Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Bren

Story? I mean really, you just drop that in there and leave it. 

Well it sounds like you got an experience to me.

Vol. One, "The Chalice Of The Flame", from "To Serve The Petal Throne".

I have a number of stories about the place, all of which are kinda long. Phil loved to get us down there, as Nyelmu was a great (?) way to send us off on quest; most of which were likely to get us killed in various nasty ways. Phil really liked Nyelmu; we all thought that Nyalmu was pretty bizarre, even for an Undying Wizard. More then once, we thought that it might be polite to send a sympathy card to the Jakalla Underworld's Overlord, who is responsible for keeping the batty wizard in his palace prison.

Patience; I'll get there.

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Stories are good.
Stories from Actual Play of EPT are even better.
=

Understood. I have lots and lots of audio tapes of the game sessions with phil in the later 1980s, when we could afford cassette tapes and recorders. My lovely wife has all the gear needed to transcribe them, as she used to to this kind of thing professionally, but she's unable to do it anymore.

I can hire a service to do the work, but there's going to be a fair amount of expense involved. Unless I can get that kind of funding, I'm afraid you'll have to work with my summaries of game sessions in my book; it's the best I can do, I'm afraid.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Vol. One, "The Chalice Of The Flame", from "To Serve The Petal Throne".

Great! Thanks.

Here's a question, but first a preamble for context. When I GM I mix in NPCs who are rather dim. In part that is because in my experience there are in the real world a fair number of folks, some in positions of power or influence, who are, shall we say, not the sharpest tools in the shed. In part that is because all the NPCs being clever all of the time sounds dull. And finally, a few dim NPCs give the players a chance to be clever without too much effort. Which given the stresses and strains of everyone's busy lives, is sometimes nice.

When you and Gronan describe your experiences, I get the impression that Phil, Gary, et al never seemed to intentionally play an NPC dumber than were they, the GM. Is that accurate or am I missing something?

Originally Posted by Greentongue

Were there a lot of ultra-tech available?
Not just left overs from the Elder days but also stuff that the resident (hostile) aliens may have created.

I'm thinking of adding Hlyss Gates that are matched teleport portals that the poles of look like something extruded by a giant insect and glued together.

Would these be out of place or just another of many strange things encountered?
=

Yes, but only in specific areas like the space marine base at the South Pole. Otherwise, it was pretty rare to find tech stuff; lots of it tended to make us invincible, so Phil tended to ration it out a bit.

He also then led us off to adventures with the Ssu and Hlyss, who had - we found out the hard way! - a lot of tech items in their arsenals and were not at all afraid of using it on us. If one was anywhere near their strongholds, we saw a lot of this kind of thing pointed at us - they didn't see to have any Eyes, but did have energy weapons that were a shock to run into. No conventional explosives or slug-throwers, just the Other-planar-powered equivalent of 20mm autocannon on tripods. Running into hostile non-humans with tripod-mounted, crew-served heavy weapons was a real nightmare, as we just were not trained and equipped for such things. We got our asses handed to us, on several occasions.

(Which is why I normally carried a little whisk broom and dust pan in my pack while off on adventures; you swept up your casualties, dumped the ashes into the Helmet of the Three-pointed Star, pushed the button, and hoped for the best. Sometimes it even worked.)

They also had, on thankfully very rare occasions, 'energy rods' that worked like energy rifles, and much more rarely actual hand weapons.

Battles between us with our sorcery and 'Eyes' and them and their sorcery and stuff got pretty spectacular; Phil's version of blaster battles...

Originally Posted by Chgowiz

1. Nobody could fucking agree on anything except that it was a good idea to "put asses in chairs to play games"
2. Nobody wanted to be the cops or arbiters of what was/wasn't old school. It was leaning towards a "you'll know it when you see it" deal.
3. TARGA was not going to go anywhere unless it was about organizing games. Which, twice for a self-proclaimed "International Traditional Gaming Day", it was.
4. If you know "more", please feel free to share, because I'm sure there was shit going on that I don't know about.

I think if TARGA had been more about just playing games, which is where I was hoping it would go, and less about publishers, and had been a grassroots thing, it might have worked.

No, you know what? Strike that, fuck that. We don't need an organization, we just need people to shut the fuck up and play games. Have some damn fun.

First off, thank you for your really informative and useful posts - this is the first time I've been able to get an unbiased version of events from somebody who was actually in there, actually doing something instead of pontificating over The Future Of The Hobby.

