Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Big Andy

You mentioned that after playing for a while, the game sort of "drifted" from using a game system as written, dropping xp for "in world" rewards, using % rolls with rules of thumb, etc., while holding closer to the rules for things like combat. Given this, why was there never an effort to create a system-less source book/world , maybe with conversion guides to major systems in it? I know that you and the Glorious General had already made millions of dollars at Adventure Games selling Tekumel stuff so you were probably jet setting around the world but I would have thought that would have been the most natural way to get Tekumel out there, especially in the late 80's and early 90's. You probably would not have gotten any richer but it might have spread the world around more.
On a side thought to this, do you think there are any rpg systems that couldn't handle Tekumel well?

When an adventurer or group brings something new and unseen before back from wherever and the Empire/Temple/Clans claims it, what happens to it? Does it go into a museum where they show it off? An R&D department? The big giant warehouse full of boxes from the end of Indiana Jones, never to be seen again? Can you ever borrow from the stockpile?

It is funny that you mention canonistas. It seemed that was very common in the 90s, which was odd. Seemed like a lot of people wanted to play in museums instead of in living worlds.

Great questions - let me hit them in order, if I may.

System-less - The concept didn't exist, back then, in the early 1980s. The S&G Sourcebook was systemless, as there were no rules in it at all - that was for Volumes II and III. Everybody, back then, wanted to be the next biggest thing in the industry - after all, if those two idiots could be a success, then MY system will make millions. Lots and lots of people all thought that they could write the perfect RPG, and use Tekumel as the point-of-purchase display to sell their systems.

And when we did tell people about Phil's preferred 'you roll, I roll' method, they tended to freak out. "Too simple", "Too loosey-goosey", "Too handwavy" are the current terms of art that I've been hearing for the past several years. If you have a look at the videos I have up on YouTube, you'll see this style of play in action; I still run things this way, and it seems to work.

I do agree with your points, too; Tekumel is a world-setting, not a system, and it can be used with any RPG you want to. I don't know much about RPGs; I have never played anything newer then AD&D, and I didn't play much OD&D - Gary and Dave were not 'rules lawyers'. I think you'd be better able to answer the question then I could , or other folks could - I simply have no data, as I have never played anything; people have always asked to run games for them! Well, one exception: we had Kyrinn Eis in for a weekend, and he ran her world for us. Wonderful time, and I really enjoyed myself.

Stuff - Yes, to all of the above. It all depends on one's connections. As a PC, I routinely 'borrowed' stuff from the Imperial museums, storehouses, Temple treasuries, you name it. You make sure that it's understood that you're not liable if you lose it in the course of your adventure, but beyond that it's considered 'noble' to properly equip your agents. Ask your clan or Temple to help you; You'd be amazed at what you can get if you ask nicely.

I once got issued a tubeway car by the Imperium, for example. One owner, good paint, and I could borrow it for as long as I wanted to.

'Museum' / 'living' - Agreed. Phil's campaign was a living, breathing thing that sometimes ran off in directions he didn't expect it to. We extended that in our fanzines, including dispatches from campaigns all over the world.

Does any of this help? I worry...

[I]Very helpful and fascinating, don't worry!

Thanks! That's a relief!

I understand why in the early 80's there was no system-less (gonna strike gold in them thar rules!) but after that glow faded I figured that an updated S&G Sourcebook would have worked, especially with all the generic systems that were in vogue (GURPS, HERO, BRP) at the time. Plus it seems to fit the Good Professor's personality, as you and others described it, with regards to his stance on system vs setting, which seems to have been use whatever you want and just enjoy the world.

Agreed. Phil's attitude was that he wanted to see people "playing Tekumel", and didn't care a whole lot about what set of rules that they used. We never said "We're playing EPT (or whatever)," we always said "we're playing Tekumel - or Blackmoor, or Ram's Horn, or Mos Eisley." It's a huge difference in approach, I think. Brett Slocum has done a lot of rules adaptations, for example, that seem to work quite well.

Part of the issue is that once Phil did something, he usually never went back to it. He did the Sourcebook the way he wanted to, and never really looked back. Keep in mind that there was never any money being invested, never any 'professional' help, and never any huge profits to anything done for Tekumel. The one product that did well was the TSR EPT, with 11,000 copies sold (info from Kevin Blume), and after that it was all 250 to 500 copy print runs or far, far smaller. (The novels did not sell well; DAW printed 15,000 of the first one, sold about 5,000, and eventually pulped the rest. "Flamesong" had a 5,000 copy print run, and about half of those were unsold and pulped.) Tekumel, between 1980 and 1988, was pretty much entirely funded out of my back pocket.

