Tékumel in Miniature: Jeff Berry Interview Part III

We reach the last part of our interview today. What's amazing is there is a good deal more on the cutting room floor. A big thank you to Jeff for helping us explore this nook of our hobby. I will be attempting to sweet talk other old heads over the next few months, so look forward to more inside scoops.

All photos in today's interview are from Jeff's candy store of a Photobucket page.

A busy week ahead for the Hill Cantons with reviews of Clovis Cithog's Red Planet RPG and Michael Curtis' new Stonehell Supplement in the hopper. Plus we'll have more older-edition new classes, Holmes Expert set musings, news on the Pulp Fantasy Society, and more.

Hill Cantons: You said that you always considered yourself a modeler first, let's talk about those minis. I love the photos of minis of the original PCs and NPCs (noticed lots of Tom Meier-era Ral Partha and some Heritage minis--my own first figures!). Did miniatures play a big role in the campaign? How often were they used in play?

Jeff Berry: I had gotten started in historical miniatures gaming in the early 1970's, and had seen the Tekumel figures when they came out in 1975. I started painting them, collecting everything I could about Tekumel in order to do a good job on them, and as a result got invited out to Phil's to paint figures for him.

He'd buy bulk packs of the Tekumel figures, and I'd paint them up for him. The deal was that he'd keep half and I'd get the other half of the batch as payment for the work. That was the start of my collection, which is now owned by the Aethervox Gamers. There's something like 4,600 figures in the collection, as well as ships, buildings, scenery, and terrain.

The second night I was out at Phil's, the party was trying to find out what had happened to the garrison of a small fort in one of the player's fief. It was full of 'wild' Pe Choi, as it turned out, and the party started to debate (as players will) what to do about it.

Phil had just gotten a pretty good shipment of the Pe Choi figures in and done, so I suggested that we get out his little modular castle and fight out the assault that the players wanted to do in miniature. Phil loved the idea, we got everything out, and fought the battle.

We had to fake up the player-characters from what were mostly the military figures that we had, and I came back the next week with some individual player figures that I'd converted and painted up to represent everyone. Phil and the group really liked that, and it started the tradition of everyone having their own personal figure.

I kept that up for years, doing new figures as needed to reflect the changes in status and wealth of each player, and I still do it today for the Aethervox players.

Prior to that, about the only time the miniatures came out was to fight big battles or other military actions; at that time, that's what “fantasy wargaming” was. After I did the PC figures, we'd use them on a pretty regular basis.

When we went off on our first voyage to the Southern Continent, I drew up the deck plans of Dave's /Harchar's ship and we placed the figures on the plan to indicate where people were at any given moment.

Gary Gygax gave me one of the TSR RPGA miniatures cases at a Gen Con, and I used that for years to bring the figures out to Phil's every Thrusday night. They got used all the time as a sort of “tactical display”, and it did make combats much easier to run.

I had to do a lot of conversions because, back then, there was a much smaller number of figures available, from very few companies. There were some Hyborean and other fantasy figures I used, but until Tom Meier revolutionized the sculpting process by using epoxy putty the figures weren't all that great. I used some Garrison, Minifigs, and Heritage figures as well the Bill Murray Tekumel figures at first, but used mostly Ral Partha figures as ther ranges expanded. There's also a few Grenadier figures as well, but it mostly became Ral Partha as the figures of choice because there were so many options.

I would do everyone's PC, and their NPC servants and such, so we could put everyone on the table for game situations.

As for how often we'd use them, well, it got to be every game session. If there was a melee, of course, but they would also get used in social situations like parties and feasts so that we could all keep track of who was where. It was why we had sets of servants with platters of food, slave girls with fans, musicians, etc., as well as furniture and other stuff.

I'd be asked to do up room plans and drawings from Phil's quick sketches, and we'd play on these plans. I also had gotten some of Gary Rudolph's "Netherworld" sets, and we'd use either these or my collection of wooden blocks for underworld situations.

We still do this, and I've continued to build what amounts to the “scenery” and “props” for our games. I treat them as little stage productions, and it's always huge amounts of fun to watch a new generation of players peer at some detail and wonder what will happen to them next. Phil used to do this all the time, and I'm happy to be able to continue the tradition.

HC:It sounds like you are still running a campaign in Tekumel. How's that going?