This is where I came in, actually, and a lot of why and where I formed my opinions of both the OSR and TARGA. The version I got, from Dr. Raymond, was very different and tended to greatly magnify his leadership and influence in both the OSR and TARGA. He's always been a very 'political animal' kind of guy, and his view of events - as he communicated them to me - was that 'his' TARGA needed to take a leading role in the industry to make sure that disreputable things like "I Hit It With My Axe" didn't tarnish the reputation of the hobby and the people in it. (Especially Dr. Raymond, who's been on a search for legitimacy for quite a long time. Early 1990's, in my experience.) He's been wanting to be A Major Publisher for about the same amount of time; it tends to color his viewpoints on things.

You are exactly right about "We don't need an organization, we just need people to shut the fuck up and play games. Have some damn fun." I strongly agree with that, and have held the same position for something like thirty-five years. In my time, I've seen an amazing number of 'movements', 'organizations', 'associations', and the like come and go; it always seemed to be about the 'prestige' and 'leadership' roles of the organizers, and a lot less about the games, the players, and the fun of the hobby. "Organized", "Authorized", "Official", and "Sanctioned" - along with business buzz-words like "premium products" and "consistent game play" - all seem to presage the eventual decline of the thing that somebody is trying to 'organize' for the good of the hobby.

Interesting. Very, very interesting, and thank you for this - it does shed some light on some things I've been seeing go by...

Originally Posted by Bren

I can't recall much from the EPT games in the 1970s so I got nuthin' there.

I was a player in a con session run by Sandy Petersen with RQTekumel. We were in the underworld somewhere fighting some kind of monster. My character was badly wounded...only it wasn't described as badly wounded...it was "the monster reaches over, plucks out your eye, stares at it for a moment, then eats it." :jaw-dropping: I don't remember what else went on in that session, but I sure as hell remember that. I wish I could remember what monster that was. Is there one that is particularly found of eating real eyes?

Thunru'u. Thomar the Wizard had one as his butler, and when we asked hom to pack us a picnic lunch for the assault on the palace of Bassa, the chap packed us an assortment of eyespoons as well as the food and drink. He - I think it was a 'he' - spoke with a bit of lisp, which I put down to his having a beak instead of lips; we had a hell of a time keeping a straight face, as Phil voicing the character sounded waaay too much like Daffy Duck.

In typical butler form, the worthy gent was scandalized that we didn't have a good set of sterling silver eyespoons, and we got a crash course on how to use them and keep them polished. I think Eyloa still has them.

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

Thunru'u, "The Eater of Eyes".

Yeah, that's them. See previous reply...

Originally Posted by AsenRG

Yes, I see. I'd have simply no space to hold a collection like yours.


Well, I guess I simply have different criteria for "losing".

Well, my PCs were exploring Tekumel, and came across a place where the people of a long-lost age have been practicing P.E. to keep in shape.
Now, I extrapolated. But there were Eyes there that served to make you relive your last action time and time again.
With them, you could get a whole workout in 30 seconds. The ultimate in couch potatoes training!
I leave it to you to guess what a Livyani clan used this Eye for...

It eats Eyes? What a waste!

Agreed; The wife has been very patient and very supportive, but it all still adds up. I had to get a garden shed for the scenery tubs, about thirty-five of them...

Probably. Phil came to RPGs from miniatures, and it did have an effect on him. Normally, he was pretty good about it, but we did give his beloved Saracen infantry a really hard thrashing - Gronan is a very good man on the table, and Phil didn't stand a chance.

Well, yes; the Eyes are tools of the Ancients, and are their versions of screwdrivers and pliers. They do just about anything, including what you extrapolated. (Typical Livyani, too.)

Oh; sorry. We should have been more clear. They eat eyes, not Eyes...

There: I think we're all caught up. I'm off the shop in the basement; I've got Barsoomian flyers on the work table; these are also useful for Tekumelyani aircars, too. Only one radium cannon in stock (vintage Heritage USA), so I'll have to make a magnetic mounting for it so it can move between flyers as needed...

Actually, you know, you might be able to answer a question I've had for a very long time. What happened to Heritage Miniatures?

I used to have some of their plastic fantasy miniatures sets and have always regretted not picking up more of them.

I know Reaper got the moulds in the late eighties or early nineties.