And, as Dave Arneson once told Phil, "You can't design games in a vacuum." Phil was, by the middle 1980s, pretty isolated in his gaming; all he had was the two groups at the house, and very occasional trips to the FLGS to play some miniatures. We simply had no exposure to what was happening in the game industry, when the time and need you talk about came along. Interest in Tekumel was dropping pretty fast in the late 1980s, and so there was even less interest in doing much of anything.

As for the "Too simple", "Too loosey-goosey", "Too handwavy" I can see that driving some people crazy but hitting the sweet spot for others. There was a time when I wanted lots of rules, lots of crunch, while now that seems shackling to me and "Too simple", "Too loosey-goosey", "Too handwavy" would be much preferred to a rule for everything and everything has a rule.

Understood. I got a lot of this from OSR people, who kept telling me that the key to better RPGS was having more and more comprehensive rules sets. When I pointed out what we did back in the times that they were trying to emulate / simulate, then tended to get upset.

I asked about the whether Tekumel wouldn't work with certain systems because one of the things that you hear whenever you talk Tekumel is that there is only One Way to play it, which is something you and others combat (thank you, btw). It can only run with this and only this system and if you have your PhD in one of the languages and you played at least x times with the Good Professor, etc.. I think it could be played with pretty much anything. I have found myself playing all sorts of games over the years, thinking- I could use this in a Tekumel game. Admittedly, I came into gaming in Tekumel backwards. I started gaming in the mid 80's and never heard of it when I started. Not long after I started gaming, I stumbled across a book in a used book store called Man of Gold that blew me away and made me think while I was reading it- I really want to game in this world. Only later did I find out that gaming in Tekumel happened before the novel!

I agree; you can use anything to play in the world setting. Phil did; I can remember when we used HotT and WRG for battles. It's what works for you and your game group.

The 'One True Way' approach came about because some of Phil's 1990s players were trying to position themselves as Very Important People in the game hobby - that's where they got the not very flattering nickname of "Barker's Own", and their reputations as elitists. The Official Party Line for much of the later 1990s and well into the 2000's was that "You must learn from me, and have no other play style, because I Am Important!" I don't worry about My Position In Gaming; if you can take away anything useful from my ramblings, then I'm happy.

Another thing that has stood out to me is the amount of female players in the Professor's games. It seems like a higher % than in most other groups I have ever seen. Do you think that is because of Professor Barker or the setting? Both? maybe I am just misreading the gender balance in some of the stories you have told

It's all true. We were considered freaks in gaming because we normally had about half the group at any given time was female. We got a lot of rude comments about it, too, which may have enhanced our feeling of being out of the 'mainstream' of gaming. We had some very talented and clever people, amd some of them happened to be women - we never looked at that, or really cared; we just played. About the only 'rule' was a guideline from Phil that men should pay men, and women women, but that was because he thought it was much easier to remember at the table. It very, very rarely even came up at the table or in play, and about the only time it did come up was when one of the artists asked Phil what somebody was wearing.

Quite of the lot of the leading personalities in Phil's Tekumel happened to be female, and we met quite a few of them.

I know that this is a real-world-butting-in question, but during any game, did anybody ever go "screw <whatever location>! it is too damn hot! Let's move to Nluss or northern Yan Kor!" I had a couple of players who struggled with Tekumel because of climate and the culture it spawns. They were old D&D hands and the idea of not walking around in full armor because of 110 F heat just drove them crazy! Not that they hated the game but it really threw them off of their game! One actually said "I feel naked walking around naked". We all died laughing but understood what he meant- that he felt vulnerable without a full suit of armor.

I don't think this ever came up; Gronan, did it ever come up for you? The in-setting assumption was since we were natives, we'd be used to the situation. If anything, if we did go north we'd complain about the cold.

I think that part of this was that some of us (like Gronan and myself) were used to wearing armor, and had done so in the heat of summer for extended periods of time. We knew, from very practical experience, just how much we could take, and how much we needed to drink water to stay functional. It's why Tekumelyani armor is not often fully-articulated, and has a lot of open areas to help with cooling.

It's Ancient Egypt. People managed to build the pyramids, in all that heat, so we figured that we could bash a few heads...

Originally Posted by Greentongue

As far as the original TSR version of the rules, fighting can get you killed!
It may go against the grain but I suspect that coming to blows was a Last Resort and that maybe being naked helps to stimulate non-combat solutions.
=

Precisely! This adventuring lark is a good way to get dead, so we spent a lot of time trying not to get dead.

