Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

This is spun off from here.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

What I prefer to do is answer your questions; I work better that way, I've found. This is what I'm not getting from gamers, or from the various forums I've been a part of.

Fair enough. Put up or shut up for Bren it is then. Let me start with....

1) So "chirine ba kal" where is that name from? Sounds Tsolyani to my untutored ears. Is it the name of a PC or a nickname for you, the player? Does it have some particular meaning, clan, etc? Are any of the words supposed to be capitalized?

2) You mentioned that you see yourself not as a player of RPGs or miniatures but as a model builder. I've seen some pictures you've posted of an Tsolyanu Temple. Is that something you've built? What other things have you modeled that have been based on or used in someone's RPG or miniatures?

3) What is it about modeling that grabbed and has held your interest over the years?

Parenthetically, I like models, I've done a bit of modelling and a bit more of customizing miniatures. But I find I like the outcome more than the process which is probably why I would never describe myself as a modeler. As a matter of coincidence or synchronicity one of the more customized miniatures I created was adapting an EPT miniature to a character I ran in the Glorantha setting - Tamlorn Two-sword. This was way back in the early 1980s before the glut of D&D-inspired two-sworded miniatures had hit the market and the EPT figure had two baroque bladed weapons that I cut down to look like a couple of Western European style swords. The beaked helmet and speckled pants (painted to look like leopard skin) gave the miniature a nicely outre look that worked from my conception of some parts of Glorantha.

As an example of this, we had one very memorable WWII game where I was playing the Allies on a table in one room, using "Tractics", and at the same time I was fighting an air battle in another room to keep the Luftwaffe from shooting up my tanks using an Avalon-Hill board game. Same thing out at Phil's: we moved from individual adventures using EPT across mass battles using my "Qadardalikoi" miniatures rules to grand strategy using Phil's PRESTAGS sets on his Tekumel maps.

We played the world-settings, historical or fictional, and we used any and every set of rules that we had to make the games happen.

That sounds fun. My current players though don't have a war gaming bent and aren't too interested in all the details of politics and military combat so I think it would be difficult to add in anything like a board game or miniatures battle into our game. I had to work hard to keep the siege I put their characters in the midst of both interesting for the characters without being too rule heavy or protracted for the players. I did have fun using the actual siege of Bergen op Zoom as a setting. This actual map of the city made a dandy game board

...mass battles using my "Qadardalikoi" miniatures rules to grand strategy using Phil's PRESTAGS sets on his Tekumel maps

I am not familiar with Qadardalikoi or PRESTAGS. What can you tell me about them?

5. You mentioned you don't play RPGs, though from your descriptions of some of the stuff you did, I'd say you did play RPGs. Did you act as the referee or GM for other players for any kind of RPGs, Braunsteins, or games that someone might call roleplaying?

Thanks in advance for any answers you care to share.

And other folks feel free to chime in with your questions...

...Like you need my permission.

Right, then; let's have a go at this...

1) "Chirine ba Kal" was the name of the PC I rolled up at Phil's about the spring of 1976. This was back before the original group split, as discussed in Gary Fine's book, "Shared Fantasy". I'm from the western part of Tsolyanu, the Chakas. Phil never used my real name, in or out of game; he only used it once, about three months before he passed away, to thank me and my family help take care of him in his last illness; it was the first time in some thirty-five years.

2) That's Phil's model of the Temple of Vimuhla in the city of Katalal. I used to take care of the model for him, and took it to conventions to show to people. It's huge, about 40" x 40" x 30". There are a lot of photos of my models and games on my Photobucket page - the list is just too long to post here, I'm afraid!

The tradition - the 'Custom of the House', if you will - is that we built stuff for games as needed. New players would roll up their character, and Phil would give me one week to make their miniature. Over the decades we've been playing, that adds up to a lot of PC's leaden alter egos, and we also liked to model our stuff as well - hence all the models in the game room.

We also built our costumes / clothes, as well. My armor weighs 38 pounds all up, and has over 15,000 1/4" rings in the mail hauberk. (Photos on my blog.)