JB:Pretty well, I think: I run two groups, on alternate Saturdays, and we have something like twenty players between the two groups.

I manage to keep them amused, and they seem to have a lot of fun exploring Tekumel. Several are really gifted artists, and have published their Tekumel work. Several more are equally gifted sculptors, and are doing masters for Tekumel miniatures.

We're in the process of becoming a formal organization, too; when we pooled all of our individual Tekumel collections, as you can see from the photos of the game room I've posted, we found we had a huge resource of books, documents, costumes, miniatures, and artifacts.

The collections keep growing, and we've working to set up a trust to maintain them for people to enjoy. There's over thirty years of history there, and we're hoping that other folks will enjoy the collections and Tekumel as much as we have.

HC: You said you were working on a book, tell us about that project.

JB: To Serve The Petal Throne will be a book, which I'm going to send through the approvals process that the Tekumel Foundation is putting together. It's a series of short stories taken directly from our adventures in Phil's games. I took notes every night our at Phil's for over a decade, and about all I'm doing is making the prose a little more readable. I'm just reporting what happened, really.

The first part of the book will cover the adventures of Anka'a, who started playing EPT the very first night they had a game: August 24th, 1974 [read her account of that night here]. Her adventures dovetailed with Chirine's as she came to play in our group and explored a lot of Tekumel with us. We'll see, we have a long way to go. 

Tales from Tékumel's First Campaign: An Interview with Jeff Berry

Sadly, in the past few years we've seen the sudden passing of a number of our great hobby's pioneer members. I find it doubly sad that more efforts weren't made to collect more complete oral or written histories of the early days of RPG play. (I am especially feeling that recently with Dr. Holmes, whose creative brain was even less picked over directly in the Internet hotspots, leaving us with great big question marks about his body of work.)

Recently, I had the great fortune though to interview Jeff Berry, an early participant in D&D's eldest first cousin, Empire of the Petal Throne. Jeff's own blog (named after his first character in M.A.R. Barker's campaign), can be found here. Further interesting (and highly amusing to yours truly) accounts by Jeff of EPT and Dave Arneson can be read in his Q&A sticky over at the Comeback Inn.

Hill Cantons: What's a good way to introduce you? I know that you were among the first to play in Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne campaigns and a co-author of EPT's most re-published miniature rules set. What else would be interesting to tell people?

Jeff Berry: No idea! Seriously, while I've been involved with Tekumel since 1975, I've never been part of what might be called "mainstream" gaming. I've always been a model builder and painter, and the games I've done over the years have been more or less an excuse to put cool stuff on the table.

I started playing out at Phil's (Prof. Barker, of course) sometime in early 1976. I was introduced to him by Gary Rudolph, who had seen my painted Tekumel figures at the local game shop, and I was brought out to Phil's to be more or less the guy who painted figures for Phil.

Phil had been gaming Tekumel for about two years, and EPT had been out for one; I rolled up a character, and my very first night of gaming out there was set in the Hall of the Petal Throne. Quite a way to get started, and a really good night.

There was just the one large group of eight to ten people at the time, and we soon split into the "old guard" of"'power gamers" who went on to become Prince Mirusiya's "New Men"; our original Thursday Night Group spent our time exploring Tekumel with Phil, and traveled all over the maps of the continent.

I wrote Qadardalikoi after I'd bought the line of Tekumel figures form Ral Partha; they'd taken the line out of production due to low sales, and didn't want to run a batch of the figures specially for me. They sold me the line, instead, right at the time that both Missum and Legions of the Petal Throne were both going out of print.

Phil wasn't entirely happy with either set of rules, feeling that they didn't really reflect how he thought Tekumelyani warfare was waged; he sort of challenged me to write a new set, which I did with his help and cooperation. He even did some little drawings for me, which was quite generous of him.

I'm currently at work on a new edition of the rules, called Qadardalikoi: Advance Standards!, which will bring the rules into this century; they were written almost thirty years ago, after all!

HC: Mega-dungeons have been a big topic in the more old school-oriented blogs. By giving good, interesting, culturally-grounded reasons for the existence of massive underworlds in Tekumel, EPT seemed to present one of the best examples of a deeper approach to presenting the mega-dungeon. Anything you care to share about what the underworld expeditions were like in the Barker campaign. Any memorable incidents? Funny? Dramatic?

