Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Gosh! Weren't those Gen Con and Origins trips fun? Didn't we have a great time? And all that packing and loading? Wasn't that great? Don't we both miss those days? Don't we long for the prestige and glory of being Big Wheels in the game business?

Hoo boy. I remember by the end of the summer convention season (Gen Con, I believe) we were ready to pile the merchandise in a heap and set it on fire rather then load it into the damn van one more time. And this is when we were young, strong, and healthy.

If you ever want to get a great bargain at a con, have the patience to wait until Sunday afternoon. At the last DragonCon I went to somebody was selling game supplements that were a couple of years old. On Thursday they were $5 each. By Sunday afternoon they were "Buy one get TWO free," which is a fancy way of saying "For the love of GOD please don't make me carry these things out to the truck." Nothing like eight days of hard work, little sleep, bad food, and stupid questions, and in my case, copious amounts of beer. And yes, eight days... a day to pack and go part of the way, a day of driving and setting up the display, four days of the convention, a day of packing and being to tired to leave Sunday, two days of driving (or driving all night and arriving the second morning mentally burned to a crisp...)

I think we'd have given up a lot sooner if not for Forrest Brown and Butch Leeper from FASA. Those guys are great to hang around with. Sometimes the thought of seeing them and a few other folks was all that got us to drag our sorry asses into the van yet again. "Once More into the breach, dear friends, once more..."

Interestingly, the late eighties saw the Games Workshop explosion. And I can't help but wonder if full color hard backs and magazines with lots of pictures of miniatures would have been the solution. I do think there was something to do with the full on punk attitude and the zeitgeist but mostly I think they hit on the high production values, high prices model that dominates the industry today first. I'm not always sure it's really the best thing for the industry.

I sit in my store, running games for teenagers and D&D is three $58 CDN hardbacks. The kids love them but most can't begin to afford them. I often wonder if a Basic Dungeons & Dragons branded $20 saddle stitched booklet that ran four classes to level 10 and included an adventure wouldn't be the way to really boost the market. The free 5e pdf is nice but costs about $20 to print on an ink jet anyhow.

But anyhow, it seems sad that nobody ever quite stepped up to take on Games Workshop at the time. I bought ever Warhammer alternative that came out for about ten years but none of them had the budget it would have taken. TSR could have done it but always seemed to fumble their attempts at getting into miniatures. I think the desire to make D&D less wargame like might have been behind it. There were other people doing amazing miniatures games at conventions but to this day people look at a table top full of models and say "Warhammer."

Originally Posted by David Johansen

There were other people doing amazing miniatures games at conventions but to this day people look at a table top full of models and say "Warhammer."

I only say when the the minis' hands, feet, swords, and guns are freakishly big.

Originally Posted by Atsuku Nare

Let me just start by saying I'm really enjoying this thread!

I do have a couple questions for Chirine:

Did Phil ever a player in anyone's game, or was he exclusively a game master?

Along with all the local adventures you came across as you traveled, did you ever stumble on world-changing plots? Like an insane wizard/AI/god that wanted to move Tekumel back to Humanspace? Or were your adventures more in working within the status quo (which it seems like from your descriptions)?

Lastly, when you run Tekumel, do you do anything different from Phil to "put your own spin on it?"

Thanks!

Well, let's see...

Aside from miniatures games and campaigns, I think he was a player in three campaigns; Gronan's D&D, Arneson's Blackmoor for a short while, and as a Livyani PC, Turshaz Arrio, in our first big adventure as a group - the 'Secret Mission' to the Southern Continent. His first PC, Firu ba Yeker of the Clan of the Uttermost Secret, was always a useful source of information - no matter where you were on Tekumel, there'd be this retired Priest of Sarku sitting in the marketplace telling stories. You put a copper in his bowl, and you got all the juicy gossip and rumors. A couple more coppers, and you might get directions to something really cool.

We stumbled on plots like this all the time, and occasionally had a minor role in them. Phil liked to keep his players out of the 'mainstream' of things, so that we would not screw up his novels as he wrote them He'd include our adventures as local color or as background, though. Our hairy footprints are all over "Flamesong", for example.

By the time we started playing, Tekumel had been dropped back into Humanspace twice, the Gods had all been defeated, and the world had come to an end several times. We wanted to simply explore and adventure the world-setting, so we spent out time within our society and having all sorts of epic adventures along the way. We played people who lived on and in Tekumel, I guess I'd say.


No, I do not. I am very careful not to introduce anything into Phil's view of his world through my games, unless I can support that through something Phil wrote or talked about. I play a very 'straight' Tekumel, and I do not put my own individual stamp or spin on what I do. This is where being an archivist and historian comes into play. If Phil did it, then I do it; if he didn't then I don't.

