Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by AsenRG

Yeah, even I found the linguistic insistence weird. And I'm the guy that finds S&G an entertaining reading, and reads encyclopaedia entries for campaign inspiration.

They lost about 15 hours of posts.

Agreed; what is it about the languages that people seem to obsess on?

Ah! I wondered what had happened. Did I miss anything?

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Agreed; what is it about the languages that people seem to obsess on?

Ah! I wondered what had happened. Did I miss anything?

Not sure, or rather, my theory would make me sound like an angrier version of one of Pundit's latest posts. So I'll just state that I don't understand it, either.

As far as we know, someone hacked an administrative/moderator account and started tampering with stuff, so they rebooted it to before the tampering started and advised all users to change passwords.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Hm. For us, 'party loot' always included 'inducements', 'tips', 'goodwill payments', 'gifts', and 'baksheesh' as a matter of course from the very beginning. We regarded it as part of the 'overhead'; payments to the clan were part of the cost of doing business for the group, so I guess we did thins from the beginning of when we played - for us, it was simply part of belonging to the society. No resistance that I remember.

In the Very Early Days of EPT (c) (tm) (pat pend) (reg us pat off) it was indeed "XP for gold" much like early D&D. That's why Moose working as dockside muscle and Anka'a and I in the arena was important; they'd get up a few khaitars so they could bet on me. Once I won enough fights that they couldn't get odds better than 4 gets you 1, we needed a new game.

Once I joined the army, for me at least the "loot" box simply got ticked "not applicable," and once I became a General and a member of Golden Sunburst, doubly so. "You've just married a member of the DuPont family. Car payments for your 2004 Subaru are no longer an issue."

So, I wake up on a fine Jakallan morning and I look out over the city from the roof of my clanhouse...What colors do I see? For example, what colors are the flora(the bestiary helps with the fauna), the buildings, etc? What prompted this was Chirine asking, "What color is the sky...?" After being wisked away somewhere while on his adventures...

So what color is Tekumel's sky? What do I see as I look around me?

I've never come across a reference to it in what I've read. Unless I've missed it. If so can you please point me in the right direction.

Thanks much,

H :0)

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

In the Very Early Days of EPT (c) (tm) (pat pend) (reg us pat off) it was indeed "XP for gold" much like early D&D. That's why Moose working as dockside muscle and Anka'a and I in the arena was important; they'd get up a few khaitars so they could bet on me. Once I won enough fights that they couldn't get odds better than 4 gets you 1, we needed a new game.

Once I joined the army, for me at least the "loot" box simply got ticked "not applicable," and once I became a General and a member of Golden Sunburst, doubly so. "You've just married a member of the DuPont family. Car payments for your 2004 Subaru are no longer an issue."

Same here. I came in when you got your Gold of Glory that was reported in "The Dragon", and I don't think I ever worried about XP or anything. I lived off my Temple and legion pay, and whatever little goodies I could pick up on our adventures. These days, I have three million of the little gold Kaitars in the treasure vault, due to a player's trying to finesse the Imperial Treasury and failing; I wonder what that would be in XP, and what could I do with it...

Originally Posted by Hrugga

So, I wake up on a fine Jakallan morning and I look out over the city from the roof of my clanhouse...What colors do I see? For example, what colors are the flora(the bestiary helps with the fauna), the buildings, etc? What prompted this was Chirine asking, "What color is the sky...?" After being wisked away somewhere while on his adventures...

So what color is Tekumel's sky? What do I see as I look around me?

I've never come across a reference to it in what I've read. Unless I've missed it. If so can you please point me in the right direction.

Thanks much,

H :0)

It's bright and colorful. Phil based his color sense for Tekumel on his time in South Asia; look on the web for photos of temples, fortresses, and palaces, and you'll see what Phil saw - and told us about. He said in a number of places that Tekumel is basically India, but with ray guns, and I've always gone with that.

May I suggest taking a little trip and following in Phil's footsteps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f1zNrdUpNc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OlrlwjBrGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpjlsgPCB-Y

(I hope that these work; I'm not very good at this, sorry!)

Back about 1981 or 1982, Phil was working with the artist who did the covers of the Zocchi edition of S&G. The first two got published as the box covers, but you have to look at the current Foundation edition to see the first painting as it was intended to be seen; Zocchi left out the black printing plate in the color seperations to save some money. He was fearfully cheap; the draft of the Sourcebook was in nine point type, with two point leading, and Phil simply refused to allow that to be published. Lou went back and did it in a larger type, but poor Curtis Scott had to go in and do all the accent marks by hand, as Lou thought that it would cost too much money to typeset. It literally killed Curtis; he had a heart condition, and months in an unairconditioned warehouse in Gulfport didn't do him any good.

Anyway, the cover painting for the GM Guide had a scene with some Ahoggya being rowed out to a ship. There's a lot of sky, and it's a nice golden-white color; Phil was delighted with this, as he pointed out that Tekumel's sun is a brighter yellow-white spectral class, so he thought that the sky should be a brighter golden color - the painting captures this perfectly.

Stuff like this went by in the campaign all the time; we knew that Kashi moves in a retrograde motion to Gayel, for example, which made my working out the planetary motion simulator kind of a pain. (Should have ahd the Tinaliya do it; they love that kind of thing.) Which is why I'm doing the book, too...

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

It literally killed Curtis; he had a heart condition, and months in an unairconditioned warehouse in Gulfport didn't do him any good.

Aw, DANG it, I didn't know that!

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Aw, DANG it, I didn't know that!

Yep. His widow wasn't very pleased, either; Bob Alberti likes to make jokes about the hand-written accent marks, and often cited them as an example of what utter dweebs you and I were as publishers - she heard about his wisecracks, and got pretty upset. I don't know if he still does this; now that he's a Director of The Tekumel Foundation, he's a Very Important Person. My girls call him "Bob The Snob", after meeting him.

(He's also the one who was a big factor in my brain bleed; I was installing a door knob and lock in the Foundations's office that they rent from Bob because Bob and Victor couldn't agree on how it should be done. So, as usual, I got handed the problem and told to get on with it. I had a year with them doing stuff like this, and that night my blood pressure was 220 over 110.)

That's why I was kinda surprised to see that they'd reprinted the scan of the Zocchi edition, instead of doing the OCR version that has been 'in the works' for something like six years. The Directors of the Foundation have always been very up front in their contempt for this particular edition, and it's a little surprising to see them reprint it in toto, including the missing portions of the text.

Ah, well. NMP, anymore. I'm just happy to see any edition of the thing back out there!

Jeez.

Well, the OCR version would take time and effort, the old edition just needed printing.

Cynical? Me? Oh, you say the sweetest things!