Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

It's usually a bleached human bone - usually a femur - etched all over with little dancing figures.

As to how to do a search, you got me...

Cool. For some reason I always think of Kokopelli when the Goddess' symbol is described. Kind of like this one.

kokopelli-1.jpg

Shemek

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

When we went there - by tubeway car - it was where the controls for the planetary terra-forming engines had been located. Please do not touch the shards of the Egg of the World; Very Bad Things happen.

The shards still spin on their axis in the middle of the round and open temple; a circular bank of Mysterious Displays, Read-outs, and Controls surrounds the circular space - it's got a null-gravity field, by the way, with a tractor-pressor to move the shards around. Supposedly, if you can collect all the missing shards, the machines will repair the device and restore the manual controls.

Phil scared the kilts off of us with this one. No two kaitars about it.

Cool! That sounds very interesting indeed. There's a tonne of potential to really screw up some characters if they're not real careful.

Shemek

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Cool! That sounds very interesting indeed. There's a tonne of potential to really screw up some characters if they're not real careful.

Shemek

That was why I frequently said to Origo "No, we're not going to touch it, and I'll have you impaled if you try."

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Cool. For some reason I always think of Kokopelli when the Goddess' symbol is described. Kind of like this one.

kokopelli-1.jpg

Shemek

Same here. When I mentioned this to Phil, many years ago, he simply smiled and puffed on his cigar. I have a deep-seated suspicion that this is one of Phil's 'in-jokes'; Tekumel is stuffed full of them, waiting like the 'easter eggs' you can find in computer games.

And, in my opinion, that's what makes Tekumel so much fun - we're still discovering stuff and laughing, decades later...

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Cool! That sounds very interesting indeed. There's a tonne of potential to really screw up some characters if they're not real careful.

Shemek

It was; it was one of the very first times we really and truly understood that we were not playing in a 'fantasy' game - we were hip-deep in a science-fiction world, and one that predated what most of us knew. "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" it wasn't; when we finally got the picture and started lookin back at the Lensman series and other F/SF of that time period, we 'got' Tekumel. If you can find a book edited by Lin Carter, "Discoveries in Fantasy", read it; you'll find some works that will instantly remind you of Phil and his creation. I will not spoil the surprise by saying anything more...

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

That was why I frequently said to Origo "No, we're not going to touch it, and I'll have you impaled if you try."

Oh, gods, how many times to you tell him that; practically reaching across the table to throttle him? I mean, I know he was a Priest of Ksarum and all that, but it wasn't until Phil revealed that he was Turshamu's nephew that all became horribly clear.

Turshamu giving Origo driving lessons while we were aboard his little intra-system space boat gave me my first grey hairs.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Well, the problem is that books don't generally get down to the platoon or company level. Bob Crisp's "Brazen Chariots" is more of a memoir then a tactical study; his favorite tactic seems to have been "Pick a jerry tank and shoot at it until it stops moving." And Hans von Luck in "Panzer Commander" rarely mentions anything lower than a battalion.

It's easy to pick up the strategy of blitzkrieg; translating that into small unit tactics is a lot harder to get good information on.

Um. yeah; there just isn't all that much in the genre accessible to the general public. You have to go to the specialist market, and it can attract attention. Me, I got lucky; I knew where to look, and who to talk to - people who had "been to see the elephant", in the old phrase. I listened, and I learned. And quite a few of the founders of our hobby had been there and done that, too; Charles Grant comes instantly to mind.

If I may, may I suggest the movie "Gettysburg"? Besides the fine acting, there's lot of discussion about 'ground': "Is this good ground?" You get a fairly painless introduction to tactics, and how to move formed bodies of troops across terrain. A long time ago, there was a BBC program called "Connections", and one of the shows had a sequence where they got a company of actual Swiss soldiers, gave them period pikes from one of the Swiss arsenals, and put a pike formation through all of the usual evolutions. Another program, John Keegan's "Soldiers", also used troops to teach tactics for the view - nothing too hot and heavy, but it did make one think...

Originally Posted by Hermes Serpent

I've done the equivalent of the military ride over a lot of battlefields. Basically instead of being a fresh military officer/cadet using a horse to be instructed about a battle you actually walk the ground with a map and a copy of the battle account.

It's amazing how things that seemed odd or unusual when reading the account make perfect sense when actually on the ground. I've down most of the ECW battles in my youth and a quite a few of the ACW ones when I lived Stateside. I did Waterloo but the ground there is so altered from 1815 it isn't very helpful. In the 90's I did a few of Wellington's Portuguese adventures and the terrain there is most illuminating.

Walking the American Civil War battlefield at Antietam for the first time, I was struck by how the terrain alternately concealed and revealed the cannon that are set up to mark the sites of the batteries in the battle. Take just a few steps in one direction and suddenly one was staring down the muzzle of a cannon at a rather startlingly close range or by taking a few steps in another direction, the cannon would quickly fall below sight-line.

Originally Posted by Hermes Serpent

Following up a little on the concept of using troops to manoeuver to see how it works.

I've done the equivalent of the military ride over a lot of battlefields. Basically instead of being a fresh military officer/cadet using a horse to be instructed about a battle you actually walk the ground with a map and a copy of the battle account.

It's amazing how things that seemed odd or unusual when reading the account make perfect sense when actually on the ground. I've down most of the ECW battles in my youth and a quite a few of the ACW ones when I lived Stateside. I did Waterloo but the ground there is so altered from 1815 it isn't very helpful. In the 90's I did a few of Wellington's Portuguese adventures and the terrain there is most illuminating.

Oh, yes, very much so. Walking through Cirencester, on a visit to see friends, I got a very illuminating view of what it must have been like during the two battles fought there. I kept thinking tactically, both in the medieval and ECW sense, and really got to thinking about how I would have managed the fight.

Same thing as you mention for the ACW, too.

(This used to be called a TEWT - Tactical Exercise Without Troops)