JB: All of the above. Phil is a tremendous story-teller, and when he was on a roll he could scare the kilts off of us.

He could also reduce us to tears laughing, like the time one of the more arrogant players found a device of the Ancients deep in the Jakalla Underworld. It was a domed cylinder with a flexible metal hose coming out of one side that had a flat nozzle at the end, and two jewels on the top of the dome; one was green and the other red.

The guy pressed the green gem, it lit up, and the device started to whirr; after a couple of seconds, vapor started to come out of the nozzle, so the guy hit the red gem and the machine stopped. The guy then announced to all of us that the thing MUST be a weapon of the ancients, and lugged it all over the underworld for the rest of the night.

Sure enough, we got jumped by Grey Ssu, and the guy fires up his mighty 'death vapor' weapon to kill them. Well, of course, it didn't kill any of the Ssu; the warm moist vapor just took all the wrinkles out of their parchment-like skin, and they looked all nice and presentable. We ran for it, with the freshly-pressed and wrinkle-free Ssu in hot pursuit...

A lot of the players had real trouble figuring out that Tekumel wasn't your stock-and-standard D&D version of Tolkien "Middle Earth": it was unique, and much more in tune with Edgar R. Burroughs "Barsoom", Robert E. Howard's "Conan", and the eldritch works of Lovecraft and A. Merritt. If one had read those, which were pretty obscure at that time, one was usually able to "get" Tekumel. Phil had grown up reading those books by those authors as they were being published, and he was of that generation or world-builders.

Keep in mind that in a six-week period in the summer of 1974 he'd written EPT, rolled up 1,000 NPCs on 3 x 5 cards, and drawn up at least three levels of the Jakalla Underworld.

He could do it, as well as all the books he created in the space of two years, because he'd been writing about Tekumel since high school. I've seen the original map of Tsolyanu from the middle 1940s, and I have copies of his Tsolyani language materials and histories from the 1950s. The earliest art that we have in the collection is from 1949, and illustrates a plot-line/story arc that we played in ourselves and which is still going on.

Part II of our interview will be posted tomorrow. 

If You are a Tekumel Fan...

I saw in today's post over Chirine ba Kal aka Jeff Berry's blog that he was pulling the plug on said blog and its related treasure trove of Tekumel miniatures photos tomorrow. 

Jeff has been an enormous inspiration and font of information for me in my Tekumel mania—that and Glorantha being the only real exceptions to my published setting-phobia—and it's hard to not be a little sad in seeing the blog travelling off to the Isles of Teretane. (Though I understand—and grapple with myself—the kind of continual weighing of costs and benefits that go into the mostly thankless work of maintaining blog day in day out over years).

Some long-time readers here may remember that a three-part interview with Jeff really ushered in 1. this blog's coverage, advocacy, and support for Tekumel-related; and 2. my first stab at kicking up the blog content to be something other than just an intermittently-updated spot for the Hill Cantons' campaign tidings and tinkering.

That series and other contributions he made here with his personal, detail-conscious observations of play in Barker's original campaign--and many, many other related subjects to the world-setting--were personally invaluable and I would recommend people going back and reading some of them here, here, here, and here.

Even more importantly I would highly recommend people go and check out the content on his blog in it's last day. Make sure to drop him a note of appreciation too--or raise a glass of mash-brandy--for the work he has put into it and keeping Tekumel on the tabletop and preserved with Aethervox.  [Editor's Note: the link to Photobucket is down on his page but can be directly accessed here for the next 48 hours according to Jeff's last post.]

A big thank you, Chirine, from the HC. 

News Flashes on The Jakallan Underworld and the Pulp Fantasy Society

Good news for all those who expressed enthusiasm for our recent glimpse into Barker's massive Jakallan “mega-dungeon.” I received word today from the Tekumel Foundation that “plans are well advanced for offering the Jakallan Underworld as a product for Tekumel fans.”

Several other related-projects are also underway, but the Foundation is (wisely) concerned about not over-promising at this early stage. According to Victor Raymond: “We want to make sure that the products are of high quality, meet with approval from Prof. Barker, and will fit in the larger scope of making Tekumel available in a way that meets the needs of the modern hobby...We are looking for volunteers who are interested in helping with various projects--particularly artists who are able to envision Tekumel properly!”

