Quote from: Old Geezer;795796The thing about Pendragon, though, is you can say "It's the perfect game about the Knights of the Round Table" and people have some idea of what the fuck you're talking about.

Tekumel suffers from a lack of an easy handle.

I chose Pendragon because the system is extremely well suited for the setting and for enabling appropriate play in that setting, which is something I think Tekumel needs. Something that enables and promotes behavior in the Tsolyani culture like we saw in Man of Gold.

You are of course correct that Mallory is much more widely well known than Tekumal. Although I'd say that other sources (bad movies for instance) that don't fit that well with Pendragon's system are probably better known to most people. Perhaps a better analogue would be the original Runequest 1/2 with Cults of Prax which are set in Glorantha - a similarly detailed, auteur invented world that is not very readily accessible to the public at large (certainly less accessible than Mallory"s book and similar tales of chivalry).

Quote from: Old Geezer;795796The thing about Pendragon, though, is you can say "It's the perfect game about the Knights of the Round Table" and people have some idea of what the fuck you're talking about.

Tekumel suffers from a lack of an easy handle.

I'm not sure that's so much as a bug as a feature.

Look, Tekumel is a dense, weird setting that's not to the taste of too many gamers raised on bog-standard Generic Fantasy.  There has to be a hundred better settings for the "I don't give a shit about background, I just want to grab the dice and play" gamer.  I'm not necessarily saying that it's impossible for someone easily deterred by the lack of a ten-word buzzphrase to enjoy the setting, but.

For playing native Tsolyani, I found Tirikelu an excellent rules set. The Honor rules (per Bren's mention of Pendragon) were found in a magazine article, but perhaps the basic handbook has been updated to include them. I liked the treatment of magic, which does not slavishly follow the S&G model. All around a nifty middle-weight set (more detailed in some ways than EPT, but not in GURPS or D20 System territory).

I've seen a BRP write-up of nonhuman races, and a full RQ adaptation based on the AH edition (with S&G/Gardasiyal style magic).

Quote from: Jason D;795683Of couse it would have been possible for Jeff Dee to have adapted the Tekumel setting to an OSR game, just as much as he could have done it for Traveler, OpenQuest, or a half-dozen other open-sourced game engines.

Doesn't anyone remember the d20 boom, where long-running settings were paired with the d20 rules set because the publishers felt they had to? How many of those games were actually good?

Of course, but I'm not saying "every setting should be OSR".  But Tekumel is an old-school setting; it was one of TSR's earliest products. I'm saying this specific setting should have had an OSR rule-set.

Quote from: RPGPundit;796350Of course, but I'm not saying "every setting should be OSR".  But Tekumel is an old-school setting; it was one of TSR's earliest products. I'm saying this specific setting should have had an OSR rule-set.

Then in all seriousness and without any snark, maybe you should step up and write one.

Personally, I think the person who is going to the effort of writing something up should do what they find interesting. They aren't going to make any money* from it, so it should at least be entertaining for them to do. I already own EPT so I don't really need an OSR version of EPT. I suspect the same is even more true of the die hard Tekumel fans.



* And by "any money" I mean that if they put in even a moderately reasonable amount of effort on the game they will be lucky to make minimum wage for the time they have expended.

Quote from: RPGPundit;796350Of course, but I'm not saying "every setting should be OSR".  But Tekumel is an old-school setting; it was one of TSR's earliest products. I'm saying this specific setting should have had an OSR rule-set.

That's like saying that Glorantha is an "old-school setting" and requires an OSR ruleset, and for no better reason than with Tekumel: that the setting was published in the mid 70s.  Nonsense.

Quote from: Bren;796357Then in all seriousness and without any snark, maybe you should step up and write one.

Personally, I think the person who is going to the effort of writing something up should do what they find interesting. They aren't going to make any money* from it, so it should at least be entertaining for them to do. I already own EPT so I don't really need an OSR version of EPT. I suspect the same is even more true of the die hard Tekumel fans.

