Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Big Andy

Sweet!

We aim to please. Sanding the cube tonight, and then slapping on the second coat of filler after I get the dust off...

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Chirine,

One thing I was wondering about is the local fauna of Tekumel. We have listings of the exotic species and such, but what about more mundane items like frogs, rats, mice, snakes, scorpions, mosquitoes, dragon flies, and other Terran bugs? Did these things make it to Tekumel with the Human settlers, or are there other non-Terran equivalents that Phil used?

Shemek

Yes, all of the above, plus all their off-world equivalents. We killed, trapped, swatted, and tried to exterminate as much of this sort of thing as possible, but it's an impossible task. These kinds of creatures was a sort of 'background radiation' that went on when there wasn't a Dire Peril to have to deal with. Have a look through 1930s and 1940s scientifiction, and you'll see what we had to deal with. Without bug repellent, either.

Phil loved this kind of thing, drawing on his time in South Asia, and would wax poetic describing the creepy-crawlies that infested the place. He'd been there, done that, and was more then happy to draw on it for our 'benefit'. It's one of the reasons why he was very strictly forbidden to give blood by the Red Cross - a pint of his blood would have infected a herd of elephants.

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

I was Tekumel.com recently and I came across this editorial from The Eye of All-Seeing Wonder (e-mag), Issue 6, Winter 1996. It's quite a long piece but I would like to put it out here and hopefully generate some discussion. Twenty years have passed since he (Steve Foster) wrote this. Do you think that his argument is valid?

Shemek

Um. Well, I'd like to have the chance to think about this for a bit, as this article came at a time when things were going very, very badly in Tekumel fandom; the context was that a guy had announced that he was going to run a Tekumel convention here in the Twin Cities, and then had it killed by "Barker's Own" - they told me that they had killed the convention because, and I quote, "we were afraid that you'd show up with all your cool miniatures and costumes and friends, and steal the spotlight from us..." We lost an immense amount of momentum then, like we did after Phil passed away, and I don't think Tekumel ever recovered from not having an event of some sort of to promote the world-setting. This also came after the publication of "Gardasiyal", which didn't go over all that well, and this time also saw the end of the 'Eye' 'zine and the loss of a lot of UK Tekumel fans. It was, for me personally, pretty agonizing to watch as all the work we'd done in the 1970s and 1980s was flushed down the drain.

I think Mr. Foster made some very good points. We asked Phil repeatedly for his help in doing an introductory level adventure or series of adventures for people to use in playing and enjoying Tekumel. We tried very hard to let people know that they could use any set of rules to play - Tekumel is a world-setting, more then anything else. I made many of these same points to the Tekumel Foundation at their first strategic planning meeting, back in 2012 - Phil left us a huge amount of information about his world, but it needs to be taken out of the 1980s game industry setting and recast for the current and future game hobby. (I got pretty much blown off.)

Can Tekumel be 'revived'? Yes, I think so, but it'll be a lot of work and effort to make happen.

And with that, I'll beg all of you for your patience and kind indulgence while I try to frame a reply that is polite and doesn't degenerate into a rant. Thanks.

Originally Posted by Hrugga

After you said it. It is obvious!!! The Professor laughs again...!!! Haha!!! In jokes everywhere...

Thanks,

H;0)

Yep. Phil was very literate, and his sense of humor reflected this. Very dry, as Gronan said.

I am working on this; I'm trying very hard to be a dispassionate observer, but I will freely admit that it's pretty hard. I've now had a half-dozen groups and organizations come through the house over the past five years, all with sure-fire plans to revive Tekumel and make it the new D&D. All of these plans seem to require my signing on with that particular group with an exclusive contract which would lock up all of my efforts as their property - including any gaming that I might want to do, even in my own home. I was told by one group of vapor merchants that I was allowed to game in my basement, but that anything I created belonged to them and that I had to pay them a licensing fee for each game. ('Public' games were Right Out, and any such were only to be done at their behest.)

The common threads in all of these 'businesses' is that they require my approval (for some reason I can't fathom), sole and exclusive ownership of any and all information in my brain, sole and exclusive ownership of my collections and archives, and for me to fund their schemes in some way or another. The other common thread is an almost complete lack of understanding of their proposed markets, their proposed fans, and in several cases of Tekumel itself.

