Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Kellri (in the Gloriantha thread):
A 'let's talk about EPT or RQ' thread instead of another 400 pages of let's ask Chirine ba Kal what he thinks.

Greentongue has very kindly started such a thread; long may it prosper!

If people find this thread useful, and wish to ask me questions about my time with Phil and Tekumel (or about my miniatures, models, and gaming), I have set things up so that I get an e-mail notification that there has been activity here and I will try to respond to that as fast as I can. I check emails twice a day during the week, and about the same on weekends, and I will try to get back to people as fast as I can.

People should also feel free to contact me directly, either through my little blog (see the signature block) or by the e-mail address that I use for my Tekumel activities: [email protected]

Thank you all once again for your time and interest; I'll be around, like I have always been.

(Off to the basement to get the Great Black Box done, and glue superstructures to the two Barsoomian sky ships. )

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Kellri (in the Gloriantha thread):
A 'let's talk about EPT or RQ' thread instead of another 400 pages of let's ask Chirine ba Kal what he thinks.

Greentongue has very kindly started such a thread; long may it prosper!

If people find this thread useful, and wish to ask me questions about my time with Phil and Tekumel (or about my miniatures, models, and gaming), I have set things up so that I get an e-mail notification that there has been activity here and I will try to respond to that as fast as I can. I check emails twice a day during the week, and about the same on weekends, and I will try to get back to people as fast as I can.

People should also feel free to contact me directly, either through my little blog (see the signature block) or by the e-mail address that I use for my Tekumel activities: [email protected]

Thank you all once again for your time and interest; I'll be around, like I have always been.

(Off to the basement to get the Great Black Box done, and glue superstructures to the two Barsoomian sky ships. )

Now, now, a 4,392 post thread that's been on the front page for over a year doesn't exactly point to you not being welcome, does it? If everyone took off when someone threw an elbow there'd be no one here.

Last time I checked, what the OP of a thread actually wants in their thread is of very little importance to put it mildly. You want to post a Tsolyani Primer in the other EPT thread, or post pictures of Barker's basement, go ahead, no one has to read it if they don't want to.

Originally Posted by CRKrueger

Now, now, a 4,392 post thread that's been on the front page for over a year doesn't exactly point to you not being welcome, does it? If everyone took off when someone threw an elbow there'd be no one here.

Last time I checked, what the OP of a thread actually wants in their thread is of very little importance to put it mildly. You want to post a Tsolyani Primer in the other EPT thread, or post pictures of Barker's basement, go ahead, no one has to read it if they don't want to.

Thanks for your comments! I'm in a holding pattern at the moment - I've run out of beam clamps for gluing the superstructure of the first ship together - and the e-mail pinged.

I think you may be reading a bit much into my last post - which is not at all your fault, as e-communications are not very good at sharing nuance and tone. Let me see if I can't be more clear...

I don't feel unwelcome at all, which is why I said I had set up the ping to let me know of activity. It's much more a matter of time management; I have very limited free time, especially during my work week, and especially at this point in the academic year - for example, there's a football game today, and in my old job I'd have been out there baking my brains out making sure the asphalt hadn't been stolen by the drunks - and I've found that I can either sit in front of the computer looking through the forums to see if there's anything I'm interested in, or do some writing and painting. The vast majority of discussions on-line - and I include the 'how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin' discussions on the Tekumel Yahoo group - are about things I know nothing about or have any interest in. While I read some 2,000 words a minute, I am very dyslexic, and typing anything takes forever and gives me headaches; the same dyslexia also enables me to be the kind of model-builder that I am, so there is a positive side to it.

(Add in the very spotty Internet service we have here at the house, and I wind up having to look in on things at odd times. This will get better, once Fifth Daughter moves in with us; we'll have to massively upgrade our connection and bandwidth for her school studies.)

What I am interested in, and what I'm willing to commit time and energy to, is talking about the world-setting that Phil created, and our time playing in that setting. (I am not interested in discussions of rules mechanics; I've had to sit through too many of those over the decades I've been doing this.) As I said, if people want to ask me about that kind of thing, then I'll do the best I can to answer those questions. I happen to agree with a lot of what's been said, like 'fuck Barker's players', because it's what I've been saying for years - and what Phil himself said, which is "Make Tekumel your own". What we did isn't the Sacred Scrolls - what we did was sit around and have some fun. If you can use any of our stories to make your games more fun and interesting for your players, then feel free to use them. Otherwise, it's your game and you should do what you want to.

What I'm doing is looking at where I put my time and energy, and concentrating on the things that I find fun. As I said, please do feel free to ask me questions, either here or on my blog; I'll be around, but just not as intensively as I used to be.

Does this help explain my position?

Originally Posted by Greentongue

My intent is not to denigrate this thread, of which I am very thankful, but to provide a place where people are welcome to post NON-Standard versions of Tekumel that interest them.

This thread seems to be (correctly) focused on The Professor's version and may intimidate people that want to go off in a wild tangent from that.

chirine is more than welcome to post about variants that he has encountered in his long and prolific gaming experience.
Especially if he can remember and share his initial Off the Boat impressions of the setting.
I'm sure the experience of players from Blackmoor arriving in Tekumel would be entertaining to all.
=

Thank you for your post!!!

I did not, and do not, take your creation of the EPT thread as any kind of negative comment on this one; the kind of discussions that you mention are the very same kind that we used to have - and which Phil was always amused and delighted by.

