Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;919155ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW TO PLAY 1975 EotPT IN ONE BRIEF HAND-OUT:

OMG. JASC, you rule.

If that was on Kickstarter with a refreshed edition in a reasonable sized book, I'd buy it in a second.

Such as shame the IP owners aren't working with Kevin Crawford.

Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;920240I've only recently taken the plunge as a "Tekumel GM", with naive players too. Some had vaguely heard of the world. Some not at all. As a result no one was there to tell me or them that we were "doing it wrong". And we had a lot of fun the handful of times we played.

Please post more about GMing Tekumel!!

What game system are you using?

Quote from: The Butcher;920720Once again, the Foundation shoots itself in the foot. Unless if course they mean to keep Tékumel obscure.

Word. Though Gronan probably has it right, alas:).

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;920721I hope that at some point maybe K.C. decides to do something like EPT with the serial numbers filed off.

We can at least hope, and I'm going to jump on this KS;).

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;920817Pundit already did that.

Arrrows of Indra? I was wondering if it AoI was that.

Kevin has a unique approach to settings, though, that I haven't seen in products other than Vornheim, Fever Dream Marlinko or Yoo-Suin.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;920721I hope that at some point maybe K.C. decides to do something like EPT with the serial numbers filed off.

Unfortunately, that'd lose the main draw of Tekumel- the incredibly intricate and polymathic world design that Barker did. Of course, that very virtue is the thing that makes it so hard for people to approach the IP, but that's why a game designer needs to put so much effort into GM support and setting legibility work. Whenever you're working with a setting that's fundamentally alien to the Typical Modern Gamer, there are certain things a designer just has to do.

GMs and players approach games with a certain syntactic language to their play experience at the table. They expect to have conflicts, exploration, puzzles, and socializing. These "grammatical elements" of a play session aren't specific details, but are ways the players relate to what's going on in the fictional world. They expect to have to struggle with something, to explore new places, to overcome puzzling situations, and to talk with the inhabitants of this setting.

This sort of thing is so instinctive and so baked into the trad gaming style that people don't consciously think about these elements as such. In the oldest-school style, they think about dungeons with traps and monsters and weird doohickeys and shady adventurers and all the customary goods of the genre. In newer-school styles, they think about plots and storylines and what makes a good scene and so forth, but even here, these more abstract considerations are expressed in terms of villains, fights, treasures, negotiations, and investigations. You might strive to make a good plot arc, but you build it out of familiar components that are well-known to you and your players.

When you take away those building blocks, people flail. All the components that they're used to using are either not there or fit in different ways now. They try to build a familiar plot arc or sandbox and they can't find any of the usual parts, or they don't have confidence that they're "doing it right". The players are hesitant and confused because nothing seems to be operating in any way they recognize. Because they can't feel a reasonable confidence that their actions will have comprehensible reactions, they end up like repeatedly-shocked mice- they just won't do anything, or they tear off in a random direction just to make something happen.

A designer has to make these grammatical components legible to the GM and players. You have to spell it out for them: "You want a social conflict? Okay, here are the big social conflicts in this setting, here are the usual participants, here's what each side wants, and here's now the PCs can get involved." You need to handhold them through adventure creation, giving them simple templates they can fill out of a box of parts you explicitly provide. Need an Evil High Priest? Okay, here's a list of priests who'd likely be good antagonists. Want a Cruel Lord? Have a collection of them, along with what's so cruel about them. Require a Sympathetic Victim? Here's a list of types who'd likely appeal to the players and why they're powerless to help themselves.

At the crudest level, it's a matter of taking familiar Standard Game Session tropes and patterns and giving the GM and players setting-appropriate elements to slot into their familiar fun. If the designer is good, he can then fit in more setting-specific play situations that wouldn't make sense in a standard fantasy setting and do so in a way the GMs and players find approachable.

For Tekumel, there are a lot of setting-specific play situations that wouldn't be comprehensible in Ye Olde Fantasye Realme. Bringing those out and making them legible to readers and players is a major design task, and if you handle it the wrong way, you're just going to confuse people even more. I'm not surprised that kind of work hasn't gotten more attention from designers, because it is extremely hard to do.

Quote from: SineNomine;920868For Tekumel, there are a lot of setting-specific play situations that wouldn't be comprehensible in Ye Olde Fantasye Realme.

Such as?
I mean, I can probably think of situations from authentic/historical Europe that don't come up in 'Ye Olde Fantasye Realme' play either. So most fantasy games aren't all that authentic/historical... but people enjoy them anyway. Why is that aspect necessary for Tekumel play? Is it a caution against play being too 'shallow'?


Meanwhile, what's wrong with Bethorm?

Quote from: Simlasa;920896Such as?

