Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Baron

Hmm, the government is quite secret. When I google Snap-25 all I get is something on genetics. Although the suggested search adds the words 'atomic bomb,' when I try that search I still just get the genetics. Well played, government.

My father was in that oxymoronic organization, Army Intelligence, during the Cold War. He was proud to tell me that he had a class Q clearance, and knew where all the silos were.

Try "SNAP" Apollo for the search terms - oh, we've already had help on this! The painting of the unit that I have, which he got from NASA, says '25'.

Yep. Dad had the same clearance, but was on the engineering side. His stories about atomic aircraft ("Steam Bird") and open-cycle steam locomotives were both hilarious and terrifying.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

1:58 in this trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vEI1GZraAk

Yes, indeed!

Originally Posted by CRKrueger

Try SNAP 27.

There you are! Thank you!

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Certainly
More Flash Gordon then.
=

Very much so! When I sat down and read ERB's "Barsoom" series and watched all of those wonderful black-and-white episodes of the serials, I got a much better feel for what Phil had had in mind - it's what he'd grown up with, and always loved. Phil had no idea how technology actually worked, and just had the devices do what they did - usually with pretty comic consequences for us.

In later years, the 1980s and 1990s, Phil was more then a little put out by fans who took him to task for not knowing exactly how any of the devices of the Ancients worked. (The on and off discussion about the Three-Light Drive is an example of this. Phil's answer: "I dunno. A ship goes into drive, and you get three flashes of light. It gets to where it wants to go, comes out of the drive, and you get three flashes of light. That's why it's called the Three-Light Drive". He was repeatedly told that this was not a good answer, and he needed to come up with something more technical.) He was even less amused when he was told by 'real fans' that Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Barsoom were all passe, and not what counted as SF.

Which I thought was too bad; it was glorious fun...

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Very much so! When I sat down and read ERB's "Barsoom" series and watched all of those wonderful black-and-white episodes of the serials, I got a much better feel for what Phil had had in mind - it's what he'd grown up with, and always loved. Phil had no idea how technology actually worked, and just had the devices do what they did - usually with pretty comic consequences for us.

<snip>

Which I thought was too bad; it was glorious fun...

Chirine,

Before finding this thread I had no know idea how heavily influenced Tekumel was by Flash Gordon, Barsoom, et al. Funny enough, when I read MoG and FS for the first time Yul Brynner and Ming the Merciless popped into my head whenever the Baron Ald or Lord Fu Shi'i, respectively, were being discussed. I still picture Lord Fu Shi'i as Charles Middleton.
I recently went back and watched a lot of the films that you have recommended and tried to spot the influences on Tsolyanu and Tekumel . You are bang on when you say they inspired Phil. The original Thief of Baghdad (1924) could easily be part of a Tekumel campaign. The same with Haji Baba, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments and Land of the Pharaohs, as well as parts of the original Mummy and Wizard of Oz. I could easily see Nyelmu's guards in the Garden of the Weeping Snows being inspired by the Winkies (the Wicked Witch of the West's guards). In all of these movies I see stuff that could easily be used in a Tekumel game. An important NPC in my game is heavily modelled on Ahmed (Douglas Fairbanks' character), right down to the gestures and stunts. Great resources to mine for when trying to create a good Tekumel ambience for a campaign, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm currently enjoying a 13 part Flash Gordon serial from 1936 on You Tube: Flash Gordon and the Planet of Terror. Great stuff! Tonnes of inspiration.

Shemek.

Baron Ald in a quiet moment, plotting his next move against Tsolyanu.

Baron Ald.jpg

Shemek

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

From AsenRG: How did the "paying for a kid" trick work back in the 50ies, Uncle? (Also, quite un-Tsolyani, I'm sure most of us don't care about the legalities around your heritage - I can certainly guarantee for myself.

