation of what can/cannot effect these but a lot of abilities have specific references such as "Undead Characteristic is immune to the Bleeding Out condition" whereas a living character will suffer from it.

Is there anywhere in the rulebook or elsewhere that explains the purpose/bufs/debuffs of characteristics?

[Steamtastic Vagabond]

There is no built in effect for having characteristic, however, certain effects only effect characters with certain characteristics. For instance, Death Marshals are considered Terrifying but only to the Undead. Also, the Genus immuto also have similar effects and there are many other examples of this across the various books.

[diki]

I appreciate why it would be nice to have a general set of rules for characteristics but new rule books introduce new rules and spell immuto's especially allow for a lot of combinations so it would never be definitive.

[Frenzytoast]

Thanks.  I noted this because I have a Tinkerer player that wanted access to a Grimoire so I asked him what spells he would be interested in.

He wanted the Construct Genus Immuto so that he could cast buffs on his constructs which had me wondering if constructs are immune to spells/magic but I couldn't find it anywhere.

I realized after searching that Construct Genus is for spells like Heal where he wanted ti repair his Construct but Heal only affects the living so it started to click.  

[diki]

Not really related but I really wanted to play a crazy life sucking summoner with exploding lightning gaiman.
Using subsume corpse with construct genus Immuto to explode my construct gamin whilst healing myself! (and with life immuto to attack other folk!)