Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1050366Might have to hit Chirine up for a presentation on the Professor's Opus Magnus that we could use as a looping intro to Tekumel for newbies. Anyone know of a YouTube presentation that talks about EPT/Tekumel that would be good for an intro as an alternative if he's too busy?

Quote from: d(sqrt(-1));1050155The game was played on Sunday AM UK time, 6 of us + Hermes Serpent himself. It was nice to get into a room with 6 other people and talk about Tekumel in general, as well as run through the scenario with (many!) side excursions into important questions such as who got to organise the shamtla collections, who loaded the pots onto the Chlen carts, and who got to fight the Shanu'u...

It did make me wonder if there is a possibility of a one day UK Tekumel get-together being viable. Even if it was six or seven people in a pub somewhere...

Thanks to all those who were there.

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1050160A not too brief run down of the three scenarios I ran at the UK Continuum convention last weekend. Thanks to all who played in any of them.

This past weekend was Continuum, a UK convention that's held at the University of Leiceester every second (even) year. It's been running for a number of years and it has in the past been very focussed on Chaosium products. There's always been a large number of Call of Cthulhu games, Gloranthan games and Pendragen games as well as the usual selection of other settings and systems. With teh new Glornathan Runequest release and the 5.2 version of Pendragon these game systems/settings have seen a fresh resurgence.

(...)

The party explored the cave and found it was an old, very old temple to Sarku and ominmous slithering sounds from the depths caused them to choose to report it for a potential reward.

The players had fun, the rules got tested and approved (only one player had used them before) and the scenario was deemed to be suitable mainly unchanged but with some tweaks for a introductory style game.

Final game of the con was a rerun of a Mythras scenario where I have some Greek heroes end up on Monster island in a very Harryhausen movie style game. As usual one cannot put a golden chalice and some gems on a temple altar without someone in the party choosing to try and take them. The Ice Worm Guardian of the Temple of Raylimshaitan and Actinius the human guardian proceed to damage the party and send them fleeing before the drums brought native lizardmen who demanded a return of the stolen goods. The party limped back to Port Grimsand with a single wild boar skin as their 'winnings'. One of the players was the translator of the German version of Mythras material and we had an interesting discussion about the difficulty of translating the Greek material in Mythic Constantinople as German and English use different transliterations of Greek letters.

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1050228Thank you! I'm hoping to get the game room on-line in the near future; we have all the technology, I just need time to hook it all up. I'm starting out slowly, this time around, and avoiding all the mistakes I made with my previous game group. Although it did last over a decade of game sessions, I made some bad mistakes at the very beginning and they helped kill the group off at the end.

You are correct. The short answer is that I am very, very good at running probability curves in my head and on the fly. If I know how relatively good or bad the situation is, I can do the math very quickly and generate the probabilities for anything. I did this for over a decade in my old game group, which had PCs done in EPT, S&G, and BESM. We had the same situation in Phil's campaign where we had EPT and S&G PCs in the same game sessions, so I guess I'd have to say that it's something I'm used to in my gaming.

The long answer is that I don't much obsess over game mechanics in general. I've been around for a while doing this, and I have enough practical experience and research under my belt to get the job done in a game (it's 'Free Kreigspiel', if it needs to have a name) and it seems to work just fine for people who play in my games. I've been told on more then a few occasions on-line from people who have never played in my games that this is all wrong - "too loosey-goosey, too much hand-waving" - which is why I've stopped participating in the various 'ODD' and 'OSR' forums that I've tried over the past decade. I have no clue what most of the gaming discussions on the Internet are about, so I don't participate in them any more.

I don't particularly mind being way off in the nether regions of gaming; our original TNG was much the same. We gamed with Phil and published shelves full of stuff, but we also constantly got lots of letters, phone calls, and  face-to-face complaints about how we were not in the 'mainstream' of gaming and that Phil and the rest of us should change our ways - we were doing 'BadWrongFun' long before the Internet came along, and it didn't seem to matter a lot to us at the time. Or in the present, for that matter, as some of my colleagues from that group and time and place are going to be part of this campaign.

That's my explanation for what I'm going to be doing; I'm sorry that it's put in such a simplistic form, but I don't know a lot of big academically correct words for what I learned how to do all those years ago and still do.

Sorry about being long-winded; we had a long discussion about this this past weekend at the workshop session.

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1050366Talk has been ongoing and Pookie has set up an event on FB for a TekUKon at Games Retreat in Birmingham probably for 6th October (confirming with them tomorrow).

I've offered to run a three part introductory scenario using Bethorm that I've written (and run) two parts of so far. We're very open to others running games or people just coming along to learn more about Tekumel. We hope to have about a dozen of so people attending to talk about Tekumel and gaming therein.

Might have to hit Chirine up for a presentation on the Professor's Opus Magnus that we could use as a looping intro to Tekumel for newbies. Anyone know of a YouTube presentation that talks about EPT/Tekumel that would be good for an intro as an alternative if he's too busy?

It's amazing what a little effort can do to enthuse a core base of fans. I've run three Tekumel games in two years and played one, been lucky enough to get other enthusiasts involved, had the Foundation give a little boost and now we're trying something more mainstream that has really taken off, resonating with those UK people who have run Tekumel games in the past and who have very fond memories. Someone contacted me who had run a recent campaign with his group (used Pathfinder but I wont hold that against him) so increasing our profile has been a good thing.

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;1050287Oxford is obviously fairly central but has, I believe, parking cost issues probably necessitating Park and Ride options. Any other possible location ideas?

Quote from: chirine ba kal;1050380I have a speaking engagement this weekend and a game session next weekend, but after that I'm clear. Are you looking for a PowerPoint presentation or more like an interview kind of thing? I'd suggest a PowerPoint show so you could keep it cycling on a screen off to one side, as well as keeping the noise factor down. Let me know what you want, and I can put it together using stuff from my files.

If it's at all useful, I do have some stuff on my Youtube channel that might be useful - Prof. Barker's bio show is on there, but I don;t know if that would be what you're looking for.

Quote from: Baron;1050598I love seeing Chirine's big mini environments, especially the ones with ships. But someone just posted about this site, and my eyes practically fell out! On reflection, I guess it's not hard to do this yourself, but nonetheless these look great! https://www.tabletopthings.com/shop

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