Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Ever read Bimbos of the Death Sun? In the in-game D&D game a teenaged couple is going to have their characters get married and the rest of the group conspires to secretly have his character killed and a double inserted.

1988. It was a common enough trope to be satirized.

Good gaming? Fuck no. Functional? Of course not.

Common? A different question.

Originally Posted by d(sqrt(-1))

I do have a question though, if I may: I seem to remember reading (and I think it's in one of the Adventures on Tekumel books), that in a ritual somewhere under Jakalla, there were priests of some of the Pariah Gods present (The Only Old One, perhaps?). Certainly there were obvious symbols of the PGs being held up. Is there any information on this, or on what was going on?

Thank you, and welcome aboard!

It's the 'circle and dot' emblem of The One Other, if I recall. They do participate in certain ancient rituals - they figure in the Kolumeljalim, the Choosing of the Seal Emperor. The Goddess of the Pale Bone usually has a bone of some sort with little leaping and dancing figures, and you don't see it very often. The One Who Is has no symbol that I know of.

Now you've gotten me curious - I'll have to go back and look!

Please, by mid-1990s WoD was old hat, everyone already threw their grittier than thou PvP into the ring (oh, such a contrast from the zany PvP of Paranoia), and arcade video game etiquette already had well established "don't exploit the known bullshit version glitches to shit on everyone else's fun, or else we reset the cabinet and threaten to knock your teeth in."

And by mid-1990s I just finished being a snot-nosed angsty teenager in the age of grunge self-indulgence -- and still my peers and I knew better.

Sorry, no pass. Not being a spiteful, vindictive asshole, inside and outside the game, was already well established protocol by the 1990s. Bad, spineless GMing.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

You know what? I have to unsay the entire message above.

You see, I have been guilty of "anachronistic thinking." I am evaluating Phil's reffing of TWENTY YEARS AGO by the standards of today.

Let me put it in perspective for you. I played in Tekumel from 1974 until 1985. 1985 is ELEVEN YEARS AFTER THE FIRST PUBLICATION OF D&D.

The events with Kathy that Chirine described are "mid 1990s." That's 20 YEARS AGO. And twenty years after D&D first appeared.

Gaming was still in its adolescence, if not infancy. Most of the terms we've been bandying about simply didn't exist as ideas. Shit on toast almighty, this is when "Internet' meant using a dialup modem to access America Onlline.

Phil was reffing by the standard wisdom of the day: the referee is a neutral arbiter, and the players can do what the players want. If that results in player vs player conflict, it is up to the referee to be neutral. If some of the players don't like it, it is for the players to sort out among themselves.

Hell, it's only the last five years or so that I've seen the notion of "Be as explicit as possible about expectations" get any traction. It's twenty years after these events, and people are STILL trying to figure out how it all works.

We are simply being very unfair, and indulging in sloppy thinking.

Um, I see your point, and I do agree with you. However, you are also correct in your first post on this, and I think you're right in both posts. I put in bold italics your comment because it's very, very true; you and I both GM'd and refereed games the exact same way as Phil did.

In this case, it blew up on Phil very badly, just as Lady Anka'a and her antics blew up on me. However, and here's where your comments above are so very much on the mark, I had an extra twenty years of gaming under my belt when the crisis hit. If I had not had that additional time in the barrel, I don't think I would have handled my situation any better then Phil had had to handle his - I submit that you are right; Phil simply didn't have the tools that we have now to deal with the situation, in game, and certainly the out-of-game real world issues that he was facing at the time played a very large and very negative part in what happened.

And, I will also be clear about this, I also had the advantage of being able to read Phil's letters to his old friend that he'd written at the time that this all went down. The letters span the time from early 1974 to late in 2005 or so, and were never meant to be seen or read by any of us. The sense of isolation, despair, and unhappiness at the way things went in the early 1990s in both his personal, professional, and gaming life is heartbreaking.

To be blunt, if I hadn't had that posthumous guidance from Phil, my situation would have been much worse, and just as bad as what he faced. Because of his letters, I knew when to pull the plug on both the Gary Con trip and the game group.

Thank you, Phil, where ever you are...

Originally Posted by CRKrueger

I dunno, was "'PvP' sexual harassment, sexual abuse, torture, and rape" ok in 1980? I'm not sure exactly what Chirine was talking about when he said The continuing and graphic in-game 'PvP' sexual harassment, sexual abuse, torture, and rape that she had had to put up with as Vrisa. I don't know if that meant all that was something the player witnessed the party due to others or was some of that an ongoing attack on Vrisa?

In any case, being drugged and sold as a slave isn't the worst thing you can do to a PC by far, but what else was involved there?

This has nothing to do with "setting player expectations" and all the new-fangled panty-bunching for the fainting couch crowd, this is Rule Zero of all gaming - "Don't use the game as an excuse to be a dick".

