Originally Posted by
chirine ba kal
Hm. Well, let's take a run at this.
Phil did EPT more or less 'on spec' for Bill Hoyt, who sold the option to TSR, and so there was a very strong emphasis on EPT being as much like / as compatible as possible with OD&D/WhiteBox/whatever it's called these days. Phil got his original impetus from Dave, and the polish on the cannonball was from Gary. So, EPT is basicially OD&D, but with some wrinkles - as both Gary and Dave told me, at various times and much later on, "EPT was the game they'd wished they'd written."
At the same time, Phil also did a neat little board game called "War of Wizards", which was all about sorcerers doing magical duels in the arena. (Always a crowd-pleaser, these.) It had a huge spell corpora of really cool stuff, and was a real eye-opener for how a magic system could be done - and keep in mind, D&D fans, when you talk about 'Vancian magic', Phil was a friend of Jack Vance and drew the first maps of the Dying Earth for him. WoW is a very good way to learn about how Phil thought magic should work in Tekumel, and was kind of unhappy with having to "dumb it down" in EPT.
In the very late 1970s, and very early 1980s, he started to write a new RPG, which he thought would be a more faithful reflection of how he thought Tekumel worked. He abandoned it about half-way through, as the thing was looking to go over a thousand pages in manuscript; he used the same material in a new RPG, which became "Swords and Glory"; he basically did a cut-and-paste to move all the world setting stuff into what became the Sourcebook (vol. I), the playing rules into the Player's Guide (vol. II), and the uncompleted Referee's Guide (vol. III).
S&G's magic system is very much the same as WoW's, with many of the same spells. Phil liked to use the S&G/WoW spells in his campaign, and when he used any rules at all, used the EPT rules for melee's and such. I think we used S&G's combat system maybe a half-dozen times, and then Phil just sort of gave up on it. The magic system, on the other hand, worked out fine and we all liked it.
So, I thought that if it was good enough for Phil to use, that's what I'd do. As my two campaigns had to interface with his two in his meta-game, it all worked out well for the players as well as for us GMs.
This is why I can suggest Jeff Dee's "Bethorm" as a good way to play the way Phil played in his campaigns. It's a very good reflection of how games out at Phil's were played, all in one package.
Does this help? Moving on...
Humans are more 'magical' then most of the non-human races, but again there are differences. I'd hate to run up against a Pe Choi or Tinaliya magic-user, for example. Other non-humans don't use magic at all, and you have to consider all of them on a case by case basis. Likewise, the non-human vary in 'toughness' in combat terms, with some (like the Shen and Ahoggya) being very, very tough opponents, and some (like the Swamp Folk) much less so. Phil rolled up a batch of non-humans, same as for humans, for his NPCs, so they were all individuals; he very rarely used 'batch' NPCs, unless they were something like a half-dozen undead or something like that>
Again, am I being helpful here?
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