Anne just rolled up a disgraced noblewoman, Bob's a ratcatcher, Chuck's a foreign mercenary, and Dee is a wizard's apprentice. This is a perfectly acceptable Standard Fantasy Party. It is also a party that could not even talk directly to each other in public in default Tsolyani society without elaborate social engineering to justify such outrageous social intermingling.

Different editions of Tekumel games have tried to deal with this in different ways. One of the more common one is to just make all PCs belong to high-ranking clans so they can directly socialize without causing people's heads to explode. This kind of radical social stratification is nonexistent in the Standard Fantasy Realm. You might have a social gulf between classes, but the Standard Fantasy Realm expresses it by having the elites be assholes to the commoners, not by completely sealing them off from association. Players understand, "The baron is an asshole to the peasants." They don't understand "My tanner PC directly addressed the Sea Blue patrician's first wife so her bodyguards broke my jaw and threw a coin in my face."

And let's not even get into concepts of honorable and dishonorable behavior in a world where the is absolutely no universalized personal morality. The Standard Fantasy Realm is very big on Black and White, whereas Tekumel is Orange and Blue.

...and yet more proof that Kevin Crawford should be doing Tekumel.

Quote from: SineNomine;920897Anne just rolled up a disgraced noblewoman, Bob's a ratcatcher, Chuck's a foreign mercenary, and Dee is a wizard's apprentice. This is a perfectly acceptable Standard Fantasy Party. It is also a party that could not even talk directly to each other in public in default Tsolyani society without elaborate social engineering to justify such outrageous social intermingling.

And this is why Tekumel badly needs a barbarian to come in and tread its jewelled crowns beneath his sandalled feet.

Sure, you could do that.

But what made Tekumel FUN was that it WASN'T about that.  Once Phil dropped the whole "barbarian on a boat" thing and started players as young members of a medium-status clan is when things got fun.  Adventuring in the City of the Dead under Jakalla was just like any other dungeon crawl; fun, sure, but still a dungeon crawl.  We ALL had our own custom monsters.

But once we started actually interacting with the society is when it became fun in a unique way.  It was the exact opposite from the mostly Hollywood-feudal society of D&D; it was more like Hollywood Egypt/Rome/India/Aztecs.  It was a Hollywood EMPIRE and that's what made it different and fun.

I can be All Conqueror of Foes Cheese in almost any fantasy game.  Tekumel's appeal was that it was something different.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;920947Tekumel's appeal was that it was something different.

Please talk more about this.

Quote from: Spinachcat;920823Please post more about GMing Tekumel!!
What game system are you using?

I've been using Béthorm, although I also plan on testing the free Dave Morris' free, battle-tested Tirikelu system sooner than later.
Bethorm has strong echoes of GURPS but it's lighter and faster. Recommended.
I wrote a little blurb introducing the system here:
http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35187-Let-s-Talk-About-EPT&p=918774&viewfull=1#post918774

You could start by listening to Jeff Dee's very good introduction to gaming on Tékumel here:
http://www.celesticon.com/Podcasts/Podcasts2015/JeffDee_Tekumel_C2015.mp3
He briefly talks about pronouncing the words, before quickly moving on to answering the question: "How can I ever be expected to understand all of this stuff and get it all right?"
Lots of tips and hints.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;920947Adventuring in the City of the Dead under Jakalla was just like any other dungeon crawl; fun, sure, but still a dungeon crawl.  We ALL had our own custom monsters.
But once we started actually interacting with the society is when it became fun in a unique way.  It was the exact opposite from the mostly Hollywood-feudal society of D&D; it was more like Hollywood Egypt/Rome/India/Aztecs.

Gronan is 100% correct. Tekumel is really not very different from your regular game world of choice.

RPGing on Tékumel keeps being made into something complex and insurmountable because the cultures are so alien, so weird and OMG, so unique and wildly bizarre, etc.
It's not. Period.
It is dense, yes. It is detailed, yes. And it does require the GMs to work a bit harder than usual at prepping the adventures. But that's not what I call complex or unique or strange. That's what I call thinking about the society in which the PCs evolve a bit more, and thinking about the NPCs those adventurers meet along the way a bit more, which makes for a richer and more fun RPG experience.

Keep in mind that you're not being asked to play aliens either. You're being asked to play human beings. As such, expect human being stuff: love, friendship, treason, ambition, etc.
How strange! How weird! How alien!

So, run your games the way you'd run any other, semi-old-school RPG session.

