Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

From AsenRG:
Huh, somehow I'd missed a reply from Chirine? I wonder how that happened.
My irregular Internet connection and equally irregular posting schedule, most likely.

Yes, and Gronan's advice is pretty good as well. Violent Disneyland ain't an attitude that's worth pandering to, give them a lesson to remember!Agreed. They are going to get a lesson, if I have my druthers. They may not like it, but they may learn from it.

My answer has lately shifted to "if it bothers you, get lost". For full-page pictures.
If it's about inch-tall figures, that would be my advice only when I'm in a good mood.
Understood. I'm just astounded that little lead people are so controversial.

I don't know, but the water explanation doesn't sound unlikely, lately...
And the "need to be right" doesn't help it, either.
Twin Cities fandom is famous for being riven by feuds. This is the only fan community where there was an official "Finger-pointing and Jeering" Committee that was part of the local convention committee, dedicated to bad-mouthing and sabotaging the people who were actually running the event. That group, and their convention, are now history. And largely forgotten history, at that.

Uncle, I recently started a freeform game. The system is "describe it, it happens and the referee tell you what happens next, oh and don't be immature or a dick".
Remind the Well-Known Internet Gamer-commentators that such games exist. Also remind them that this style of play is more popular by orders of magnitude than D&D.
Watch them choke on their own bile.
Profit.
(I call dibs on their shoes and phones, you can keep the rest! And you gain cleaner air in the bargain.)
I don;t talk to people like that, anymore, but if I do I'll wipe off the residue before I pass along the loot.

Check the end of my post, too...
I did; very nice!

Originally Posted by DavetheLost

I have cured a few murder hoboes of the notion that all NPCs are there for the killing as walking experience point banks. Putting the players on trial for murder can be wicked fun...

As for the modesty bars, there is at least one site selling nice Egyptian type figures that has modesty bars on one picture, none on the one next to it, on the same page! I fail to see the danger to society in little lead nipples anyway. But I am sliding into middle age.

Agreed. Being an Imperial official with the powers of High, Middle, and Low Justice does indeed have some nice aspects to it...

Same here. These are little miniatures, and nothing else. And they're in quite well documented historical costumes, to. So, what's the outrage all about?

Originally Posted by AsenRG

Indeed, are little lead nipples a danger for people who have access to Internet?
According to Forbes, depending on how internet traffic is measured, claims for the share of porn-related traffic vary from 4% to 30% from all traffic on Internet.
I leave it to you to guess why I'm laughing really hard at modesty bars!

Yep. There's nothing you probably can't see on any beach in Europe - or in the US, for that matter. Let alone on the easy-to-access Web.

"Modesty Bars! Now with 40% more outrage in every bite!"

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

"Modesty Bars! Now with 40% more outrage in every bite!"

Shemek

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

I've extracted this sentence, if that's all right, as I think it's something that I'd like to speak to.

What is - and I'm not trying to be difficult here, I'm genuinely curious as to what people think - 'official' or 'canon' in relation to Tekumel and Phil?

I've been hearing these words used in discussions for literally decades; the reason why Ken and I did the 'Seal of Approval' on our products was simply because people seemed to really need to be reassured that whatever they were looking at had been approved by Phil. Most of the time, he'd look at something, say "That's fine by me," and promptly move on. To be frank, he just wasn't all that interested in our products as they had very little relevance to 'Story Time With Uncle Phil' on Thursday nights.

I take a different approach, myself; there's what Phil wrote about, talked about, and did in his games - that's 'primary' Tekumel. Then there's us players who gamed with him, and wrote or illustrated what we saw and heard - that's 'first order' Tekumel. They you have the people who listened to us (and I include talking to Phil in this, too), and did their own publications/artwork/maps/campaigns - that's 'second order' Tekumel. I use all the Tekumel materials that I can get my hands on; I do compare things from 'third parties' to what Phil did, and govern myself accordingly.

I am, I have been told by the Tekumel Foundation, quote "The Greatest Living Authority On Tekumel"; I don't know if that's accurate or not - me, I think I just happen to have a good memory and lots of files and stuff - and I've been asked repeatedly if my book "To Serve the Petal Throne" is an Official, Canon object. I don't know if I can answer that, as the thing is (from my perspective, anyway) simply a 'tidied up' of our adventures - 'tidied up' in the sense that I try to give the backstories behind our antics - and more 'fan fiction' then anything else because it's being told from my personal perspective as a player-character. It's not a transcript of our game sessions - somebody else can to that, thank you - but a storyteller in the market place.