You heard the man, here is your own chance to serve the Petal Throne.

While the recently-founded Foundation took a bit of a beating by some in the rarefied circles of the Tekumel yahoo list, I am of the opinion that it's launch as a not-for-profit organization is an unqualified positive development for broadening out the setting's appeal. Plus extra kudos to a group that that has enough of a sense of humor to illustrate their submissions page with a slave market of all things.

Our other news flash is for the Pulp Fantasy Society. Scott from Huge Ruined Pile has graciously allowed us to set up our little nook in his forum for discussion of our project. Boogie over there to help us get our discussion up and running.  

Gladiators on Tekumel

It was bound to happen. A few days into playing my Roman Gladiator solo campaign, I found my thoughts—and game-designing urges—wandering over to the Five Empires of Tekumel. Victor Raymond's comment yesterday was the tipping point.

For the uninitiated, gladiatorial spectacle is as much a part of Tsolyani (the setting's default starting country) everyday life as it was for the Romans. In the Empire of the Petal Throne cities sport massive Hirilakte arenas.

The importance of Hirilakte arenas in gaming Tekumel is underscored with a big, fat black marker in the EPT rulebook—where it gets an entire section (Sec. 800) and some scattered related rules--and following canonical material.

But while it gets emphasis and some supporting detail info on what goes in in the arena still has some large unpainted corners—and the obvious tantalizing mini-game that could be spun out of it. 

Barker teases us by pointing to a long out-of-print, now nearly-impossible to find set of English gladiator mini rules and to his marginally easier to find, but hella expensive War of Wizards board game. Flashing Blades-designer Mark Pettigrew also took a stab at this bitd (now found in the Pettigrew Selections), but it's one of the few sub-systems that he put together that I don't like over much.

Which, of course, adds up to awesome for tinkering souls like us that want to make Tekumels of our own. Bumping its way now up to the top of the post-Borderlands project list is now a Hirilakte gladiator mini-game built open-game design right here on the blog.

Not one for delayed gratification let's get a jump on it in the here and now.

First, let's start with what we know about things gladiatorial on that hot, isolated planet before we dive into what kind of game we want. Keeping with the spirit of Victor's “drive it out of the EPT box” approach I am going to contain this to the rulebook itself and mostly ignore the other material that followed. (Which is fairly easy as it gets the most extensive treatment in EPT proper, perhaps a comment on the unfortunate move away from “gamey” Tekumel in later years.)

So whadda we know?

Arena Size. When I said earlier that the arenas were massive, I wasn't exaggerating for dramatic effect. On the Jakalla city map included in the box set, the arena takes up a whopping five hexes (750 feet) lengthwise by three hexes (150 feet) wide. By comparison the famous Colosseum of Rome, which could seat 50,000, extends 615 feet. So we are talking very large affairs capable of seating over 50,000 in the major cities.

The immense size and extended oblong shape of the arenas seem too awkward in providing sight lines for spectators especially for small one-on-one matches. An "educated" guess is that perhaps the larger one such as Jakalla's would be sub-divided for multiple, simultaneous matches.

Our rules will have to make sense of the size, shape, and possible sub-division of these arenas for its ground scale.

Champion Warfare. We know from EPT that the arenas aren't just blood-lust entertainment, they also play a social function as both ritualized warfare between nations. War in the Five Empires is portrayed as highly-static and conservative affair that invariably ends in stalemate. (A notion smashed on the rocks by the highly-decisive and volatile wars advanced by canon in later years—something akin to the shenanigans of Greyhawk's late-canon Götterdämmerung—but I digress.)

According to EPT: 

“Open warfare has thus been replaced to a great extent by 'champion warfare,' a phenomenon which suits the need for ritual, display, and social stratification of the nations of Tekumel. At designated cities throughout the four major empires, therefore, champions come to do battle and win (or lose) not only great sums of money for their patrons, but also great glory for themselves and the groups they represent.
The four great empires each put up their own official champions, and lesser patrons--nobles, temples, clans, and other groups--spend their fortunes to procure, train, and present their own gladiators. Opponents come from neighboring lands to take up these challenges and win glory for their homelands.”

Further we know from the intro that:

“Every major city has an arena, and safe passage is guaranteed for these ritual warriors. Battles are normally to the death, although fist-fighting can be arranged as a side event. Wizards and priests also come to fight magical duels.”