At first, focus on keeping things simple, for yourself and the players:

- Have the adventures take place in and around some rural/remote clan.
- Have all your players roll characters from different lineages but from the same clan.
- Have all your players pick gods/goddess from the same pantheon (either Change or Stability) to avoid game-breaking conflicts later on.
- Get your players involved in some old-school achievable adventures with clear goals/objectives, whether they are "off the boat" barbarians or members of a medium rural clan: find where that boy is; why haven't we heard from the hunters/merchants/sailors in a while; what is that weird structure that's now coming out from the local hill; there's a thief about! There are thousands of such adventures out there for all sorts of games.
- At first, think of clans as fantasy-setting guilds, and lineages as, well, regular families. We, as 21st Century people, understand what families are since we are members of our respective families, with the shady uncle, the crazy grand-dad, the sweet granny, etc. And we work with "guild members" too: work colleagues, the cool ones, the pain-in-the-butt ones, the helpful ones, etc.
- Keep in mind that all Tekumelani things revolve around one's appearance, one's honor, and keeping one's clan/lineage/temple proud. You do so, well, by looking good and behaving honorably, whatever that entails in the temple and/or clan of your choice. And by the way, we all understand the concept of honor in a semi-traditional setting since we've all seen those samurai films.
- Tell things to your player about the world directly as a GM, or, more adroitly, as an NPC. For instance, have the head of your PCs' clan remind them, at the start of their first adventures, that they should behave honorably and not shame the clan, etc. Some street urchin met in some city can be one such unofficial guide to Tekumelani daily-life. Etc.
- Keep in mind that almost any issue can be resolved by putting the right amount of money in the right hands.

And then, as things progress inject a bit more detail:

- Start using a bit more Tsolyani words, for atmosphere. Simple ones. Your players don't have to do it at all, of course.
- Clans and lineages are like guilds and families respectively, sure, but not quite.
- Give your PCs a backstory. The Bethorm rules, with its system of advantages and disadvantages, help that way. But if you use another system, just come up with some backstory that might answer such basic questions as, what does the character want? Who are his/her friends? What's his/her greatest fear? etc. Regular RPG stuff.
- Give your NPCs a life of their own too! What do they want? Where are they from? Etc. Regular RPG stuff too. This approach will make your games that much more interesting down the line, as your key NPCs (be they clan-leaders or rich employers) will keep showing up in the lives of your PCs, etc.
- Don't allow your players to play Tekumel's aliens, unless it's for some unusual game session, like a one-shot. That way, you keep the aliens weird and strange.
- Get inspiration on the look, smell, and taste of things everywhere and anywhere! For instance:

• Read the first Tekumel novel and you'll see that we're dealing with very normal adventures and very normal daily lives where clan politics are really not that important.
• Read, if you can get your hands on them, the solo-adventures from the Gardasiyal RPG. Again, you'll realize that Tekumel is like any other fantasy world when it comes to going on adventures, meeting people, etc.
• Wanna see what going on an expedition looks like on Tekumel? Watch the opening of Aguirre the Wrath of God: https://youtu.be/4dbBur_bSUE
  
• Wanna see what a religious festival might look like on Tekumel? A video on the Kumbh Mela Hindu pilgrimage in India will do: https://youtu.be/wCnX2XCBMAA
  
• Wanna know what some of Tekumel forests sound like? Jungle sounds should give you a hint: https://youtu.be/u4pZcU16mIA
  
• Wanna see what peering beyond the veil of Tekumel's reality is like? Any fractal video will do https://youtu.be/AgdN5yO39UI
  
• If you see some wild Asian fantasy film trailer, think of the magic in it as being advanced, futuristic technology that harnesses extra-planar energy, like here https://youtu.be/Gsy6u5LdRRA
  
• Don't hesitate to make it pulpy, campy, and tongue-in-cheek, with loads of colors and outrageous situations when appropriate: "No! Not the Bore Worms!" https://youtu.be/x0Ev2qiY08M
  

Good god. Stop with the tl;dr lecturing. What part of 'let's have a Tekumel discussion that isn't inevitably monopolized by Tsolyani-named super troopers' didn't you understand?

This reminds me of when you watch those cooking shows and the chef spends 30 minutes doing 50 steps with 12 different pots and pans and 15 obscure ingredients and says, "See? It's really simple!" Yes, for a professional it is.

What it comes down to is that nobody is going to do months of study just to play a game once a week. There are good reasons for Tekumel's obscurity, just as there are good reasons Rolemaster was less popular than D&D, and GURPS4e is less popular than GURPS1e.

Quote from: Neshm hiKumala;921040RPGing on Tékumel keeps being made into something complex and insurmountable because the cultures are so alien, so weird and OMG, so unique and wildly bizarre, etc.

That's awesome. Thank you!!

Sounds like a cool, dense setting. The linguistics appear to be a challenge. Is there an easy idiot proof pronunciation guide online to print for players?

Quote from: Kellri;921112Good god. Stop with the tl;dr lecturing. What part of 'let's have a Tekumel discussion that isn't inevitably monopolized by Tsolyani-named super troopers' didn't you understand?

So, is he not allowed to express an opinion in this thread, particularly when asked a direct question oh great arbiter of all things Tekumel?