I have a question! (finally) - totally unrelated to most of the topics here.
Was there any reaction to Raymond Feist's creating his world of Kelewan based off of Tekumel? His Empire series was pretty damn entertaining but it lifted *many* concepts from Tekumel. I was always curious to know what old-school Tekumel fans and creators felt about it? I'm not sure he ever publicly acknowledged it - I know he denied it at one point (but it's glaringly obvious).
Thoughts?
I agree with you, it was entertaining but it obviously was Tekumel. I know my group saw the similarities right away. At the time we thought that he must have been a player, inspired by a game that he was in, but his DM didn't tell him that Kelewan was actually Tekumel. I don't what the legal ramifications were, but I'm sure the Glorious General or Chirine can fill us in.Originally Posted by tenbones
Wasn't there a Midkemia supplement out as well? I thing Judge's Guild may have published it?
Shemek.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
I just can't wrap my head around this. Ok, your preconceived notions of how it was are wrong. Deal with it, especially when an actual player who was there is telling you that this is how they did it! Holy shit Batman! You and Chirine are a hell of a lot more patient than I am. After the second time this happened I'd be swinging a bat.
Shemek.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Yep! Midkemia Press put out a few supplements for D&D which Feist converted into his novel world called Midkemia. He gives thanks to Steve Abrahms and the rest of his gaming crew in all his books.
I had to admit, while Kelewan is obviously a re-imagining of Tekumel, I found that series pretty damn good. I still think Tekumel deserves more credit for the 'originality' ascribed to those books. Kelewan as awesome as it iswould simply not exist if it weren't for Tekumel.Spoiler:
Ah, me. I'll give the short version, for now, as we have to be up in six hours for the Missus' latest round of treatments. I had more then a front-row seat for this one. And now, Storytime with Uncle Chirine...
So we get a letter in from a Tekumel fan, asking about this new book by Ray Feist, and it is part of the 'Tekumel canon'? No idea what he's talking about, so I get sent out to buy a copy and read it for Phil. I do so, and Kelewan seems very familiar. So, I bring this out to Phil, and he gets on the phone to Don Wohlheim at DAW Books; Don asks Phil to provide notes on the possible copyright infringement, and (as usual) the job gets handed to me. I do the same kind of work that Dave Arneson's Very Big-name Lawyer did for all the TSR royalty lawsuits, and do side-by-side comparisons with Phil's and Ray's works. I found that the descriptions in the Feist book were close, but not identical with, Phil's descriptions of the same items, like the insect-like Choja /Pe Choi. I turned the whole pile of notes over to Phil, he sent them to DAW, DAW handed them to their lawyer, and their lawyer found that there was no copyright infringement with any of the books that DAW had published; the issue seemed to be with the TSR EPT, the lawyer said, so DAW had no legal standing in the matter. Don, trying to help Phil out, bought Phil a membership in the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), and suggested that Phil take it to the SFWA arbitration committee which had been set up specifically to deal with things like this. Phil got very upset and told Tekumel Games to sue Mr. Feist, and Tekumel Games CEO (this was after Gronan's time in the hot seat, by the way) pointed out that the company had no legal standing in the matter either, because Phil had never signed a contract with the company to publish his works - they were, in effect, a surplus dealer as all they had were the legacy products from Adventure Games and my Tekumel Journal; Phil, while majority stockholder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Tekumel Games Inc., hadn't done any agreements for publishing anything new with the company.
Phil got very upset, cried "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?", and stopped doing anything for DAW - he was in the middle of "Lords of Tsamra" at the time, and put it on the shelf for over a decade. For whatever reason, Phil didn't pursue the matter any further, and griped about it for years. He didn't take to the SFWA board, either, which baffled all of us at the time. Later on, I got to talk to both Mr. Wohlheim and Mr. Feist, and they were surprised that Phil hadn't gone to SFWA. This was back in the days when the concept of 'Intellectual Property' was still being defined, and having SFWA look at this would have been a real benefit for everyone.
Back at the beginning of this, I'd had a feeling from the way things were being described that Ray was playing in somebody's D&D game, and the GM had used Tekumel as the basis for his 'other world' that you got to through the rift. Back in the day, this was a very common thing in gaming; people would wander back and forth between Blackmoor and Greyhawk pretty frequently, for example. Nobody in the D&D campaign (which was out on the West Coast) knew about Tekumel, and it wasn't until they started doing the publishing that they found out what was going on; they contacted TSR, and they got permission to use the EPT-inspired elements in the books. So, they thought that they had it covered, and why they thought that going to SFWA would have been a good idea.
This turned into a major scandal / controversy amongst a number of the die-hard fans on both sides of the fence, and you can still spark heated discussions amongst them to this day.
