Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Yes, treating that level 1 character like the "dirt" the setting thinks they are, doesn't go over well.

Many say that characters should start as "people of some importance" which reminds me of the saying, "The higher you are the harder you fall."
Social expectations of a character / person of some status are pretty intense for someone that hasn't played in the setting for years.
One slight of the wrong person and the entire clan could turn against you for their own good.

I hear there is a minor administrative position open on the Hlutrgu frontier.

chirine ba kal did this happen to new players in games you know of?
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No, not in any of my games or in the ones we had with Phil. I should note that by the time I started, in early '76, Phil had had a couple of years of very 'hostile PvP' game play under his belt and there was a lot of unhappiness over the way that this played out on the table. This style of play was the major reason we 'mutinied' and the group split. We went on to have a very 'cooperative' style of play; the others kept on with their PVP style.

I don't use the 'off the boat' scenario; never have, never will. What I do is what Phil did, starting in '76, which was to give people characters already embedded in the culture in some way - sort of like pre-gens, in a way. It gets people into the culture and the world-setting a lot faster, gets them on adventures a lot faster, and gets the fun rolling a lot faster.

I have some thoughts on your other points; let me get back to you this afternoon...

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Yes, treating that level 1 character like the "dirt" the setting thinks they are, doesn't go over well.

Many say that characters should start as "people of some importance" which reminds me of the saying, "The higher you are the harder you fall."
Social expectations of a character / person of some status are pretty intense for someone that hasn't played in the setting for years.
One slight of the wrong person and the entire clan could turn against you for their own good.

I hear there is a minor administrative position open on the Hlutrgu frontier.

chirine ba kal did this happen to new players in games you know of?
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If a player said "I will address him politely," or even to speak with ordinary manners of courtesy, it was never a problem. Phil didn't make us fucking speak in Tsolyani.

There are, however, a significant number of RPG players with huge chips on their shoulders concerning issues of authority. Not all of them are 13 years old. Those players did not fit in well.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

If a player said "I will address him politely," or even to speak with ordinary manners of courtesy, it was never a problem. Phil didn't make us fucking speak in Tsolyani.

There are, however, a significant number of RPG players with huge chips on their shoulders concerning issues of authority. Not all of them are 13 years old. Those players did not fit in well.

I would very, very strongly agree with this! If the player made any kind of effort to be polite and well-behaved, it was never a problem when dealing with his NPCs.

And no, the subtle nuances in his conlangs didn't feature in his game play, except as 'local color' - unless we wanted to talk about them, whereupon Phil would go into full professor mode and go on and on and on and on - he really enjoyed lecturing, and he was never, ever boring.

I'll address this further, but Gronan's point is very well taken - and is extensively documented in Gary Fine's "Shared Fantasy". Over the years, and I'd like to have Gronan speak to this as well, if Phil had a different set of people in his original Tekumel group, the publishing history - and the game itself - would have been a very different beast then what we have to work with. I think I've mentioned this before, but after the first couple of years, Phil used EPT as a guide and a game mechanic, and not as something set in stone; likewise, S&G stands as a monument to what was happening in the Monday Group. And to what was happening in our group. Now, S&G has a vast amount of useful information - but when you delve into the fine details, it's the world's longest, largest, and least playable miniatures rules set for skirmish gaming on a one-to-one scale.

I think that if Phil had play-tested - a concept not well known at the time - his RPG with 'outside' players, things would have been very different.

Originally Posted by Hermes Serpent

Interesting, I suspect that English doesn't make it any easier to comprehend the use of different pronouns for talking to others. Someone familiar with Japanese or Korean may find it easier to understand that concept. I don't known if any of the languages of the Indian sub-continent have this type of structure either. Some European languages have some a degree of this built-in (French for example) but not to any great extent.

Again I suspect that as a lot of gamers find it almost impossible to read a rulebook and expect to learn on the job as it were even if they do buy the book, then using social engagements and beating them over the head with the social constructs you are trying to impart might work but isn't very fun.

Urdu, I'm told, by Ambereen Barker; we were discussing the ramifications of my extended family, and she was hugely amused that English does not have the words to describe a concept like 'quarter-step-brother's-son', while her native language does.

Agreed. I run into this all the time.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

I guess my point is that as much as people rave about a game where the culture and society are unique and it is the thing that they like the most, there is very little support for the details. For example sixty four pronouns are mentioned by not listed in any source I has seen commonly available.
This implies that etiquette is very important and yet almost no details are provided to support actual gaming.