* And by "any money" I mean that if they put in even a moderately reasonable amount of effort on the game they will be lucky to make minimum wage for the time they have expended.

Yes, exactly. Jeff wrote (assumedly) the game he wanted to make, using the system that he was the most comfortable with.

It may have been more profitable or thematically suitable to do as an OSR game, or by using Savage Worlds or FATE, but his heart wasn't in doing it as OSR, so I can respect him not doing something he wasn't passionate about.

Granted, we could have a different conversation about passion vs. business sense being an issue in the industry, but given that the stakes here are so small, it seems bizarre to criticize him over setting out to do a task, delivering it on schedule, and exactly as described.

Quote from: Bren;796357Then in all seriousness and without any snark, maybe you should step up and write one.

I already did one better: I wrote Arrows of Indra. That's MY answer to EPT; with a recognizeable system and a setting that's low on the anthropologist-porn or linguistic demands.

Quote from: Ravenswing;796371That's like saying that Glorantha is an "old-school setting" and requires an OSR ruleset, and for no better reason than with Tekumel: that the setting was published in the mid 70s.  Nonsense.

Not at all the same: Glorantha has, in old-school terms, already been tied to a very successful RPG: Runequest.  if anything, the old-school system that it should be tied to is that one.

But EPT has never had a hugely successful ruleset tied to it.  The most successful version of it was the original EPT box set, which used a system vaguely similar to (but also significantly different from) D&D.

Quote from: RPGPundit;796606I already did one better: I wrote Arrows of Indra. That's MY answer to EPT; with a recognizeable system and a setting that's low on the anthropologist-porn or linguistic demands.

Oh snap.

(That actually made me more interested in Arrows of Indra, though I normally shy from sourcebooks)

Quote from: RPGPundit;796606I already did one better: I wrote Arrows of Indra. That's MY answer to EPT; with a recognizeable system and a setting that's low on the anthropologist-porn or linguistic demands.

Not better. Just different.

And if you already had a solution that works for you, then why whine about someone else coming up with a different solution that works for him?

I get that you are proud of your work and want to mention it, but you are sounding like those annoying folks on another site whose answer to every game question is Fate.

Quote from: RPGPundit;796607But EPT has never had a hugely successful ruleset tied to it.  The most successful version of it was the original EPT box set, which used a system vaguely similar to (but also significantly different from) D&D.

Which had nothing to do with the system.  Such success as EPT had was due more than any other factor to the timing: that in the 1970s, your options for significant fantasy RPGs came down to less than a half-dozen games: D&D, EPT, T&T, RQ and C&S, and in a time before D&D became the overwhelming market leader.  Bring a Tekumel game out today, and no matter the rules system, it'd get a fraction of the market share EPT did: there are just so many more options today.

I was re-reading the early issues of Dragon magazine looking for some of the early classes, and noticed that issue #4 was devoted to EPT/Tekumel

From the opening editorial (by Tim Kask)

QuoteEPT is the culmination of a life time of working on what started out as a childhood invention. In the course of evaluating the world of Tekumel, certain comparisons are inescapable. For one thing, it is the ultimate in terms of a D&D campaign; the entire mechanism is D&D inspired, as the author notes in his introduction. By mechanism, I mean the mechanics of play: experience points, hit dice, combat resolution, magic system, etc.

Quote from: Bren;795905..the original Runequest 1/2 with Cults of Prax which are set in Glorantha - a similarly detailed, auteur invented world that is not very readily accessible to the public at large (certainly less accessible than Mallory"s book and similar tales of chivalry).

Funny that. I found Glorantha in the Cults of Prax very accessible, I just began with the words 'Bronze Age analogue' and I was in there. Maybe I just read more Greek mythology and stories of heroes as a kid.

I came to Tolkien late as well, after rpgs, whereas I also read Moorcock when in my tweens.

So a mix of Moorcock and Greek tales, Glorantha was very familiar.

Tékumel is not easily accessible to me, but I have always loved it.