Now, having said that, I do one thing that Phil did not do; I compress time as needed. As I've remarked, Phil had a habit of running his games in one week of real time + one week of game time. This made for very long 'pauses' in the time flow, when we had to play catch-up and run a week's worth of adventures in a single night. I don't do that; I make a series of rolls, and if nothing has happened we move on. Game time expands and contracts as needed in real time, so that we can maintain continuity in the time flow. In model railroading operations, this used to be called 'the rubber clock', in order to run trains to the timetable but allowing for events to happen.

Originally Posted by AsenRG

So you mean, he was trying to gain by selling in bulk?

Yeah, there is a point where selling physical product is too cheap. But it seems a common mistake.

No, he was trying to destroy TSR. He was right up front about it, too. Since it was his company, there wasn't much we could say about it.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

A few words on Akbar and Jeff's Traveling Tekumel Show:

First... Dave Arneson was a dear, sweet man, I miss him greatly, and I would truly describe him as "a gentle soul". However, he had all the business acumen of a colony of cherrystone clams. He had cover art and boxes produced for at least a couple of games that never got written. By the way, boxes are a shockingly expensive proposition; having a thousand full color boxes sitting empty in inventory is a huge drag.

I'd forgotten about the Balboa stuff.

And let me say this: In my opinion, nobody, and I mean nobody, has done more to promote Tekumel than Chrinie. Not create, enhance, enrich... I mean promote. Without his efforts I truly believe Tekumel would have slipped into obscurity in the middle 90s and never been heard from again. No single person has worked harder to make and keep the gaming world aware of Tekumel.

And yes, we worked our bloody asses off as Akbar and Jeff's Traveling Tekumel Show (AAJTTS). (By the way, 100XP for the first person besides Chirine who can identify "Akbar and Jeff" without Google.) It was every bit as thankless as Chirine's description above makes it sound. The real reward was that we met people at cons who absolutely loved it, and that is what kept us going. When I finally gave it up I dropped out of gaming as a hobby for 15 years. They say "Do what you love and you'll never work a day of your life." They lie. This is why I've never tried to get involved with anything about model railroading in any commercial sense.

And Chrine is, if anything, understating the flurry that went on around his miniatures demo games. Very early on, an eager player who just lost a unit said "If I buy more figures can I use them in the battle?" Chirine, not having just fallen off the Mash-fruit Chlen cart, said "Sure." At which point our young lad ran to the table to buy more figures.

I sidled over and prison-yard whispered "I'd think some tactics would help, but I'm not telling him that," to which Chirine grinned and replied "Ixnay on the actics-tay when the ustomer-cay has ash-cay."

It reached the point that we were not only selling miniatures, we were selling Exacto knives, tubes of glue, and sheets of cardboard as well. (All miniatures must be assembled and based.) Sometimes each team had one guy just gluing figures to bases full time.

This is when I realized Chirine is one of the greatest natural marketers in the world. He'd be running the miniatures demo all day long, with players/customers running to our dealer table to buy more minis and throw them into the carnage (think of a volcanic subduction zone -- figures just marched into the center and disappeared), and I'd be taking money and handing out miniatures so fast there were scorch marks on them. Sometimes we'd have a helper or two (Aaron P. and Perfect Mikey), in which case I could stand there with my jaw hanging open watching Chirine work.

So why, ultimately, did it fail? Well, the single biggest reason is that we're talking the 1981-1985 time period. 1982 was the peak year for D&D, and 1983 saw sales decline sharply, and keep falling. And "as goes D&D, so goes the market." We were trying to turn Tekumel into "the new D&D" at exactly the time that D&D stopped being "the new D&D." Alas, as my dear grandfather used to say, "Hindsight is always 20/20." By 1985 GAMA meetings were mostly on the subject of "how to turn the market around," and in 1986 I got the contract to write a Star Trek module for FASA that included a board game, to "get RPG players playing wargames."

If I had it all to do over again, as the saying goes, assuming that I knew then what I knew now (including that business degree) I would try to become a great little spare time business instead of trying to turn Tekumel into the world's most popular RPG, and I would have spent a lot less time "doing the same old thing harder than before" and more time figuring what the new thing should be.

Sports writers talk about boxers having "heart." "The kid's got heart." Well, AAJTTS had plenty of heart, but in retrospect I see that, sadly, we were pretty much trying to accomplish the impossible. We weren't alone; the late 80s took a huge toll in the adventure game industry as it slowly sunk in that we weren't seeing a downward hiccup in the market, we were seeing the collapse of a bubble after the Gold Rush. Things had changed and were not coming back, but nobody realized that at the time.

And people far more trained and experienced then we were have fallen prey to such circumstances... the early 2000s housing bubble being the most recent example. It happens.

Heaps of truth here, folks. We busted our butts on this.

And thank you for the kind words - I've been told by several of Phil's old players that I was the only one keeping the thing alive for all those years.

Well, we tried, anyway...

