Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

GW does a "burn and churn" model; they are continually coming out with new figures with capabilities that make the old figures much less powerful.

Sadly, that or some variation seems to be a big trend in miniatures gaming. Even the new X-Wing game that I was so excited about has that; beyond the starter sets it's all about buying the uber macho new variants with all the cool added abilities and shit like that.

The notion that "all P-40C Kittyhawks are alike and the only determinant is player skill" seems to be virtually obsolete.

And which is why I don't like 'tournament play' or points value systems. I'm a campaign gamer, first last and always.

Originally Posted by Neshm hiKumala

Out of the blue question perhaps, but I've been slowly preparing a Tekumel adventure, I can already foresee that my players will ask me the following question: what does the Emperor's Seal actually look like? Representations of it are present in all clan-houses of the empire after all.

An artist has a copy of the Kolumel at this site:

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/tag...l/interesting/

And I can shoot you photos of my standard and the various other depictions we have on file. Let me know...

Originally Posted by Greentongue

That would imply that the target market would need to have skill to use them.
How big of a market would that leave?

One advantage of the internet is that you can have a subset of a subset and still have a lot.
=

Which does raise an interesting question for me...

Back in Ye Olden Dayes, 'the rules' were a set of scattered notes in Dave and Gary's three-ring binders. One had to develop a particular set of skills to survive in those games, as one was sorta 'feeling out' how the world worked. Today, of course, we have a very large and very wide variety of game rule sets to choose from, and from my perspective it seems that an entirely different set of skills are needed to survive in them - what's been called, I think, the balance between 'crunch' and 'fluff'. I strongly favor detailed and deeply-textured 'fluff', and prefer simple and fast 'crunch', which is why "Qadardalikoi" had such a large proportion of campaign game material in it; I had been getting asked by people 'how do you set up a campaign', so I thought I should include the material.

These days, I'm not so sure it would be useful to include that kind of thing. My feeling, based on what I'm seeing in the local FLGS and at conventions, 'one-offs' are the usual style of gaming. So, what I'm thinking of is dropping the campaign information in the second edition and giving scenarios that people can just sit and play - and perhaps borrowing a notion from the wonderful "Complete Brigadier" and providing 'overhead view' counters the same size as the figures' bases to get the players started. I have these games already done in 'pre-packaged' form, as I've built them for my own games and have them stored ready for use, and my thought was that I could include photos of the games along with the scenario texts.

And, of course, there's the thought in the back of my mind that I am a very old-fashioned gamer, playing old-fashioned games. Should I even bother?

Originally Posted by Greentongue

The internet is a very big place. If you post them, they will come.
As for making money from it, that is a lot more nuanced.
=

Very good point!

As I think I've mentioned here and on my blog, the idea is that the second edition would be available as a 'free-to-download' off the Internet, either as an e-book or a PDF. I very strongly doubt that the first edition sold more then 300 copies over the past thirty years, and working with that number as a base point it became very obvious very quickly that there was simply no way that I could do a 'commercial' edition that would be available at any sort of reasonable cost to the gamer due to the background production costs. I want to illustrate the 'book' with color photos of the miniatures and of actual games, so printing costs did enter into this; the other 'overhead' costs are all way to high for today's game hobby, and so price the thing out of practical production.

And, in general, Tekumel books have never made back their production costs - let alone pay for their printing - over the years. Niche of a niche, and all that.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Which does raise an interesting question for me...

Back in Ye Olden Dayes, 'the rules' were a set of scattered notes in Dave and Gary's three-ring binders. One had to develop a particular set of skills to survive in those games, as one was sorta 'feeling out' how the world worked. Today, of course, we have a very large and very wide variety of game rule sets to choose from, and from my perspective it seems that an entirely different set of skills are needed to survive in them - what's been called, I think, the balance between 'crunch' and 'fluff'. I strongly favor detailed and deeply-textured 'fluff', and prefer simple and fast 'crunch', which is why "Qadardalikoi" had such a large proportion of campaign game material in it; I had been getting asked by people 'how do you set up a campaign', so I thought I should include the material.

