Quote from: Opaopajr;593676Well, there's also the "only enough slots at the top" argument. RPGs are not a big income source to most FLGS, let alone hobby stores, especially since the advent of CCGs. Given that miniatures, paint, dice, and cards predominate regular income there's little incentive to have multiple RPGs in your store.

And as with all commerce, you'll eventually suffer from lack of exposure: no one knows, no one cares. Looking at the secondhand market quite a bit of Tekumel goes at a premium. So there's devoted interest, and online sales presence, but I haven't seen commercial representation in the stores.

And then it gets back to the "how many popular slots" argument. How many products can the pop consumer bother with before they are over-saturated? Exposure (and consequential reputation) matters, just like accessibility.

There are two gaming stores in my town (Fort Collins CO) both of them have literally hundreds of board games and a large prominent space devoted to CCGs and such, rpgs are wedged in to a corner, out of sight of the door and limited to D&D, PF and Savage Worlds at both stores. They have a better selection at B&N- and that's all shit too.

Quote from: Opaopajr;593676And then it gets back to the "how many popular slots" argument. How many products can the pop consumer bother with before they are over-saturated? Exposure (and consequential reputation) matters, just like accessibility.

There's always room in my gaming library (and a budget) for a good game, supplement, or mini. It has to be an interesting selection for me to make the immediate buy though.

There's also the bucket list of games and accessories that I want, that I buy, as I can afford to acquire them (1/72 minis, Scourge of the Demon Wolf, and Arrows of Indra, Also, FFGs Star Wars Game (Not for the game, for the ship minis) I'm looking at you!).

The rest of the market is not over-saturation, it's just nothing I happen to want.

Quote from: SineNomine;593487Tekumel works against that. To the extent that a GM emphasizes its de-individualistic social structures, rigid caste divisions, and extreme social separation of groups, you end up with an intensely interlaced social context that requires a high degree of setting mastery before you can meaningfully interact with it in any role beyond that of an off-the-boat campaign. Whether you're playing tomb guards in a necropolis or cadets in the Omnipotent Azure Legion, you need to know a lot about the world before you can begin to have the kind of play you're trying to have.

That's a very good reason for not achieving great sales. Its much easier to play Fantasy Canada.

I don't think Tekumel or RQ/Glorantha are alone in this. Running a fairly realistic Japan game like Bushido or, to a lesser extent, something like Skyrealms of Jorune have the same problem.

Quote from: Gib;593681There are two gaming stores in my town (Fort Collins CO) both of them...

CSU Cam the Ram, Go! Yup a college town. There also used to be a Game Shop up in Boulder (Also a college town, CU Buffs, Go!) at the top of the hill, now it's called Leviathan Games. They had a suck selection which didn't include any OSR back in 1989, Wonder if they have improved?

Leviathan Games
1212 Pearl Street
Boulder, CO 80302
(720) 565-1141

Also, there's a new game shop, I never knew about. Been There? Any Good?

Karliquin's Game Knight
2085 30th Street
Boulder, CO 80301
(303) 545-1745

Quote from: GameDaddy;593686CSU Cam the Ram, Go! Yup a college town. There also used to be a Game Shop up in Boulder (Also a college town, CU Buffs, Go!) at the top of the hill, now it's called Leviathan Games. They had a suck selection which didn't include any OSR back in 1989, Wonder if they have improved?

Leviathan Games
1212 Pearl Street
Boulder, CO 80302
(720) 565-1141

Also, there's a new game shop, I never knew about. Been There? Any Good?

Karliquin's Game Knight
2085 30th Street
Boulder, CO 80301
(303) 545-1745

I actually got my undergrad at CU Boulder, but I've never been to either of those stores, even though I've walked Pearl Street a million time. Weird. Boulder is a pain in the ass to get to from FC, because there is no direct freeway- it's country roads or drive way out of the way. Thanks for the tip, though.