Me, I walked away from this one years ago. I'm an archivist, not a lawyer, and once I'd recorded the data that was it for me. I do have copies of the Feist books on my bookshelf, as well as the recent Atlas / Sourcebook; I was hugely amused to see the Ral Partha figures we'd been using out at Phil's being used as some of the models for some of the cover artwork. (But that's another tale.)
So, that's the short form of the backstory.
Kelewan is not Tekumel; there are enough differences between the two to make them separate world-settings, and I threat them that way. A Livyani sorcerer I know would say that the two are 'next to each other', and I'm satisfied with that. Yes, the one inspired the other, and beyond that it's one for the lawyers.
Last edited by chirine ba kal; 06-21-2016 at 02:29 AM. Reason: typo
Is it bad of me that I'm devoutly glad that I was no longer involved with the business part of Tekumel at that time?
Also, it's kind of interesting because the Golden Age sf/fantasy authors borrowed liberally from each other all the time; see A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson and the ending of Heinlein's Number of the Beast.
I don't care if you respect me, just buy my fucking book.
Formerly known as Old Geezer
I don't need an Ignore List, I need a Tongue My Pee Hole list.
The rules can't cure stupid, and the rules can't cure asshole.
Wow! That's pretty damn interesting. As a fan of Tekumel and Feist, I can totally see how that might have developed. There certainly were differences between the two - I never knew how far things went behind the scenes. Ray didn't seem, to me, the type to wholesale "steal" these ideas in some malicious way. But yeah, that explains a lot. I know a lot of old-school GM's that just stuck all kinds of stuff from books, movies, other games into their homebrew and let it fly.
Thank you so much for the inside story. I really appreciate it!!!
From AsenRG:
Yeah, it seems I was playing Chirine right...though they've never interacted with him personally.
Sounds good. These days, I don't go off on adventures - adventures seem to come to me, which is nice because I get to eat at home and sleep in my own bed - but I am one of the 'patrons' that sends parties of adventurers / player-characters off on the sort of 'odd jobs' that I used to have to do. (Even have the figures for it, thanks to Dark Fable!) I was, and probably always will be, a guy who's trying to provide for the family and household, just like most people; I just happen to be a powerful sorcerer who lives on a very hostile alien world...
Yes; I think the thing that netted me most points was using the fact that another faction has announced full mobilisation, and organizing a manufacture in one of their own cities, for supplies we needed.
It was faster to get them from there to the front lines, and if we were defeated, I'd have had a business in the winning country...
Sun Tzu would be very proud of you, sir!
"Reasonably good for someone with decades of experience" is "really, really good" in layman terms.
Oh. Well. I have to say that I agree with you, if I may be so immodest. I just like making things; I'm good with my hands and tools, and stuff seems to flow together in most projects. No idea why, it just is...
Maybe. Or maybe people just misinterpreted what accounts there were. Both seem equally plausible to me; though from your description of the other group, that you split from? I'd have been tempted to railroad those guys, too. Though I'd probably just let them in the sandbox, and steer them towards the most self-destructive courses of action.
To paraphrase Gronan, "some PCs are only good when you watch them burn".
There were, out at Phil's, several different generations of each of the two groups. The original Monday guys were the 'New Men', and they had faded out by the middle 1980s; they were replaced by a number of 'power gamers', who lasted until the middle to late 1990s. Out group was in it's heyday 1978 to 1988, and then the original membership was largely replaced by the 'politically correct'. Both groups closed down in the late 1990s, and our groups' name was taken up by the five or six players who remained. I think, based on all the accounts I've heard, that we were the most 'open sandbox' of the groups as well as being the most assimilated and immersed in the setting.
Well, seems like you're in the same spot where my local community was 10 years ago or so. It has changed for the better now, but it took quite a bit of effort and side-stepping the community and building my own thing outside of it.
(Then people that have started with me in turn integrated with the local gamers and brought the outlook I'd taught them).
I would not be surprised at this. I'll keep plugging away, and we'll see what happens. I start a new job in two weeks - I had a very successful interview today, at the end of which I was offered the position - with a better schedule, and we'll see if that helps.
"How dares your experience to deviate from my theory" is sad when you encounter it in scientists, and merely funny when you encounter it in gamers, in my experience.
(It only gets scare when you encounter it in cops and judges. I'm fortunate to never had experienced that).
Agreed; it just got old, in the gaming discussions...
No, I don;t think so. You were able to get out just in time, I think, as the control rods seemed to come right out of the reactor after this affair.
Agreed. See also Lovecraft and Howard sharing their story elements back and forth, too.
You're welcome. All I can do is report what I saw and heard.
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