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Hoo boy. I remember by the end of the summer convention season (Gen Con, I believe) we were ready to pile the merchandise in a heap and set it on fire rather then load it into the damn van one more time. And this is when we were young, strong, and healthy.

If you ever want to get a great bargain at a con, have the patience to wait until Sunday afternoon. At the last DragonCon I went to somebody was selling game supplements that were a couple of years old. On Thursday they were $5 each. By Sunday afternoon they were "Buy one get TWO free," which is a fancy way of saying "For the love of GOD please don't make me carry these things out to the truck." Nothing like eight days of hard work, little sleep, bad food, and stupid questions, and in my case, copious amounts of beer. And yes, eight days... a day to pack and go part of the way, a day of driving and setting up the display, four days of the convention, a day of packing and being to tired to leave Sunday, two days of driving (or driving all night and arriving the second morning mentally burned to a crisp...)

I think we'd have given up a lot sooner if not for Forrest Brown and Butch Leeper from FASA. Those guys are great to hang around with. Sometimes the thought of seeing them and a few other folks was all that got us to drag our sorry asses into the van yet again. "Once More into the breach, dear friends, once more..."

Yep. I have a basement full of stuff that I got this way, to the delight of the merchants off-loading the stuff on me...

Originally Posted by David Johansen

Interestingly, the late eighties saw the Games Workshop explosion. And I can't help but wonder if full color hard backs and magazines with lots of pictures of miniatures would have been the solution. I do think there was something to do with the full on punk attitude and the zeitgeist but mostly I think they hit on the high production values, high prices model that dominates the industry today first. I'm not always sure it's really the best thing for the industry.

I sit in my store, running games for teenagers and D&D is three $58 CDN hardbacks. The kids love them but most can't begin to afford them. I often wonder if a Basic Dungeons & Dragons branded $20 saddle stitched booklet that ran four classes to level 10 and included an adventure wouldn't be the way to really boost the market. The free 5e pdf is nice but costs about $20 to print on an ink jet anyhow.

But anyhow, it seems sad that nobody ever quite stepped up to take on Games Workshop at the time. I bought ever Warhammer alternative that came out for about ten years but none of them had the budget it would have taken. TSR could have done it but always seemed to fumble their attempts at getting into miniatures. I think the desire to make D&D less wargame like might have been behind it. There were other people doing amazing miniatures games at conventions but to this day people look at a table top full of models and say "Warhammer."

Oh, agreed; nobody had the money to invest in the kind of vertical integration and physical plant that GW invested in. And nobody had the business practices that they used, either.

And I agree with you about the price barrier to get into the hobby. Which is one of the reasons Ral Partha is bringing their figures back into the market at very good prices - they are very upfront about trying to get younger people interested in the hobby.

Originally Posted by Bren

I only say when the the minis' hands, feet, swords, and guns are freakishly big.

Oh, agreed! Some of their stuff - usually the older items - are pretty good, but a lot of the lines are specifically aimed at their 'market demographic'.

Originally Posted by David Johansen

Interestingly, the late eighties saw the Games Workshop explosion. And I can't help but wonder if full color hard backs and magazines with lots of pictures of miniatures would have been the solution. I do think there was something to do with the full on punk attitude and the zeitgeist but mostly I think they hit on the high production values, high prices model that dominates the industry today first. I'm not always sure it's really the best thing for the industry.

I sit in my store, running games for teenagers and D&D is three $58 CDN hardbacks. The kids love them but most can't begin to afford them. I often wonder if a Basic Dungeons & Dragons branded $20 saddle stitched booklet that ran four classes to level 10 and included an adventure wouldn't be the way to really boost the market. The free 5e pdf is nice but costs about $20 to print on an ink jet anyhow.

Isn't the OSR helping there?

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Well, let's see...

Aside from miniatures games and campaigns, I think he was a player in three campaigns; Gronan's D&D, Arneson's Blackmoor for a short while, and as a Livyani PC, Turshaz Arrio, in our first big adventure as a group - the 'Secret Mission' to the Southern Continent. His first PC, Firu ba Yeker of the Clan of the Uttermost Secret, was always a useful source of information - no matter where you were on Tekumel, there'd be this retired Priest of Sarku sitting in the marketplace telling stories. You put a copper in his bowl, and you got all the juicy gossip and rumors. A couple more coppers, and you might get directions to something really cool.

Tell us, oh, Chirine, the tale(s) of Turshaz Arrio...

And tell us, oh mighty Gronan, of MARB's play in your campaign. So far, you've told us one fact that I presume was about it: that when Phil told you the monsters in your dungeon wouldn't have a place to eat, you've added a McD for monsters to the dungeon's lower levels!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

No, he was trying to destroy TSR. He was right up front about it, too. Since it was his company, there wasn't much we could say about it.

I really, really hope you're kidding there.