My about-to-be mother was unhappy that all her friends were having babies, and she wasn't. She also didn't want to have to do all that messy stuff, and wanted something 'off the shelf'. My about-to-be dad mentioned this to a friend of his, who was a judge, and who happened to know a young unmarried lady who was 'in a family way' - and with a guy from the wrong side of the tracks, no less. A very specifically-worded contract was drawn up, the judge got $2,500 for fixing the paperwork and legal stuff, and my birth mother got all her medical expenses paid for and a $2,500 payment. All very grey market, and dubiously legal, but they got away with it because the only applicable laws were the old anti-slavery statutes that we're still on the books. The authorities didn't want the enormous scandal that a trial under those statutes would have cause, so here I am.

Oh, my, isn't that a classical reason!

The Tsolyani don't worry about 'bastardy'; one is born into a clan, and that's pretty much that.

I wanted to say "do they ever care about legalities"... (Unlike people around here, I'm lucky to add).
Of course, your father did it right according to the Tsolyani way! In a way, even the circumstances of your birh were Tsolyani-styled...

But if we can turn it into game fodder...I have already used Chirine, shortly, in a campaign, and it worked great, so why wouldn't we do it one more time?

Feel free! Let me know if you need anything.

I'll see what I can do, Uncle.

And the taping part is wonderful! Consult a lawyer, but I doubt anything can stop you from publishing a list as I suggested...

I follow the state and federal laws on this, and it's saved my bacon on a number of occasions. The phrase, "let's play the tape, then" has an amazing effect on people.

I can imagine.

He sounds like a great man to me, FWIW.

Both he and my stepfather were very special people, and I miss them both.

As is to be expected. Great people are always missed!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Agreed!

And yes, it was a very special Fourth of july.

His sense of humor could pop out at the most unexpected moments. When I was signing up for Army ROTC, the FBI was very concerned over my ten identical fingerprints and lack of proper documentation. My dad was 'invited' in so as to prove that I was a real person; they asked him for his ID, and he fixed the captain doing the interview with a stern gaze and asked him what his clearance was. The captain did a double take, and after an exchange of code phrases and hushed phone calls to unlisted phone numbers, my dad finally revealed his US government ID. Which was from the Atomic Energy Commission, and had a clearance level so high you had to have a 'Top Secret' rating just to look at the thing.

So, what was my dad doing? Do a Google search for 'SNAP-25'. My dad helped take us to the moon, and I still have the slide rule and drafting instruments that he used to do it.

In a way, that's also totally Tsolyani. Just substitute the captain for an OAL agent.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Never played Traveller, really, so I'll hazard a guess here. I'd say 'yes', because Phil's view of the technology of the Ancients was a lot more 'Art Deco Streamline Moderne' then anything else. There are not a lot of immediately identifiable controls on his devices, and it a lot of cases we couldn't even begin to figure out what the thing was, much less what it did and how it worked. I think if you go to the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art you can see a lot of examples of this technology, or look up the 1939 World's Fair. For Phil, that was what the future was going to look like.

Which was, it has to be said, very unsatisfying for a great number of Tekumel fans over the years, who expected that Tekumel's high tech would look like Star Trek, Star Wars, or anime rather then the 1940s and 1950s scientifiction, space opera, or ERB books that Phil had grown up with and been inspired by. In a lot of the games I used to run at conventions and such, I had to graft on a lot of knobs, etc. to keep the punters happy.

Phi's 'robots' range from the mechanical to the humanoid, depending on their function. We ran into and were chased by everything from the very humanoid Yeleth to the very 'mechanoid' combat Ru'un to the simplest of garbage collection robots. Here again, I'd suggest looking at 1940s and 1950s SF publications - the 'pulps', as it were - for the kind of thing that Phil described to us.

Does this help, at all?

I'd suggest, in turn, doing a search for "Art Deco Streamline Moderne".
I just did, and my players are going to hate the next Underworld expedition to an unknown location. Though I was just looking at tables...