This doesn't sound like friends fucking eachother over gleefully while playing Diplomacy or Paranoia, or even the Thief deciding he needs a little kicker for all the poison traps he faces. This sounds Real Life Personal.

You were right the first time. Phil, being human, fucked up royally. If those types of players were coming to dominate his groups, then more of his friends needed to call him out on that bullshit back then.

I don't know the situation, so forgive me for pulling something out of my ass, but this sounds a little bit like a really popular famous figure attracting a group of sycophants and starting to believe their bullshit.

It was as bad as it sounds; I got it from both Kathy and her various tormentors.

It was all about the politics around the table, and getting rid of Kathy to advance the career of one of the people who came in in the 1990s with these folks.

As I think I said, the single biggest roadblock that Tekumel ever faced was the politics around the table. Phil was never comfortable with dealing with 'external' publishers; he ran afoul of the locals' tendency for feuds with the 'internal' ones.

I personally did not like those days; my single biggest regret in my long and very busy life is that I agreed to be hired by Dave Arneson to be the Tekumel person at AGI. If I have known what was going to happen in the coming decades, I would have stayed well away from the commercial side of the house.

Now, it's been said by a number of people that if I hadn't spent the last thirty-some years of my life promoting Tekumel, it would have been dead and forgotten a long time ago. Maybe; I don't know, as I'm too close to the subject.

As I'm writing "To Serve The Petal Throne", I am making a very up-front decision to skirt all these issues; I want people to get to know the Phil Barker that we enjoyed playing with, and the wonderful times we had with him. I could certainly write a book about all the things that went wrong and/or badly, but I'll leave that for someone else to pursue.

First off, I am doing a sort of general reply to everyone on this subject; I want to be as clear as possible on this for everyone.

I've talked to The Missus about this, and we have no problems with this. There is precedent; about four years ago, we had an 'open-house' weekend and had some fourteen guests in for three days. About half were from out of town, and some from quite far afield. I thought it was great fun; we had miniatures games, RPGs, and even a guest RPG GM. Everyone said that they really enjoyed the chance to come and game, and see all the stuff I've accumulated over the years.

If people wanted to do something like this, talk to each other. I have an absurd number of vacation hours 'in the bank', so I would take a full week off around the (I presume) weekend that everyone agreed on. This would give everyone as much 'time on target' as possible, which I think is the idea. Both the game room and the game lounge would be open, and my workshop as well. (Two toilets, too; we try to be prepared.)

I would be at your disposal for the entire time, and we'd have to discuss what people wanted to do and see. I would need a month's notice of the actual date, if not a wee bit more, so I can file the vacation request, but that's about it. (Oh, and no smoking in the house, due to The Missus' asthma.) We can also see about a Skype connection, too; we';; need to work on that...

That's an extraordinarily generous offer and makes me regret the distance we live apart. I hope genuinely kind and appreciative people take you up on your offer.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

As I'm writing "To Serve The Petal Throne", I am making a very up-front decision to skirt all these issues; I want people to get to know the Phil Barker that we enjoyed playing with, and the wonderful times we had with him. I could certainly write a book about all the things that went wrong and/or badly, but I'll leave that for someone else to pursue.

You shouldn't. Good comes with the bad, bad comes with the good. It's important for people to know that the gaming legends weren't just merry grognards with vikings hats, and everyone always played the best, the lost golden pioneer days of gaming, but that they also had issues and fuck ups at the table all too reminiscent to us.

Reading this thread, I enjoyed both the descriptions of great moments in gaming, as well as taking a look at the absurd, but all too human, screw ups.

And sorry, but I agree with Opa on the issue of GMing. 20 years old is past adolescence. If this happened in first 3 - 4 years, it'd be understandable.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Thank you, and welcome aboard!

It's the 'circle and dot' emblem of The One Other, if I recall. They do participate in certain ancient rituals - they figure in the Kolumeljalim, the Choosing of the Seal Emperor. The Goddess of the Pale Bone usually has a bone of some sort with little leaping and dancing figures, and you don't see it very often. The One Who Is has no symbol that I know of.

Now you've gotten me curious - I'll have to go back and look!

Thank you too!

I think you are right it is The One Other. The thing that confuses me is that I thought these guys were completely "deity non grata", so how do they participate in the rituals without being instantly whacked by the OAL or other temples? Or are they "stand-in" representatives there to represent the bad guys and show how they were defeated etc(*)? I'm guessing that it's something to do with one of the secrets of Tekumel? Maybe there is no definite answer. I'll have a look and see if I can find the reference.

(*) The parallel here would be in a Gloranthan Heroquest, if you know Glorantha, where members of cults re-enact the stories of their god, and others stand in as the opposition in the story, sometimes willingly, sometimes not.