3) I don't really know. I also do model railways - the UK's Great Western in OO scale - as well as plastic kits and scratchbuilds. I think the biggest project was the 20' by 20' game playing area for my Star Wars Braunstein; the biggest model was the 4' Imperial Star Destroyer I built for the same campaign. I just like to build stuff, and I'm told that I'm both fast and good at it. I now build things for my gamers on a two week cycle, between game sessions, and it seems to amuse them.

Sounds like you modified the YK-1, Yan Koryani General...

Loved to hear about your siege! Phil did a lot of battles that same way, as he didn't want to slow the game down with an on-table battle unless there was a really good reason for it.

4) I wrote "Qadardalikoi" (Tsolyani for "Great and Glorious War" after I bought the Tekumel miniatures line from Ral Partha; both "Missum" and "Legions" were out of print by then, so we needed a set of rules to help sell figures. I'm currently working on a second edition, to take advantage of all the wonderful new technologies in gaming that have come along - the rules are older then my daughters!

PRESTAGS was SPI's attempt to do a Middle Earth board game without a license; if you put all the counters in piles sorted by color, oddly enough you got all the armies of Middle Earth. If you put all the maps together the right way, you got a very good map of Middle Earth. The five games in the series / set were finally marketed as historical board games, and they were actually very good; i played them for decades, and had a lot of fun with them.

5) Yes, we did play what you'd be able to call RPGs, as well as what I think you'd call miniatures. However, we played as part of continuing 'campaigns', where we played people like Chirine or the hapless Hauptmann Von Braunschweiger of the Afrika Korps, who kept running into the British in his little Pz. II when the verdammnt Englishers were off their tea break and were in their brand new Yankee tanks. ("Donner and Blitznen!!!") We played using whatever tools we needed at that point in the campaign - RPGs, Braunsteins, miniatures, boardgames, poker, you name it.

I think that, over the years, I've run all sorts of games for people. I used to run two Tekumel campaigns in parallel with Phil's; my games were the 'waiting room' to get into Phil's, as well as a way to screen people for him. I used to run games at Coffman Union for the Conflict Simulation Association, and I also used to run a game convention. I still run games, on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, in my own game room; The Missus lets me have half the basement for it, as you can see in the photos on my blog.

I ran a Star Wars campaign, for example, long before there were any rules for such a thing. I 'winged' it...

I love to build the models we use in the games, and the games are a way to astound and amuse my players. The looks on their faces when they come down the stairs and see what's on the table is what's worth it to me...

Does this help, or have I just confused things?

Originally Posted by Phillip

I'm not Chirine, but I can tell you that SPI's "pre-seventeenth-century tactical game system" was a common rules set used for a series of boardgames such as Chariot, Spartan and Viking -- much as other rules sets spawned multiple games in other periods.

I'm not familiar with Qardadalikoi except as one of the first products advertised by Empire Games (or whatever Barker's post-TSR publisher was called). I stuck with Dave Sutherland's Legions of the Petal Throne.

Agreed! PRESTAGS gave us hours of fun. I think I liked "Chariot" the best.

It went TSR - Imperium Publishing - Gamescience - Adventure Games - Tekumel Journal - Tekumel Games - Different Worlds - TOME - Guardians of Order - UniGames. Tekumel Journal was the publisher of my rules, after AGI didn't do it.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

1) "Chirine ba Kal" was the name of the PC I rolled up at Phil's about the spring of 1976.

Have you posted tales of Chirine ba Kal on your blog? A character that memorable (to you and to Prof. Barker) must have some good tales to be told.

2) That's Phil's model of the Temple of Vimuhla in the city of Katalal.

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. That was darn impressive. I'll check out your blog (which I see is at the bottom of your post).

The tradition - the 'Custom of the House', if you will - is that we built stuff for games as needed. New players would roll up their character, and Phil would give me one week to make their miniature.

I'd have loved that. I can see why there was a waiting list.

Back in 1974 we didn't use miniatures for D&D. Just scratch paper and the very detailed graph paper maps the players made as they went along. Well most of us had a player in our groups who made detailed maps. The exploration/mapping aspect was one of the parts of OD&D that appealed to me from both sides of the DM screen.