Also, I just remembered this, Brett Slocum's rules for Running Tekumel, using GURPS.

http://www.weirdrealm.com/tekumel/gurps/

And you can start as a Legion Member, or Citizen of Tekumel.

Quote from: The Butcher;593439Something of a riff off the Runequest thread.

Now, I love Tékumel to bits. And I feel it's easy to understand why a lot of people aren't into it. Involved and intricate alien cultures aren't everyone's cup of tea, and I attach no value judgement to anyone's like or dislike of it.

Notice how EPT encourages PCs to start as "barbarian" foreigners unfamiliar with Five Empires society and with zero social standing; this made the exotic civilization as much an object of exploration as the tsuru'um, Tékumel's vast underworld (possibly a direct conceptual ancestor of the Underdark?), and the wealth gained in the underworld could be used to buy citizenship, clan adoption, and eventually even military and religious rank (not entirely unlike the classic D&D endgame of followers, strongholds and domains: go into the dungeon, get rich, accrue a reputation, people high and low start taking notice).

I feel this is easy on the players, whose ignorance of the intricacies of the setting mirrors the characters' and leaves them free to take things and explore them at their own pace.

This is all or mostly gone by the time the Swords & Glory books roll out, with rules for native Tsolyáni characters, which somewhere along the way seem to have become the norm in Tékumel fandom. Again, no value judgement, but this does feel like a more difficult approach, or at least one that demands higher player buy-in.

What happened? When and why did the focus shift?

The problem is the "barbarians off the boat" thing never made any sense to begin with.   I mean, what boat?! Where do these barbarians come from? Do they act like european adventurers? If not, you just have a compounded problem of having to play equally alien "barbarians" who are also pariahs in a state that is totally alien to both player AND character.

In a bigger sense the problem is just what Sine Nomine said: WAY too much player buy-in.  This was a lesson I tried very hard to keep in mind when doing Arrows of Indra: I wanted it first and foremost to feel comfortable to players and to let them feel like they could play an Indian character without having to read 300 pages of obscure setting material.

Incidentally, I suspect that tekumel's underworld is based on the Patala Underworld of Indian myth, which I am also using in my Arrows of Indra game.

RPGPundit

Quote from: SineNomine;593487I think a lot of it had to do with the seduction of the setting itself and the desire to experience parts of it that couldn't practically be attained in an off-the-boat campaign.

RPG settings conventionally have multiple points of entry. The general assumption may be tilted toward a particular type of PC, but the idea of "Okay, this campaign we're all going to be working for the Royal Spymaster" or "This is going to be an arcane campaign" or some such is par for the course. People expect to be able to enter a world from multiple points for multiple types of play.

Tekumel works against that. To the extent that a GM emphasizes its de-individualistic social structures, rigid caste divisions, and extreme social separation of groups, you end up with an intensely interlaced social context that requires a high degree of setting mastery before you can meaningfully interact with it in any role beyond that of an off-the-boat campaign. Whether you're playing tomb guards in a necropolis or cadets in the Omnipotent Azure Legion, you need to know a lot about the world before you can begin to have the kind of play you're trying to have.

It's just a matter of bringing a set of templates for RPG adventure to a setting and then being unable to plug any of them in without heavy reading. People are going to give up on it unless they really, really love that setting.

I think you've pretty much nailed it, but the mystery (to me) remains: why is it that the more difficult, high-buy-in mode of play (native Tsolyáni PCs) displaced the easier (foreigner PCs) mode as the implied standard in later Tékumel books, up to and including GoO Tékumel? Is this the result of catering to an increasingly smaller and more hardcore audience, dissatisifed with the classic EPT approach, that demanded the more complex and/or deeper immersive native game?

Because while I'd never expect Tékumel to reach Forgotten Realms level of popularity, under any circumstances, I find it hard to believe that the eschewing the "foreigners fresh off the boat" PC perspective did the game any favors.