Ever have that real-world fantasy that wars would be decided by putting a few aggro members of each nation into the ring? Well here's your chance to make it so (at least as much as you can in fantasy gaming.)

Make a note for rules for ritualized warfare in the game. Also make side notes that we should include rules and guidelines for unarmed combat, magical duels, and patronage.

So far plenty to mull on. I will extend our analysis and working notes for Hirilakte in Part II either later today or tomorrow.

Empire of the Petal Throne, the “Gamist” Early Years

Empire of the Petal Throne is often referred to by old school D&D gamers as the “favorite game I never played”, a notion that I (sadly) cling to myself. Having developed a case of Tekumel fascination after an impulse buy of Barker's Man of Gold novel, EPT also became for me the one and only gaming system I bought in the entire two-decade period in which I swore off gaming.

At the time though, the fiddly-seeming, original D&D-flavored rules seemed far less interesting and evocative than the setting squeezed around. (Likely the nature of the Tekumel beast impels nearly all it's admirers—outside of the group still playing with Barker or other hardcore initiates—to be background-consuming admirers rather than hands-on practing admirers these days.)

These days my thoughts run about 180 degrees in a different direction. OEPT starts to look more and more as a fascinating set of tweaks and experiments building off a core of D&D rules and concepts when they were both still young and fresh. Which is why I find the remarkably well documented --if obscurely filed away--accounts of the game's early days so fascinating. It's a glimpse into a sweet-spot time when a richly-imagined setting firmly rooted in pulp science fantasy added to the excitement of an adventure game—a time before when acting out scenes from Tsolyani daily life became the end in itself.

Take the following account from M.A.R. Barker from the Runequest Con booklet I quoted from yesterday:

“When I first dragged my dusty tomes on Tékumel out of my basement in 1974, I thought of them as little more than background material for a “dungeon” to entertain my friends in our small gaming group at the University of Minnesota. I had been dissatisfied with the background-less, society-less “dungeons” then being played: when one came up out of a “dungeon,” what did one do? Go to a bar, drink, and fight? Go to a “hotel” and sleep until the next “expedition?” Wander around the streets of the “town” where very few buildings had interiors or even shopkeepers? Go to a “temple” to be healed or to “pray” for useful magical benefits, sorcerous weapons, etc.? Go on an “outdoors adventure,” using a set of rules designed to appeal to backpackers? The choices were limited...

The format of the game offered interesting complexities, but little was in print. One of our first referees, who had played with Gary Gygax and had introduced the game to our group, brought in a government. Being a medieval history major, his ruler was a Duke, and the social structure was feudal. The “church” for good folks resembled Catholicism, while the “temples” for “evil” characters were simplistic borrowings from Robert Howard’s Conan stories and the like. Admittedly, we had a great time.”

I love the telling honesty of that last line. The following, fascinating account from one of Barker's original players, Lady Anka'a, gives some texture to what the newly-synthesized campaign was like in its first year. One should note that this original OD&D-based campaign was not yet the OEPT version that was commercially published by TSR. Ironically it was Gary Gygax no less who convinced Barker to create the slightly more-divergent, percentile-diced based system.


(By the way all of this information was found on the Tekumel yahoo group. If you dig this stuff, you should mosey over there and join up. Among other things you can find an old email from the same lady that talks about how Barker developed the original manuscript after objecting to Mike Morand, of Old Geezer fame and the likely DM mentioned above, let his players ice the Archangel Michael. Whoa.)

“So it passed, that one August evening, hot and sticky, we all traipsed down to Klaeber Court--which was the office for the South Asian Studies Department, which Prof. Barker headed. It was not in the usual gaming place, because he wanted this to be private--he said then he planned to publish it and we said we would be discreet about it...

7:00 pm was the appointed time, but we got there and as usual, we hung around and chatted for a while. Eventually, Phil took out a number of green-covered mimeo booklets--two volumes each, and passed them around. Maybe 100 - 150 pages total.

We read through the booklets while Phil told us about the world, and we eventually started rolling up characters. In those days, it was pretty much a copy of D&D in stats and combat. We all got characters and looked through the books and decided what class we would be, fighter or priest or magic-user. It was different from D&D in that there were many more sociological things we had to deal with right at the start. Like picking a god to worship and alignment, though Prof. Barker said alignment was not as big a deal as in D&D, in other words stability and change were not automatically inimical...