Starting in the late 70s, I've customized miniatures for most of our favored PCs, mine and my players. The only exceptions were the Star Trek campaign - where we instead had drawings of each PC and the important NPCs done by an artist friend of my co-GMs and Honor+Intrigue. Since my H+I game is all done over Skype it doesn't feel worthwhile to do minis. Also I have absolutely no Early Modern minis so I'd have to start from scratch and (for various reasons) I just haven't been motivated to paint any minis for years. I still have hundreds of Saxons and Vikings from my last buying binge for Runequest at the end of the last century.
Minis do add up.

[quoteWe also built our costumes / clothes, as well. My armor weighs 38 pounds all up, and has over 15,000 1/4" rings in the mail hauberk. (Photos on my blog.)[/quote]Sounds like SCA meets wargaming.

I think the biggest project was the 20' by 20' game playing area for my Star Wars Braunstein; the biggest model was the 4' Imperial Star Destroyer I built for the same campaign.

Now those sounds like a blast. Star Wars and Call of Cthulhu were the most recent games that I did minis for. I ended up with a hundred or so for CoC and several hundred for Star Wars. Of course I cheat and use green skinned Orcs for Gamorreans.

While I don't model locations, I did do a couple of large color floor plans on huge 1 inch square graph paper sheets. One for a Hutt palace that I used for the big climactic confrontation and rescue that was the climax of a mini campaign and the other for a huge place called Gazi's. Gazi's motto was "Something for everyone." It included multiple bars, lighted exotic dancer cages, Gilfi tanks of fighting fish with colored tags to identify the combatants for betting purposes, a fighting arena, holoscreens for broadcasting holonet sports broadcasts, a null G-dance floor, a casino, and an upstairs brothel. The first time the PCs went there I had it laid out with at least a hundred miniatures giving it the effect of the Mos Eisley cantina on steroids. Amazingly its one of the few bars in Star Wars that one of the PCs didn't get thrown out of, though he did have to leave in a hurry. We used Gazi's four or five times with three different groups of PCs. One time we had two separate PC groups in Gazi's at the same time. The first group's antics provided the background action for the second groups adventure.

Sounds like you modified the YK-1, Yan Koryani General...

That sounds familiar.

EDIT: Well I deleted the long description I wrote and the various minis that weren't quite right after I finally turned up this picture.
[IMG]http://i0.wp.com/tekumelcollecting.c...dGuardAdv.jpeg[/IMG]My mini is in the upper right. You got it in one. I am impressed.

I modified the miniature for my Runequest PC, Tamlorn Two-Sword. He had a Sartarite father and an Esrolian mother. He got his looks from his mom, a temple dancer. I figured the Esrolians looked something like ancient Minoans or Egyptians.

Loved to hear about your siege! Phil did a lot of battles that same way, as he didn't want to slow the game down with an on-table battle unless there was a really good reason for it.

I think I wrote up most of those adventures so I'll try and post something when I have more time.

4) I wrote "Qadardalikoi" (Tsolyani for "Great and Glorious War" after I bought the Tekumel miniatures line from Ral Partha; both "Missum" and "Legions" were out of print by then, so we needed a set of rules to help sell figures. I'm currently working on a second edition, to take advantage of all the wonderful new technologies in gaming that have come along - the rules are older then my daughters!

Ral Partha made some nice minis. And I'm guessing your daughters are probably older than some gamers on this or other forums.

I missed SPI's PRESTAGS.

5) Yes, we did play what you'd be able to call RPGs, as well as what I think you'd call miniatures. However, we played as part of continuing 'campaigns', where we played people like Chirine or the hapless Hauptmann Von Braunschweiger of the Afrika Korps, who kept running into the British in his little Pz. II when the verdammnt Englishers were off their tea break and were in their brand new Yankee tanks. ("Donner and Blitznen!!!") We played using whatever tools we needed at that point in the campaign - RPGs, Braunsteins, miniatures, boardgames, poker, you name it.

Although I've almost always run long campaigns, I think the difference for us in the old days was that our D&D games never included army level actions. Part of that was due to some of DMs (cough, cough, like me, cough cough) running campaigns where players didn't succeed in getting to a level where they had strongholds and where the PCs were wandering adventurers rather than people integrated in the hierarchy of their society.