So, yes, I do have a response, based on the four decades I've been at this. More to come.

Sounds like death by exclusivity factionalism. Not much you can do about that except live your life and enjoy doing what you love. Power games over reduced stakes, all the more bitter for how small the prize. It is best to walk away from that sort of cliquishness.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

The common threads in all of these 'businesses' is that they require my approval (for some reason I can't fathom), sole and exclusive ownership of any and all information in my brain, sole and exclusive ownership of my collections and archives, and for me to fund their schemes in some way or another.

At first glance that sounds wonderful.

...for them.

And their model makes a lot of business sense since we all know how the proprietary source code of Betamax and Apple allowed them to gain and maintain the dominant market share for video cassette recorders and personal computers.

...or maybe not "dominant market share" but that other thing.

Um. well then. I'm going to try to respond to the editorial as best I can; what follows are excerpts from a ten page document that I did some years ago in response to a request for a 'way forward' for Tekumel. It's what I've been telling all of the people who have been beating a pathway to my doorstep for the last decade, and especially in the last five years.

Supposedly, I am "The Greatest Living Authority On Tekumel" and "The Only Person Who Was Ever Successful At It"' personally. I'm not at all sure about either, and i'd suggest asking Gronan to comment - he was there, and in the Very Hot Seat, for much of the period when our current situation started to develop.

Right.

Over the past thirty-five years, there has been little or no attempt by the 'mainstream' of Tekumel gamers to do much in the way of 'outreach' to the larger game and fannish community. As has been noted many, many times by the hobby and the industry, 'mainstream' Tekumel fandom is insular, isolated, and inward-looking. In order for Tekumel to survive, this has to be reversed. It must be noted that this viewpoint was fought tooth and nail by the players in the original Thursday Night gaming group of Prof. Barker; these people produced large number of fanzines, outreach materials, and 'public relations' materials such as the costumes that won many prizes in costume competitions at conventions for over two decades. (In my own personal experience, over the past thirty-five years, this latter activity has drawn more new people to the Tekumel world setting then the small-scale activities of the 'mainstream' gamers.) This should be added to with a very strong Internet presence, such as through blogs, websites, and participation in forum threads.

The former model in the game hobby / industry is changing at a very fast pace due to the rise of Internet publishing. The old publishing model of author-publisher-printer-distributor-wholesaler-retailer-consumer is falling apart, with companies at all levels in the old chain / model going out of business every day. The new model has become author-internet web site-consumer, as the start-up and overhead costs for the latter model are almost non-existent. In addition, where the old model reached relatively few consumers in a relatively small hobby industry, the new model has both a global reach and a global market. It is now far less cost effective to attend large trade shows, such as Gen Con, where the cost per consumer is rapidly approaching $1,000 per capita per event. (Based on industry sources; I asked companies I know.) It is time to 'disassemble' the rich archive of materials we have for Tekumel, and recast them in ways and in products that can be used by the modern gamer and fan.

What is being referred to informally as the 'Legacy Line" of Tekumel publications and products should be renamed the "Heritage Line" to avoid confusion, and to distinguish these publications and products from other works by Prof. M. A. R. Barker such as his series of novels, which are not and have never been considered part of the gaming and game-related series of publications and products. (The novels will be referred to briefly, as they remain a cornerstone of future publishing and marketing.) Prior publishing efforts have been fatally crippled by lack of direction, lack of planning, and lack of funding; most products produced by these efforts are neither up to current industry standards in presentation or ease of use by the end consumers. In short, while we feel that it would be useful for a segment of the game market to have these products available through electronic publishing and Internet distribution, they are not viable in today's game hobby or in today's game industry.

What would seem to be required for the continued survival of Tekumel in the game hobby and industry are introductory adventures that will bring the world-setting and the potential for adventures in it to the gaming public. This will need to be accompanied by a concerted and determined effort to restart the 'meta-campaign' that Prof. Barker ran; this has been demonstrated to be much more feasible in this Internet Age - doing a 'Living Tekumel' campaign, as was done as a 'play-by-mail' campaign in the late 1980s, would be an effective 'marketing tool' and get players and fans involved in the continued creation and demonstration of both old and new content. This continued involvement is vital, and will require considerable amounts of time and energy to be invested in the work.

Promoting Tekumel is, as has been noted by a number of people, a 'full-time job' - and it still is.