For me, as an American, trying to run or even play in a game where this is as critical as many proponents claim, would be basically impossible.
If this is required, and you are assumed to already know this type of thing, I can see why it has been passed over by the gaming masses.

While I may be derided for my crude take on the setting, I have played, had fun and made use of the setting.
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One, I do not deride you for your 'crude take' on the setting; we play the ball where it lies on the green.

Two, you are entirely correct. As Gronan remarked, simply saying "I ask them politely" was always good enough for Phil; while I had a copy of Phil's "Tsolyani Language" at the table, we didn't try to construct the pronouns as we went along; we used a lot of 'simple' words, like 'Lord' or 'Lady' to indicate rank, and didn't delve into the maze of titles in the various states. I really do wish that Phil's earlier works would be republished, as he did a lot of very useful articles on how he played his game in his world.

Over the years, I've never had issues with new players 'learning the ropes' of how to survive in Tekumel; I give them the very basic information that they need to roll up their PCs, and then turn them loose. Where I differ from some people is that I'm there to run an adventure, not a language seminar. As you point out, part of this is based on my time in the barrel, and my access to all of Phil's works. And I'm not out to push an agenda, either; I'm out to have some fun at the game table.

To be frank, I wish Phil had never written the 'just-off-the-boat-in-Jakalla' bit in EPT. He intended it, he told me, as a suggestion for people; he assumed, like Gary and Dave, that people could and would make up their own adventures from the source material that he was providing. (Gary, as Gronan has remarked, was especially astonished by the commercial success of 'modules'.) In this, I think that all three were mistaken, and while Gary and Dave went on to do introductory adventures, Phil never did; he just wasn't all that interested in the 'gaming' aspect, and wanted to more of an ERB then an EGG or a DLA.

One of the big questions that preoccupied the great minds in gaming, back in the day, was how a diverse band of low-level people got together and went on an adventure. The off-the-boat gambit was Phil's way to answer this, and I personally think it's a dead end. What I've done, over the years, is have people create a low-level PC and have them embedded in society; my game group was started by 'country cousins', people from various clans who'd been sent to Jakalla to stay with their 'big-city' cousins to get an education, makes some money and connections, and bring fame and glory to their clans. It works, both in-game and out-; I had something like two dozen people play in my games over the years, and they all seemed to have a good time as they rotated in and out as real life allowed them to come and go.

I've been told that "I do Tekumel better then Phil did." I don't think so, myself; what I do is take all the lessons I learned from him about his world - and about RPG gaming from Dave and Gary - and apply them to my adventures. I've tried to bring that to life in my book, and I'm thinking that I need to run some RPGs, record them, and put them up on my You Tube channel.

Does this help, at all? Further discussion would be welcome...

Originally Posted by Greentongue

I seems to come up often of where a NPC, or player character for that matter, fits.
They are of a lower-mid linage of an upper-mid clan that is known for safe a hurried deliveries of valuables.
While that is clear, players want to know, "How can I tell that by looking at them?"

This is what I'm talking about. The adage "Don't tell them, show them."
There is little if any information on what the quality of fabric indicates, which accessory is a status symbol, what the size of their entourage says about them, etc...
What guides are there for "showing" the status of a person?

Since an alien society is said to be one of the "selling points", I'm surprised there is not more on the visual aspect of it.
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Agreed with all your points!

Here's what breaks my heart about Tekumel: I have 34 Gigabytes of artwork by Phil and various artists done over the decades on file; probably two-thirds of it has never been published. Most of it was generated in the course of our games for precisely the reason you give - to illustrate these very questions. (And I have 32 Gigabytes of texts on file, too.)

(My old "Miniatures for Tekumel" painting guide had some of this material in it; I don't know if Carl Brodt still has any copies left, and you might want to drop him an e-mail asking if he does.)

Phil's Tekumel was always very, very visual' he'd whip out his sketches, or Chris Huddle, Kathy Marshall, or Ken Fletcher would do one of theirs. (With me painting figures as fast as I could, too.) The stuff is there; it's been suggested by several people that at 'art book' would be A Good Thing.

I divide it between "use during gaming" and "background material." Phil would give sketches or others would draw them, yes, but much like the languages he didn't go into great detail unless asked. He would say "He looks like this, and you recognize him as a such and such of this rank of that clan."


What he did NOT do is show a sketch and expect us to figure out status and rank just from the sketch, just like he didn't speak Tsolyani at us and expect us to understand.