Our origin, and that of all the original player characters, was that we originated from the Southern Continent (never seen on maps) and had decided to leave and cast our fortunes in the north. We were supposedly about 18-years-old or so. We each arrived on the shores of Jakalla in a small boat. We landed, sold the boat, and with the few coins we got from that and the clothes on our backs (and presumably a small pack of personal items) we entered the world of Tekumel, and the Tsolyani Empire...

At first the campaign was mostly a dungeoning campaign, with interesting twists. We first fought in the Tlakotani slave arenas for money and earned enough to outfit ourselves, to go into Jakalla's underworld, kill monsters and get gold--kaitars--so we could get better equipment and kill bigger monsters. And we would earn points and go up levels, and do more and better stuff. The usual D&D progression. The first six months or so was mostly that.

But it was fascinating. We encountered monsters we had never heard of before, and strange people and places. The idea this was a metal-poor world and such was made clear to us from the start, but we absorbed a lot through asking questions, and on our shopping trips to outfit ourselves. Later we ended up exploring most of the planet through use of the tube car system.

Those were some of the best adventures I have ever played in, in any campaign. They are still etched vividly in my memory.”

Barker goes on to say in that convention piece that “the original Empire of the Petal Throne was about as realistic a simulation as Monopoly is of Atlantic City of the 1930’s.”Personally though, I would love to see nothing better for Tekumel to return to its “gamist” roots, to a time when those barbarian outsiders explored vast, history-soaked underworlds by torch-light with nasty barbed chlen-hide swords in hand.

Instead of yet another clunky (or narrativist-rooted) edition of rules, why not a return full circle? Why not a whole new, old edition of OEPT that explicit posits itself as a tricked-out, rules-lite version of OD&D with a outwardly, less canonically-obsessed tone? Based on the sales of new, old rules sets presenting heavy designer-flavoring such as LotFP--which has effectively sold out on its entire first print run--my hunch is that the professor would have a hit product on his hands.

Interview Series Index

When you run a blog for several years--and spend too many years abusing your head as a young man--a terrible thing starts to occur: you start losing touch with the things you wrote about. It comes way too often these days but long into gaming-related conversation in a strike of blindingly internal light I will suddenly find myself thinking “waitttt, didn't I write a whole mother-flippin' series of blog posts about that three years back?”

To stave off that “all that is solid melts into air” feeling, I've finally started on my long-procrastinated annotated blog index. As I do each chunk—and they are pretty much going to follow in the order of what I consider the best or most useful of the posts here—I will post about them and add them to a larger index page. Likely next is the long index of pointcrawl and wilderness posts. 

First up is one of my favorite (and neglected) groups of posts: the on-again/off-again interview series. A series which under pretext of presenting ideas, recollections, and analysis to a broader audience, selfishly allowed me to dig into the brains of people I have found interesting or critical to our hobby.

The Interview Series (in Chronological Order)

Jeff Berry

The first interviews on the HC where with Jeff Berry aka Chirine Ba Kal, a longtime player in M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel campaign and for a time a mover and shaker in its business end. I had originally reached out to him with the intention of doing a one-shot little piece on what the early Tekumel games were actually like. The ongoing conversation was so incredibly rich with insight and Jeff's memory so exact in the amounts of detail that it spilled over into several encores, all of which I still enjoy reading today.

Tales from Tékumel's First Campaign:An Interview with Jeff Berry

Exploring the Jakallan Underworld,Playing with Arneson, and More: Jeff Berry Interview Part II

Tékumel in Miniature: Jeff BerryInterview Part III

Why the Barker-Tékumel Collection isWorth Paying Attention To

David Dunham

If you pressed me for all my all-time favorite computer game it would have to be King of Dragon Pass. Not only was it a near-perfect blend of handpainted art, strategy, roleplaying and big ticket mythic themes it was set against the worldbuilding of Glorantha that I love (mostly from afar) so well. A huge treat to interview David Dunham, creator of the game, and pick his brain about the connections to KoDP to tabletop roleplaying.