These days, I'm not so sure it would be useful to include that kind of thing. My feeling, based on what I'm seeing in the local FLGS and at conventions, 'one-offs' are the usual style of gaming. So, what I'm thinking of is dropping the campaign information in the second edition and giving scenarios that people can just sit and play - and perhaps borrowing a notion from the wonderful "Complete Brigadier" and providing 'overhead view' counters the same size as the figures' bases to get the players started. I have these games already done in 'pre-packaged' form, as I've built them for my own games and have them stored ready for use, and my thought was that I could include photos of the games along with the scenario texts.

And, of course, there's the thought in the back of my mind that I am a very old-fashioned gamer, playing old-fashioned games. Should I even bother?

I don't see why you couldn't just include this as an appendix: "Appendix A: Creating Campaigns", "Appendix B: The Tsolyani Army", etc... This way you keep it separate from the main body of rules, but it's still there for those who are interested. I just can't see how you can have a game set on Tekumel and not include fluff. This is such an integral part of what gaming on Tekumel is all about (and I'm not talking about the pedantic minutiae here either).
What level will Qadardalikoi MKII () be geared for, tactical, strategic, or skirmish? It would seem that skirmish level wargaming is quite popular these days, and to have a skirmish option for the game could go a long way.

Shemek

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

I don't see why you couldn't just include this as an appendix: "Appendix A: Creating Campaigns", "Appendix B: The Tsolyani Army", etc... This way you keep it separate from the main body of rules, but it's still there for those who are interested. I just can't see how you can have a game set on Tekumel and not include fluff. This is such an integral part of what gaming on Tekumel is all about (and I'm not talking about the pedantic minutiae here either).

Good points! I had planned to reorganize the rules, with the games building from small to large to campaign gaming. The actual rules themselves are pretty short; most of the first edition is actually 'fluff', explaining how Phil thought that warfare worked on his world.

I agree with you about the 'fluff', which is why I was so startled when the Tekumel Foundation told me about their idea to republish EPT without the Tekumel elements of the original; I was told that such a game would be a sure-fire seller to the OSR community and that a Very Big Name OSR Author would be doing the conversion. The notion that was expounded to me was that my miniatures rules would be a great OSR product, if only I dropped all that Tekumel stuff and changed the name to something that OSR people could pronounce. I declined; if I wanted to play "Chainmail", I'd play "Chainmail".

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

What level will Qadardalikoi MKII () be geared for, tactical, strategic, or skirmish? It would seem that skirmish level wargaming is quite popular these days, and to have a skirmish option for the game could go a long way.

Shemek

This goes all the way back to the dawn of time, where 'fantasy gaming' consisted of tables full of lead re-staging the battles in Tolkien. My very first exposure to such games was at the Little Tin, where the locals had lined up about sixty square feet of miniatures on the two sides of a huge table and were about to shove the vast hordes into each other. (I suggested getting the mechanism from one or more of those 'electric football' games, and simply vibrate the table to move the figures.) The experience has had an effect on me to this day.

Back in the day, we did lots of skirmish games as they'd just been invented - by the colonials players, as I recall; see also Larry Brom's "The Sword and the Flame" - and had a lot of fun doing them; it was a step up from the one-on-one play of RPGs, and a nice medium down from the big battles we were fighting. The first edition was aimed at the kind of campaign games and larger battles we were fighting out at Phil's at the time, as well as the kind of play that the existing miniatures line was intended for.

So, you'll be seeing a game that will cover skirmishes, the ritual Qadarni battles (Think the Aztec 'Flower Wars', here), the larger campaign battles of a larger war, and things like sieges and naval fights. I'll also be suggesting more detailed rules for things like strategic games - Steve Pisani's "Missumdalikoi", for example - and smaller games like "Song of the Petal Throne". My idea is to have a sort of generic introductory set of rules that will generate all sorts of games for players, and give one a foothold in Tekumel. I'm hoping that I can introduce people to the kind of gaming that we did, back in the day, and maybe give a feeling for that kind of play style.

And photos, which I could only dream of back in the day...