Runequest included much more societal integration, but we only ever once got to a battle scale. A group of PCs banded together with some NPCs to kick the Lunar Empire out of the Citadel of Elkoi in Balazar and put a local adventurer and PC on the throne of Elkoi. Sadly, the gaming group split up when I went out to grad school and we never did more with those characters. Trying to resist the Lunar Empire's revenge would have been...interesting.

I ran a Star Wars campaign, for example, long before there were any rules for such a thing. I 'winged' it...

I ran Star Wars before there were published rules. I didn't wing it though, I was a play tester for a rule set that my friend who bought the first D&D rules for our group was writing for Parker Brothers. But Parker scrapped the game and surrendered the license. Some time after that West End got the license and produced their D6 game.

The looks on their faces when they come down the stairs and see what's on the table is what's worth it to me...

I can only imagine. It's too bad you can't rent out your models to astonish other groups.

Does this help, or have I just confused things?

Yeah, that was cool. Nothing you wrote confuses things. It all makes sense. It's just a bit different than how the group we had way back in the day did things. But it was obvious to me that different DMs ran D&D differently. They each had their own takes on play and their game worlds. Most of us ran separate worlds, though two guys who were brothers ran different countries in the same world. One of them was a big WWII fan. He usually wanted to play Germany in the WWII board games. We teased him a bit because his fantasy kingdom had guards who were always asking the PCs for "their papers" which some of us thought was atypical for a medieval-style fantasy kingdom. We teasingly mimicked the guards using a German accent.

I recall the DM of the game I mostly played in, ran a variant game or two which included guns and wizards. I can't recall now whether that was wizards introduced to a Boot Hill game or gunslingers added into a D&D game. But he thought mashing the two together would be a fun diversion from the usually fantasy game. And it was.

Originally Posted by Moracai

It does.

Me being born in 76, you gave me a lot to think about. The closest you are describing that I've attempted or even thought about would be Warhammer 40K going from orbital bombardments to individual fightin' guys in rules that are always bit sameish. Ballistic Skill for nuking that pesky city to Weapon Skill to stab that knife to your opponents gut.

Going from one platform to another must've been one of the off-game exciting things to discuss and come together in agreement thingies.

Sorry for bad english. At the moment I'm coming high with alcohol (vacation, yay) and dont care too much.

And that's my goal - to give you a window into the past, where you can see how some of us old codgers did things and give you ideas for your own games...

A short reply; more tomorrow after I get back home...

Two short excerpts from the book I'm writing, "To Serve The Petal Throne":

http://blackmoor.mystara.net/forums/...hp?f=22&t=8005

http://http://blackmoor.mystara.net/...hp?f=22&t=7964

I have fifteen years of games to write about. I'm going to wind up with six books at 50,000 words in each book. :0

I have a lot of stories to tell.

And I'm back... Let me see if I can address all of your comments...

1. See my previous post for some snippets from the book. we gamed with Phil in his world for some fifteen years, four+ hours a week, 52 weeks a year. He kept an attendance book, too. I took notes at every game session, from the beginning, and in the middle 1980s we started audio taping the game sessions. I have *a lot* of material to work with. The final form of the book is likely to be six volumes, with about 50,000 words about our adventures over the years in each. Artwork, too, I hope!

2. The temple model is really pretty cool; I have lots of photos of it.

3. The waiting list out at Phil's was also because we were kind of choosy about who we wanted to play with; some folks just didn't 'get' Tekumel, and didn't prosper. They didn't last long, and so we started screening people to see if they'd actually like the campaign. We were very much into long-term game campaigns, and 'short-timers' didn't have much of a good time as we generally didn't do things that gave them what they wanted.

4. Interesting! We used miniatures a lot, because both Phil and I loved making them, but we didn't use maps very much. I might make notes on a location, if it was interesting, but otherwise we usually didn't make them.

5. Most of us were in the SCA, and Phil had a huge collection of medieval arms and armor. I took care of the collection, and one of his suits of munition armor fit me like it had been made for me - back about 1580.

6. Loved your description!!! Very good!!!

7. Don't be impressed; I cast the things for years, so I have every portion of the little things memorized...

8. Actually, your descriptions of what you were doing sound a lot like what we did; I think you have 'our style' down pat.