Thoughts? Comments? I'm genuinely curious as to what people think about this...

Personally, I think that "canon" or "official" are only really useful if a GM wants to maintain some type continuity with his game and the published material, i.e., novels. Your breakdown of the various levels of Tekumel is great, and is a good rule of thumb when trying to fit something into the big picture. For what it's worth, I would classify your book as "Tekumel Canon." You can't get any closer to source, in my opinion.

Shemek

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

The good news is that the guy in charge of my people got killed for trying to take on heavy cavalry with light infantry, in the open with no cover. Saves me an execution for being stupid.

Didn't we used to call that 'self-correcting behavior'?

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Yeah, I said the same thing when I heard about the incident. From what I gather, the party did discuss what to do with the prisoners, then killed them mostly because they couldn't think of anything better to do with them. About all it got them was a bad reputation and cheesed off the rest of the staff, so it's going to be hard to keep everybody from retaliating. We'll see, I suppose.

You know, your point about "not used to facing live opponents" is a good one. And I have to admit I think that computer games are responsible for a lot of that. In a computer game your choices are incredibly limited. Usually you have to kill your way through the game. Only rarely do you actually have a chance to parley with a hostile agent, and even then your dialog choices are very limited, usually only 3 choices or so.

So then you come into this world of the table top where you can try anything, but all you've been taught to do is stab cardboard cutouts for easy treasure and XP.

And because of the limits of computer game AI the enemies act in ways that are downright stupid in real life. Number one example is what's called "pulling" a bad guy. Say there's a group of guards; you get close to the one on the fringe and he will move to attack you and you can lure him away from the group and kill him to death for his stupidity.

Then players who have been trained to do this play on the tabletop, and the first guard who spots them falls back and sounds the alarm and a squad of guards appears and swords the players to death, stwikes them woughly, and thwows them to the fwoor.

Tactics are dying and I don't know what to do about it. People get killed and they DON'T REALIZE THEY ARE DOING IT TO THEMSELVES even if I try to explain it.

See, folks, tactics are REAL. Many moons ago I started getting more deeply into historical miniatures games. I started borrowing books from Chirine and our mutual friend David about World War 2. So I read and read, and after a year or so I realized something astonishing.

The Germans won most of their campaigns with Panzer IIs and a smattering of Panzer III.

All the big glitzy German stuff, the Panther, the Tigers, the Jagdpanther, etc, etc.... all that shiny neeto keeno stuff that the German players love to field... all that showed up AFTER THE GERMANS STARTED LOSING. Now, you could argue about the Tiger I, I suppose, but the Germans had already gotten mauled by the T-34 in Russia by then.

So... the big German victories in France and the Desert had nothing to do with hardware. It was then and there that I had the realization, to quote the late John M. Ford once again, "Tactics are real!"

That, by the way, dear ones, is why your uncle Chirine found himself buzzing around the desert like a gang of demented flies in gobs of Pz I and II while being chased by that horrible juggernaut, the M3 Lee. Not because of sadism on my part (okay, maybe a bit) but because he was one of the best, possibly THE best, tactician I knew. I wanted to see how the hell the Germans did it, and Chirine seemed the most likely candidate for being able to pull it off.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Thoughts? Comments? I'm genuinely curious as to what people think about this...

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Personally, I think that "canon" or "official" are only really useful if a GM wants to maintain some type continuity with his game and the published material, i.e., novels.

Shemek makes an excellent point.

I actually hesitated before leaving that line about this not being canon in.

That term sort of kills the possibility of Tekumel as a playable fantasy world, as it suggests that one cannot run it unless one does it the manner in which Barker did it.
I actually love the "non-canon" stuff, that is, the "'second order' stuff", as Chirine puts it. Those reports, maps, ideas, etc. show what Tekumel is and can be around an RPG table: alive, fun, full of wild situations, scary, etc. The 'second' and further orders indeed show that people outside of Barker's circle have gotten hold of the world and made it their own, thus saving it from complete excitation.

I may be wrong on this, but it seems to me that talks of what's canon or not are not common in, say, the Glorantha community, or any other deep fantasy world community. The fans of these settings seem to enjoy their world of choice and share their experiences of it. To my knowledge Tekumel is the only one where canon-talk is recurrent.

And I made the mistake of bringing it up ... again!
Bad Neshm, bad!