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Very much so! When I sat downb and read ERB's "Barsoom" series and watched all of those wonderful black-and-white episodes of the serials, I got a much better feel for what Phil had had in mind - it's what he'd grown up with, and always loved. Phil had no idea how technology actually worked, and just had the devices do what they did - usually with pretty comic consequences for us.

In later years, the 1980s and 1990s, Phil was more then a little put out by fans who took him to task for not knowing exactly how any of the devices of the Ancients worked. (The on and off discussion about the Three-Light Drive is an example of this. Phil's answer: "I dunno. A ship goes into drive, and you get three flashes of light. It gets to where it wants to go, comes out of the drive, and you get three flashes of light. That's why it's called the Three-Light Drive". He was repeatedly told that this was not a good answer, and he needed to come up with something more technical.) He was even less amused when he was told by 'real fans' that Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Barsoom were all passe, and not what counted as SF.

Which I thought was too bad; it was glorious fun...

Phil, it seems, liked "softer" Sci-Fi, focusing more on what humans do with technology. In a way, he knew what humans do with technology in situations where it's a scarce resource - from his years in South Asia...so it was more or less a story to him, with the PCs as the "wild cards".

The fans, it seems, wanted "harder" Sci-Fi, focusing on how technology works, and what it does to humans. And they had no such background to fall back on, so to them, it was an exploration "what you can do with this".

Two viewpoints, informed by different life experiences, coming into a clash...what more can one say?

Their views on Barsoom and the like, though, were totally outrageous!

Science fiction writers and fans spent the late sixties and early seventies trying very hard to be a serious, adult, form of entertainment. Then Star Wars came along and proved that all sf really needed to be embraced by the general public was Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon with a better special effects budget. I have mixed feelings about it. I'm not fond of intellectualism to the exclusion of fun or anti-intellectualism to the exclusion of reason. But I am a big fan of Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Robert Heinlein. Clarke's always left me cold for some reason. I've read a lot of Asimov's essays and I think he makes some good points against Star Wars and Battle Star Galactica, "how do they get people into these one man death traps?"

But there will always be people who struggle with the idea that these things are childish. There will always be those who try to raise their fun to an art and look down on those who do not. Really, that might be a strong argument for gaming being an art form. If it stops being fun it just might be art.

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Chirine,

Before finding this thread I had no know idea how heavily influenced Tekumel was by Flash Gordon, Barsoom, et al. Funny enough, when I read MoG and FS for the first time Yul Brynner and Ming the Merciless popped into my head whenever the Baron Ald or Lord Fu Shi'i, respectively, were being discussed. I still picture Lord Fu Shi'i as Charles Middleton.
I recently went back and watched a lot of the films that you have recommended and tried to spot the influences on Tsolyanu and Tekumel . You are bang on when you say they inspired Phil. The original Thief of Baghdad (1924) could easily be part of a Tekumel campaign. The same with Haji Baba, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments and Land of the Pharaohs, as well as parts of the original Mummy and Wizard of Oz. I could easily see Nyelmu's guards in the Garden of the Weeping Snows being inspired by the Winkies (the Wicked Witch of the West's guards). In all of these movies I see stuff that could easily be used in a Tekumel game. An important NPC in my game is heavily modelled on Ahmed (Douglas Fairbanks' character), right down to the gestures and stunts. Great resources to mine for when trying to create a good Tekumel ambience for a campaign, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm currently enjoying a 13 part Flash Gordon serial from 1936 on You Tube: Flash Gordon and the Planet of Terror. Great stuff! Tonnes of inspiration.

Shemek.

Wonderful! You're following in Phil's footsteps, here! I got a very real appreciation for early F/SF from Phil; it's what he'd been reading and watching when he was a kid, and then built on when he went to South Asia.

For example, I knew nothing about the '39 Fair, what with the Trylon and Perisphere, until Phil talked about how he saw 'The Future'. There's a direct link with "Space Viking" by Piper, as the vast majority of Phil's starships were spherical, while the in-system ships - the 'landers' were classic Deco 'towers'.

Beacon_2014781u-200x300.jpg