Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Bren

Think of it this way. One meaning of professional is you got paid. And in one sense, peanuts still counts as pay.

$25 a day food allowance and a place to sleep.

Originally Posted by Bren

Think of it this way. One meaning of professional is you got paid. And in one sense, peanuts still counts as pay.

$35 a day for the twelve days a year I went to conventions for Dave; I had to pay for all my expenses out of that. I did get a spot on the floor to sleep on, though. (The AGI staff, Dave's friends, got beds; we 'Tekumel boat people' - as Dave referred to us - got floors, as befitted our lesser status and dignity.) On the average, I spent between $2,500 and $3,000 a year paying for everything else that had to do with Tekumel. The miniatures line broke even, and paid for the metal it took to cast the figures; we donated our labor. Everything else was pretty much a dead loss; the paper goods never paid for themselves. After the collapse of AGI, I paid for all the convention trips, and hoped to break even from sales. Never happened, thought.

I must not have been much of a professional. A sap and a chump, probably, but probably not a professional.

You should have been around for all the whining and crying when I stopped paying for other people's fun, a few years back.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

$25 a day food allowance and a place to sleep.

But think of the prestige! The fame! The glory! The adoration of the multitudes!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

But think of the prestige! The fame! The glory! The adoration of the multitudes!

Can I go back to trudging through Milumanaya with 5000 rabid tribesmen trying to do me in with their bone tipped spears, instead?

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

You should have been around for all the whining and crying when I stopped paying for other people's fun, a few years back.

Nah, I'd probably have hurt them.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Can I go back to trudging through Milumanaya with 5000 rabid tribesmen trying to do me in with their bone tipped spears, instead?

Just like an imperialist, always whinging about how nothing is as good as the good old days out on the frontier with the regiment, surrounded by stout hearts and true, and the inevitable yet somehow comforting dirt, mud, blood, and dust and of course lots and lots of hostile natives.

Originally Posted by Neshm hiKumala

Well, I gotta say, it's really excellent. Thanks for sharing this with us.

I've been working on setting up a series of Tekumel adventures and this fantastic thread (now with the added bonus of your session reports, Greentongue) are tremendously helpful.

As far as I'm concerned, "Questioning Chirine Ba Kal" is the most inspiring Tekumel stuff I've come across since reading the novels. Barker's word loses its academic veneer here and starts to smell, look, and sound like something very real, which makes it manageable to a GM.

So thanks every one ... and thank you especially, Chirine.

Thank you for your kind words! For us, it was something very real, for quite a few years. What I'm hoping to do is give a feeling of what our Tekumel with Phil was like.

You;re very welcome!

I've been trying to think os a better answer for all of you as to why I love Tekumel. This is something I wrote a while back, which may illuminate what I'm trying to say...

[1.0001] Preface: Saint Maries, Idaho; Summer, 1939 C.E.

The late afternoon sun shone on a scene of carnage; on a hard, flat plain, armies marched and counter-marched in their serried formations, closing in places to engage their enemies in deadly melees. Here, a clump of armored men were trapped against some rough ground by a larger group of kilted slingers; there, a force of spearmen pressed home their advantage against an opposing force armed only with shields and swords and courage. The fighting forces were commanded by hierophants in jeweled robes and heroes in glittering armor; they led their soldiers to victory or defeat, and cried their triumphs or their defiance as the fortunes of war and the chances of battle took them. The vast plain resounded with their battle cries, their soundings of braying trumpet and thundering drum; their standards proclaimed their glory to the world. The armies fought, men died, and such as it had always been on that great plain…

An expert observer, schooled in the niceties of warfare, would have noticed something odd about the contending forces; there were none of the cavalry formations that one might of expected of the time and the place which the garb and armor of the fighting men – and women, for there were also priestesses and queens amongst the armies’ commanders – would suggest. No armored knights in their glittering plate and mail, no chariots thundering down the field; instead, there were strange beasts of war, most unlike those which had served mankind in warfare for so many millennia. These beasts looked more like those described in the recent works of some of the authors considered to be ‘not of the best’ by more established and more conservative writers of history, and more like the illustrations done by artists for the luridly-colored covers of these new authors’ publications.

A less expert observer, or a more casual one, would perhaps not have noticed this at first glance; a more casual look across the plain would have revealed it to be a floor in a room lit by the late afternoon sun. The mighty generals, and their equally mighty armies, would be seen as toy soldiers; some from the manufacturers of the time, and some – the hierophants and heroes, the strange beasts – carved of wood and painted. The rough ground would be seen as no more then a rug, and the low hills simply the stacked books and magazines of a library both extensive and eclectic. Many of the low ‘hills’ that edged the ‘plain’ bore the cover illustrations that had been regarded with distain by more ‘serious’ writers. Titles like “Amazing Stories” competed for space on the room’s shelves with much more scholarly tomes on the languages of long-dead civilizations such as that of the Egypt of the Pharaohs, or the feathered rulers of the Mayans of Central America.

Scattered in amongst these books and magazines were scraps of paper, with the writings of a spidery cursive script that had no known counterpart in the historical lexicons; these seemed to be centered on a desk, which in turn bore on it’s wooden surface a large map of a land marked with the locations of cities and towns, rivers and oceans, mountains and forests. There were notations on the map in the cartographer’s own language, as well as more of the cursive script. The land bore the name “Ts Solyánu”, and the cities bore names like “Jakálla”, “Khirgár”, “Tumíssa”; marked with dot of gold ink were the names “Béy Su” and “Avanthar”, places which the cartographer must consider to be of special importance.

The desk also bore documents and drawings; some in the relatively more familiar hieroglyphs of the scribes of Ancient Egypt, some in a blocky script that was unfamiliar and seemingly less refined then the cursive script of the map. The drawings, done some in pencil and some in ink, depicted scenes of tales and wonders that were both strange in their setting but familiar in their themes of love and war, heroes and heroines, cads and cowards; there was an obvious element of artistic imagination at work, but there was also a sensation of tales that had yet to be told.

“Philip! Dinner!” The woman’s voice drifted up the stairs, calling the cartographer, and artist, and storyteller.

A boy, about a decade old, looked up from the musty and ancient scroll he was holding – and had just finished inking the delicate cursive script upon – and adjusted his spectacles. He rose from the desk, picked his way through the groups of soldiers still locked in combat, and closed the door to the room behind himself. The armies would still be here on the hard flat plain, as would their stories and legends; there would be more time, later on, to tell them…

And so it begins; tales of wonder, and of people not yet born, and of lands not yet known…
Come with us; our journey is just begun…

(From "To Serve The Petal Throne", Book One - "The Chalice of the Flame", Introduction - Section 1.0001)