QuoteThe problem is the "barbarians off the boat" thing never made any sense to begin with.

Regardless of making sense or not (for me it does), the point is that its a coherent and simple enough premise to introduce players to the setting (instead of requiring you to read a essay on anthropology).

 

QuoteWhere do these barbarians come from? Do they act like european adventurers? If not, you just have a compounded problem of having to play equally alien "barbarians" who are also pariahs in a state that is totally alien to both player AND character.

And thats actually a good thing, because it allows the players to begin playing instantly, without the need to pre-absorb any knowledge (nor read the above mentioned anthopological essay), and get to know the setting through play.

QuoteIn a bigger sense the problem is just what Sine Nomine said: WAY too much player buy-in.

This I agree with. And thats why I think such settings should give a huge importance to intro scenarios (like the "foreign barbarians" of EPT, or the "farmer barbarians" of RQ´s Apple Lane), and effective gaming tools.

Quote from: RPGPundit;593759The problem is the "barbarians off the boat" thing never made any sense to begin with.   I mean, what boat?! Where do these barbarians come from? Do they act like european adventurers? If not, you just have a compounded problem of having to play equally alien "barbarians" who are also pariahs in a state that is totally alien to both player AND character.

I suppose this was easier to pull of in Ye Olde Days when you were just rolling 3d6 in order and hoping you'd survive to level 3 when you could actually name your character -- i.e. developing your character in actual play as opposed to front-loaded backgrounds and personalities. Something like "dude, you're a country yokel in the big city of zigzag swords and freaky gods with masked priests, just act like one and we'll be fine."

Quote from: RPGPundit;593759Incidentally, I suspect that tekumel's underworld is based on the Patala Underworld of Indian myth, which I am also using in my Arrows of Indra game.

In game it's said to be a vast, possibly trans-continental hyper-tech subway built by the Ancients, the starfaring alliance (which included future Earth) which terraformed and colonized Tékumel. It also may or may not be an ancestor of the Underdark as the "ubiquitous megadungeon" that extends under everything in the campaign setting.

I've been giving it some thought and I recalled James Malizewski's chronology of D&D. Now the man is not an unanimity but I find his stratification of D&D to be useful shorthand.

Foreigners-off-the-boat is Golden Age through and through: just roll up a character and we're all off to explore the weird world of acid-trip monsters in abandoned subways under a bizarre let's-lump-a-bunch-of-non-Western-cultures-together civilization.

Natives is patently Silver Age: it's not enough to explore the exotic elements of the new setting, you have to immerse into the strange new culture to better appreciate the Professor's exquisite world-building in all its coherent and comprehensive glory.

The publication dates seem to line up with James' as well; so, I put forward the hypothesis that the shift in Tékumel fandom just about matches up with a similar transformation in D&D culture, in which exploring the strange new world takes a back-seat to emulating it and immersing into it. The same sort of reasoning that would give us, in due time, Dragonlance and the 1e oWoD.

Quote from: The Butcher;593788I think you've pretty much nailed it, but the mystery (to me) remains: why is it that the more difficult, high-buy-in mode of play (native Tsolyáni PCs) displaced the easier (foreigner PCs) mode as the implied standard in later Tékumel books, up to and including GoO Tékumel? Is this the result of catering to an increasingly smaller and more hardcore audience, dissatisifed with the classic EPT approach, that demanded the more complex and/or deeper immersive native game?

My wild guess is that it rapidly split the audience into those who were only willing to put in off-the-boat levels of attention and those enthusiasts who wanted to learn Tsolyani declensions. The former wandered off to games that let you do a lot more with minimal theme prep and the latter demanded elaboration of the weirdness that made them love Tekumel in the first place. Since the latter were buying books and cheering the concepts, the latter got the product focus. There just weren't enough of them to carry a line.