I go kind of berserk over the idea of a 'standard Tekumel'; Phil used to say right up front that his games were different from his novels, and that he himself picked and chose from the former to provide 'local color' in the latter. Phil used what I think are called 'mash-ups' quite a bit, and usually managed to slip them in on all of us without anybody getting the idea - his wild tangents were a lot wilder then anything I've ever seen gamers come up with! And he used the stuff from other campaigns, too; see also Lord Gamalu, from upstate New York, and the various tourists we had over the years from Blackmoor, Barsoom, Greyhawk, Arisia, and points beyond. This whole notion of 'canon' Tekumel got started in the 1990s as a way to promote some people's self-interest, and it's been a pretty constraining attitude ever since.

If there's something you want me to talk about, ask away, and then feel free to move the information where you want it. I work better with a Q & A format, and with more specific types of questions; the broader the question, the less likely I'll be able to give you a useful answer.

Does this help, at all?

(Uh, oh! Glue timer just went off; 'scuse, please!)

My participation is hemmed by school sports too... I've been working til 10 or so Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights covering high school sports for the newspaper.

Weather is still nice here so model building has to wait a bit. I've become very fond of Tenax 7R cement and the "Touch and Flow" applicator for plastics. I also read something a while ago from a chemist saying that cyanoacrylate should be discarded a few weeks or so after it's opened. Since then I've switched to the tiny little cheap tubes from the drugstore; they work just as good when they're fresh. Makes it easier to avoid gluing oneself to one's work too.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

My participation is hemmed by school sports too... I've been working til 10 or so Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights covering high school sports for the newspaper.

Weather is still nice here so model building has to wait a bit. I've become very fond of Tenax 7R cement and the "Touch and Flow" applicator for plastics. I also read something a while ago from a chemist saying that cyanoacrylate should be discarded a few weeks or so after it's opened. Since then I've switched to the tiny little cheap tubes from the drugstore; they work just as good when they're fresh. Makes it easier to avoid gluing oneself to one's work too.

Yep; I'm really glad not to lose all my Saturdays between August and January, anymore, which is one of the big reasons why I changed jobs. The issue is time and energy - I'm finding that I'm having to take a really close look at where I budget what I have of both, and (in effect) maximizing the 'return on investment' in both.

And, I will freely admit, there have been some pretty negative things going on that have really soured me on dealing with gamers and agming. As an example of this, one of the players in your Gary Con "Legions" game was the one who tried to bribe me; I was offered all-expense trips to Gary Con and North Texas RPG Con, but in return I had to 'edit' everything I said on my blog and the rest of the Internet to reflect his views and support his business - including saying only very positive and supporting things about the Foundation, quote "because you hurt their feelings" unquote. Idiot never bothered to ask if I wanted to go to conventions and run games for him; he just assumed that I did, because it's his idea of heaven to do that kind of thing. Cut that connection pretty quickly. So, I look very hard at what I do, and who I interact with, and if I'm not having fun I tend to lave the room. This is why I left a lot of the Internet sites that I'd been looking at, a couple of years ago; I was putting in a lot of time and getting very little back.

I'm finding the 'Talk about EPT thread' pretty entertaining - Kelleri's especially fun to read, even though he'd probably shit a brick at the idea, as he's saying a lot of the same things that I say and have been saying for forty years. New generation, and all that; it's a delight to see people actually talking about EPT. What I find really amusing are the preconceptions about what I'm supposed to have said and done; I do get the impression that I'm preaching some sort of orthodoxy, which is news to me.

I'll try the Tenax. I have some of their older stuff in stock, but haven't done any plastic modeling for ages; last project in plastics was building your legion, actually. Current project is using good old fashioned wood glue...

DSC00115.jpg

[QUOTE=Greentongue;918125]This is why I think that "Tekumel Adventure Paths" would be consumed if made available.

I missed this, first time through - sorry!

Yes, very much so. 'Basic' adventures that set up the world and inspire that 'sense of wonder' that we had back in '75 - '76 would go a long way to introducing Tekumel to players. I'm not very good at writing such things - I'm not much of a 'gamer', after all - but I'm doing what I can with "To Serve The Petal Throne". I'm staying away from the 'game mechanics' aspect of our adventures (for which I have been roundly criticized by gamers, who seem to want a new set of RPG rules) and providing an account of what we did for people to use and adapt to their games.

If I may make an observation, hard-core Tekumel fans who have looked at the drafts haven't liked it; soft-core Tekumel fans who have looked at the drafts like it. Personally, I think I'm going in the right direction; I'm not writing this for the people who agonize over glottal stops and bilabial phoneme fricatives - I'm writing this for people who want to explore the unknown and have adventures. And maybe a little fun mixed in with the sense of wonder.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

I do have some thoughts on the whole issue of Tekumel in the marketplace, but I'm on the night shift at work and I'm beat.

Essentially, as Rob Kuntz says, RPGs have become a consumption item rather than support for imaginative creativity, at least in terms of where the dollars go. Way more people buy Pathfinder Adventure Paths than make up their own worlds.

So Tekumel is now a niche within a niche.

Agreed. Which is why Piazo is making money - if that's what the market wants, you give it to them if you want to stay in business.

And what struck me about all of the people trooping through the basement over the past five years with their Big Plans and Wonderful Schemes is that none of them seem to have absorbed this lesson. Everybody is looking at capturing some small niche of the small RPG hobby, like being 'Properly OSR' or 'Politically Correct'. None of them seemed to have any really good grasp of the hobby, the industry, or of basic business in general. And following their subsequent careers hasn't dissuaded me of this opinion...