[From Big Andy:] All true, but for many who started playing after OD&D, especially AD&D and beyond, it was nothing but fight fight fight. I am reminded of the scene in the comedy film Gamers: Dorkness Rising when the new player suggests negotiating as a useful way to handle encounters and the old hands look at her in speechless horror. "Negotiation isn't your style?" she asks and they reply "Not exactly, no. Our philosophy is: beat it until it stops moving ...and then shoot it... ...and then step on its 'nads."

Understood. That's not the way Phil ran his Tekumel; we often ran into things that would kill us stone cold dead if we didn't start talking really quickly - or run the other way. We killed stuff when and if we had to - melees were just too deadly, if we hadn't been prepared for them, and we all had a real desire to keep our PCs alive - no matter what Phil threw at us. We didn't spend a lot of our game time fighting, over the years.

It is my understanding that in many games now, all fights are level appropriate, meaning characters have at least a punchers chance in every encounter so I doubt if negotiation is every mentioned at most tables. And dropping something completely out of a parties league would be considered bad form from many I have talked to. Kind of a shame.

Wow. Is this what's being talked about concerning a 'balanced game'? It's like the WWII game where I sent a jeep down a road on recon, just like they did in Normandy. Sure enough, somebody took a shot at them, with a tank gun that was 'way above their level'. We played a lot of Tekumel the same way - everything was 'scenario-based', where we'd kick down the door and find ourselves barging into some Temple's ceremony; all the temple guards in the world would then descend on us, and it would all be due to the player doing the mapping making a mistake - "I think we shoulda turned left, back there..."

For us, part of the challenge of the game was playing way out of our league, and still surviving to tell about it. Phil was always happy to oblige, too.

On to questions, did anybody ever play a member of the OAL? All through the novels and various other sources, it strongly implied that the OAL doesn't mess around, like they are more organized and unified in purpose, overall generally more on the ball than all the clans, temples and secret societies. Almost like they were the only group that could sort of almost step outside of the rigid cultural rules that bound everybody else when they were on the job. I always thought you could run some neat spy/caper/mystery games using OAL members but haven't had the chance yet.

Not in our original group, but we'd never know - it's the secret police, after all. As for playing them, yes, it's a great way for people to run mysteries and capers - I'd certainly let one of my players try it, if they asked.

This is a little esoteric but how does the worship of Ksarul work? He is asleep and locked up, so how can his followers get anything from him? All the other Temples worship a being that can, in theory, give them things or punish them or interact with them in some way but it would seem that Ksarul would not be able to do anything for his followers. Is it kind of like Cthulhu where he can somehow send dreams and portents or whatever out? How did the Ssu end up with one of the keys? I wouldn't think it would have been entrusted to them.

The answer we saw is that he manages to extend his influence throughout the Planes of Reality, despite being confined. He certainly does answer his worshipper's prayers - I've seen it in action. And yes, dreams and portents happen all the time.

As to how the Black Ssu got one of the dang Keys / Wards, ya got me; we never found out. And they could keep the thing, as far as I am concerned...

Originally Posted by Hrugga

Hello,

Just a follow up question about Tubeway cars...I think I have been thinking about them in the wrong way. I have been thinking of them as being similar to trains. For example, they go only on "their line". But it just dawned on me that as long as you have the right "Tubeway Car disk"(or coordinates), you can take any Tubeway car to that location. Is this the way it is? Thanks much.

H :0)

Yes; all the standard - spherical - cars can go to any station. It's only the longer 'pill-shaped' transports that have to go to specific stations, as these are the ancients' troop and cargo carriers. The standard cars are all the same shape and diameter, so they can go anywhere on the system, but do differ in their internal details as they were often personal property of the ancients.

The 'memory discs' have ten preselected destinations on them, and the car will go to them when you press the 'pre-selected' button; otherwise, you get the last ten destinations that were programmed into the car; the destinations from the last disc used stay in the car's memory until a new disc is inserted, or some 'helpful' person reprograms the car. It is possible to wipe the car's memory, which is really annoying as the car will then just sit there and do nothing. It's also possible to reprogram the discs, but one has to be a pretty high-level wizard to do it.

The tubes are on a sort of 'hub and spoke' system; the cars will travel through the tubes, and often change over to a different tube in one of the huge interchange and repair areas. I do not advise getting out and looking around - many of the machines still work, as do the robotic guards.

All of this is why one should always take one's disc out of the console, and take it with when disembarking from the car. It's really bad to lose your disc, too.

Does this help? More?