For the former players, it was a question of choosing between games where the entire table experience was usually predicated on little or no cultural prep-study, like AD&D, and choosing Tekumel, where you were tacitly expected to get past the fresh-off-the-boat stage fairly rapidly and start learning how things worked. Telling these people "You can learn all that complicated stuff in play." is not going to appeal to them like "You don't have to learn all that complicated stuff."

And in many ways, I think the migration away from fresh-off-the-boat play was a lot slower and more nuanced than it might seem. In my Tekumel collection I've got the 1994 Gardasiyal edition. While the actual character creation was... not pretty, it channeled you into "Choose Your Own Adventure"-type prelude books that allowed you to play your fresh PC through several initial adventures before joining the game. These adventures were keyed to showing off Tsolyani culture and educating the player in how things worked, and they were quite interesting on that count.

Quote from: !The Butcher"I've been giving it some thought and I recalled James Malizewski's chronology of D&D. Now the man is not an unanimity but I find his stratification of D&D to be useful shorthand.

Very interesting, I didnt know it. I think it makes sense, and can be extrapolated to industry in general.

Quote from: silva;593792Regardless of making sense or not (for me it does), the point is that its a coherent and simple enough premise to introduce players to the setting (instead of requiring you to read a essay on anthropology).

And where do these western european adventurers come from? Where is "the boat" from, and why not just be there instead of in the Land Of Too Many Accentuation Marks?

Again, its a stupid premise that solves nothing because you get neither the experience of playing a game in a recognizable world, NOR the experience of at least playing a person who is a PART of the unrecognizable world of the setting.
The Player can't even ask the GM "Well, what would my player know about the customs for entering and leaving the Veiled Garden of Tasawn'awa`nthalna``argasel?", because the answer will be "nothing". Both Player AND PC will be stuck with an impenetrable barrier of ignorance of an alien world that will make no sense to them.

QuoteAnd thats actually a good thing, because it allows the players to begin playing instantly, without the need to pre-absorb any knowledge (nor read the above mentioned anthopological essay), and get to know the setting through play.

Except that tekumel is supposed to be all about the Culturewank, about being able to follow the thousands of different little customs and behaviours and not violate taboos, and caste, and all that, and you have to shatter that premise with the "barbarians off the boat" concept, because suddenly everyone of your NPCs will have to be far more patient with total violation of said taboos than the setting justifies; either that, or if you play it straight the PCs will all get to have very exciting lives as slaves or human sacrifice victims within 5 minutes of mispronouncing their first Honorific to The Grand High Poob'ah of Tsalalthanalt'than'thha'arglebargle.

QuoteThis I agree with. And thats why I think such settings should give a huge importance to intro scenarios (like the "foreign barbarians" of EPT, or the "farmer barbarians" of RQ´s Apple Lane), and effective gaming tools.

Or you can just agree that the game is bullshit: Too Weird to Live for anyone but the tiny group of ultra-obsessive fans that get wood from having to immerse their lives into the material at a level that can only compare to doctoral students (who at least have the excuse that the thing they obsessively dedicate their intellectual lives to is usually something real); and and having reached that agreement you can choose to play something else instead, if what you just want is a game with a strong exotic flavour but at least recognizable and comprehensible cultural context.

Like, for example, the upcoming Arrows of Indra!

RPGPundit

Quote from: The Butcher;593794In game it's said to be a vast, possibly trans-continental hyper-tech subway built by the Ancients, the starfaring alliance (which included future Earth) which terraformed and colonized Tékumel. It also may or may not be an ancestor of the Underdark as the "ubiquitous megadungeon" that extends under everything in the campaign setting.

Yeah, I know, and what I'm saying is that Barker, who was after all a scholar of India, would no doubt have taken his inspiration for that from the Patala Underworld: a vast trans-continental multi-level system of caverns that extends under everything in the campaign setting, that holds entire empires in its depths (not human ones, of course..).

Arrows of Indra describes all the levels of the Patala Underworld and provides a set of rules to randomly generate sections of the underworld cavern complexes.

RPGPundit