Originally Posted by
chirine ba kal
Well, let's see; we never got a whole lot of information on him, especially after he turned a nosy player-character (Eyloa) into a talking fish. What we do know:
He usually appears as a human. He's extremely powerful; we always assumed that he was at the level of the Undying Wizards, and really tried to stay away from him. At one point, somebody noticed that his eyes do glint red, which usually was the sign of a Mihalli shapeshifter. He's an ally of Baron Ald, but does have his own agenda and masters. We originally thought that he might be from the human empire ('the brown and purple empire, from their theme colors) on the opposite side of the planet from us, but then we got more information about the Hokun and the general feeling was that he was working for them. (There's not much information on the other portions of Tekumel, either; Phil always smiled and 'suggested' that we explore them to find out...) When we found out that it was the Hokun who had originally paid the Lords of Humanspace to terraform Tekumel for them, we got really uninterested in asking them or him a lot of pointed questions...
As for his role in the meta-game, we never found out. Phil played those cards very, very close to his chest. (Including doing index cards in Urdu.)
As for Phil's future plans, he left nothing behind in his files. (I looked. Oh, did I look.) His main focus / plot line / story when we played with him was the Mirusiya / Elara romance ( which he worked on from 1948 to 2004 or so); He sort of got a new plot line started in the unpublished novel, but it wasn't all that well developed.
The meta-game was never 'planned'; it grew very organically, and Phil pretty much pushed the 'start' button and let the thing run; his focus was on his novels, and the meta-game provided a lot of the background details for them, just as our adventures did. It developed quite a bit over time, starting with his 'Risk'-like game in the 1950s and then miniatures and then RPGs.
No, Phil did not reveal a lot of any Big Secrets; he preferred that there always would be mysteries for people to explore. He certainly did drop a lot of hints along the way, which was part of the fun of playing and working with him, but he always played things very close and didn't give up any secrets unless it was important. He was asked about this very thing over and over, both by us and at conventions; he'd always just smile, and politely suggest that you needed to go off on an adventure to try and find out - and drop him a line to let him know what you found, if you got back...
I certainly can talk about this forever, which would probably bore you to tears; let me say that one of the really wonderful things about gaming with Phil was having a front-row seat for the creative process as he developed and refined what he wanted to do. It was like out time with Gordy Dickson; we had a front row seat for the Dorsai, too...
Can you be more specific? Which particular mystery do you have in mind?
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