I seldom even go to RPGnet anymore, but I just logged in to see whether they'd been talking about George Vasilakos' Adventure Maximus! and I chanced upon this.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;16758143If I may, I'd like to announce that I will be running a classic 'Braunstein'-style game session at The Source Comics and Games here in the Twin Cities on June 8th, 2013. This will be the traditional game with all the trimmings, just the way we used to play back in the late 1970s, with all the fun and mayhem we're used to. I learned how to run these from Dave Wesley, back in the day, and I still run them the same way. I'll be setting the game in the world of Tekumel, and we'll have a lot of the new miniatures that are being produced by Howard Fielding and The Tekumel Project.

If you'd like to know what these are like to play in, ask Old Geezer. He played in my game "The Great Mos Eisley Spaceport Raid" as the dashing young hero Luke Skywalker, along with Dave Arneson as Jabba the Hutt, Dave Wesley as Boba Fett, Ross Maker as Greedo, and Fred Funk as the Imperial Stormtroopers. (There is no typecasting in these games. Really. Seriously. I mean it.) Game report and photos to follow...

yours, Chirine

I felt almost sorry for chirine, for posting this over at RPGnet rather than here, where it would garner a tad more attention.

To any old school diehards who have the vaguest of interests in either Braunstein or Tékumel, and who can make it to the Twin Cities by June 8th without a lot of fuss: fucking go. This looks like it'll be an epic game.

Quote from: The Butcher;653897I seldom even go to RPGnet anymore, but I just logged in to see whether they'd been talking about George Vasilakos' Adventure Maximus! and I chanced upon this.



I felt almost sorry for chirine, for posting this over at RPGnet rather than here, where it would garner a tad more attention.

To any old school diehards who have the vaguest of interests in either Braunstein or Tékumel, and who can make it to the Twin Cities by June 8th without a lot of fuss: fucking go. This looks like it'll be an epic game.

I bet a LOT of settings/games could be run this way using the Savage Worlds Showdown rules.
Tekumel, with all its factions, is a natural for something like this.
=

Dont know this Braustein, but if it have Tekumel it must be cool.

I get its some kind of wargame ?

I think it's fair to call Braunstein a proto-RPG or even a full-fledged RPG. It predated D&D by several years and influenced Dave Arneson, who played Braunstein 4.

This blogpost by Ben Robbins is widely quoted and I feel it's a good recap. There's also the obligatory Wikipedia article on the author.

To me, this looks like a golden opportunity to sit down and play a classic, hugely influential game with a veteran of tabletop gaming at the helm.

I didn't know about SW: Showdown (thanks for the link), but I don't think it's a good fit. Unless you were mixing it up with the actual SW RPG, which I still don't think is a good fit for Tékumel specifically.

Quote from: The Butcher;654139I think it's fair to call Braunstein a proto-RPG or even a full-fledged RPG. It predated D&D by several years and influenced Dave Arneson, who played Braunstein 4.

Based on my reading of Playing At the World I see the evolutionary chain as like this:

Braunsteins arise from a whole heap of predecessors.

Then Dave Arneson comes up with the idea of a) sticking them in a fantasy setting, b) restricting players to 1 character each (IIRC the original Braunsteins had some people playing entire armies), and c) running a series of them as a campaign (previous Braunsteins had been one-shots).

Then Gary Gygax took that hot mess and turned it into a product which was actually within spitting distance of being commercially viable and which a particularly determined maniac could just about suss out without prior personal contact with any of the above.

So yeah, I think it's fair to say that Braunsteins were the first RPGs (or the first game environment in which a subset of the players had an RPG-like experience), Blackmoor was the first RPG campaign, and D&D was the first commercial RPG.

Man, I should really pick up Playing At The World some time.

Quote from: The Butcher;654139Also, chirine (Victor Raymond) was one of the players in Prof. Barker's original Tékumel campaign.

No, Chirine (my aide-de-camp) is not Victor.

Quote from: Old Geezer;654226No, Chirine (my aide-de-camp) is not Victor.

My bad; I stand corrected. I'll go back and edit the original post.

Quote from: The Butcher;653897I felt almost sorry for chirine, for posting this over at RPGnet rather than here, where it would garner a tad more attention.

No "allmost" about it, man.

He'd been way better served here. In spite of certain cool oldschoolers D&D-related things tend to be very heavily 4e-dominated on TBP, wich is a pity.

The game sounds awesome. Never tried Tekumel but man, I like most of what I've seen about it (especially the old stuff).

The second hand impression I got about Tekumel was that it was a bit too... well, involved. Difficult to get into. How much truth is there in it?

Quote from: vytzka;654373The second hand impression I got about Tekumel was that it was a bit too... well, involved. Difficult to get into. How much truth is there in it?

I would say it's not especially involved -- EPT being little different, rules-wise, from the original D&D set -- but rather notably different from the pop-cultural referents (mainly bowdlerized Tolkien) that more popular fantasy games use as a foundation.

The original EPT hardwired in the assumption that the PCs were uncultured barbarians rocking up in Tekumel to learn the ways of civilisation and eventually carve out a niche for themselves, so I think even MAR Barker would have conceded that the setting was rather ornate. I wouldn't say it's more ornate than other non-generic fantasy settings that have arisen later, though, and I suspect it's reputation for being impenetrable stems partly from the reaction of gamers in the 1970s, who hadn't seen half the settings we have.

Getting off the boat in Jakalla is probably almost as exotic -- from a North American's perspective -- as getting off a plane in India.

There's actually a lot that evokes India, plus some hints of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

There are also more science-fictional elements, reminiscent especially of the work of Jack Vance (but also of A. Merritt, E.R. Burroughs, Leigh Brackett and others).

The main region of activity is rather tropical, not much resembling the Northern European model common in sword & sorcery games.

Instead of Nordic fairy folk, there are more alien species. Behind the fact that there are no stars in the night sky, there is a history of men coming from another world. Beneath the cities (periodically razed in a religious ritual), there is a planet-spanning transportation system. Other magical devices, such as the 'eyes', are a mixture of transdimensional and psionic technologies.

Iron is scarce, but cured chlen hide makes goods almost as durable as bronze and much lighter (sort of like some plastics).

The Lords of Change have temples openly alongside the Lords of Stability.

Caste and clan are very, very important social factors.

If you can get into Glen Cook's "Black Company" novels, it might not be too hard to get into Tekumel. There are probably other good non-Tekumel comparisons.

I love Black Company. This makes me want to check out Tekumel now (I suppose the India comparisons mean it's more like the books of the South?).