Interview with the Man Behind the King(of Dragon Pass)

Magira

Digging into the altnerative paths that roleplaying could have taken in the 1960s and 1970s led me to places I had never known about notably such great “world games” as that of Magira in Germany. An interview with one of its participants.

Follow-Up Interview on the German Worldgame Magira

Jeff Dee

Looking back at this interview three years ago which focuses on Jeff Dee's then beginning drive to get his Tekumel rpg published, it makes to happy to see that it is not only sitting on my shelf right now but is helping re-raise the flag of Tekumel after Barker's passing.

In the Pocket With Jeff Dee

Kyrinn Eis

Kyrinn Eis talks about her fascinating worldbuilding and quirky attendant game.

Urutsk Rising: An Interview with KyrinnEis

Urutsk Rising Part II

Robert Kuntz

One of the more controversial outings of the blog but one I am still proud of running. The interview sprawls over great length but there are fascinating bits spread through out. While one may like or dislike the man, his recollections are important to our understanding of the early days of the hobby.

No Borders: A Conversation With RobKuntz

Dan Boggs

A look at Champion of Zed and its creator before it became another casualty of the rpg crowd-funding bubble. 

The Champion of Zed

Trey Causey

One of my favorite interviews with one of my favorite people from our side of the hobby. Trey on his post-Weird Adventures victory lap. You better believe I will be banging on his door again when his 70s space opera book Strange Stars sees the light of published day.

Beyond the Weird: an Interview withTrey Causey

A Jakallan Underworld of My Own

Stick around one of the internet watering holes for things Tekumel and you will hear a curious and persistent drumbeat of certain lines. Among the most cyclical are the ones declaiming why such and such person doesn’t run a game in that world--despite their appreciation for it from afar.

Until a Google plus Empire of the Petal Throne game two nights ago I was one of them.

Those claims persist because there are big honking grains of truth in them. Tekumel is a highly personal affair. It is M.A.R. Barker’s world, one that has existed for many decades for him. But is also been OUR Tekumel too ever since a hot and sticky Minnesota summer night in the mid-70s when it became a playable game.

Gamer common sense would have it that the people closest to the Barker tap, the old players of his home campaign, enjoy sitting behind walls of canonical exclusion. If anything my experience has been exactly opposite.  

I spent a few hours jawing with Victor Raymond, one of those old salts, the night before I ran the Google game I mentioned the session. I told him I was trying to run it “straight out of the box” (a theme he is taking up in an incredibly useful, practical way here on the OD&D Board) in about as bog standard fashion as you can get: the players are barbarian refugees fresh off the boat from that conveniently vague Southern Continent, living on their last kaitar in the stereotypical squalid flophouse of the walled-off Foreign Quarter.

Of course, there was also a sweaty, officious patron there, one leading them by carrot and stick—or impalement pole in this case—to the vast layers of buried city upon buried city that lie beneath the City Half as Old as the World.

Victor to my great delight on hearing this had pulled out one of those famous index cards that Barker kept track of the many, many NPCs gracing his world and voila I had the gaunt, tall, tattooed Livyani con-man owner of their flophouse, t he Tower of the Red Dome, as a living, breathing character.

A tingle of “isn’t that cool” went over me, but there was that old apprehension about it being Barker’s world standing right behind it. But then Victor said something that just liberated me: he told me to make the Jakallan underworld my own. 

Yeah sure, I’m with many of you in wanting some day to see that magnificent “mega-dungeon” make the light of published day—just getting a peak at that famed massive, laminated sheet of tiny-squared aging graph paper at NTRPG Con had sent me off in an embarrassing and rare bit of fandom swooning—but truth be told I have a hard time running any adventure let alone all encompassing and well-detailed world setting.

It’s not that I am a snob about being DIY—or rather it’s not that I am just a snob—but that my brain as a GM isn’t wired for working that way.  The winding alleys, jagged hills, claustrophobic depths of the Hill Cantons or in the Domain Game’s Nowhere run smoother for me because there is a internal vividness inside my head.  As such, I rarely find myself looking at my notes in a session, no matter how many of them I pour out in my campaign brainstorm notebooks in between.

Long and short of it is that I decided that I would try and meet Tekumel half way. I dusted off Mark Pettigrew’s  nifty EPT underworld random generator article (which you find in the Best of the Journals booklet here) --which is one of the best such generators I’ve ever used because  it breaks down dungeon levels into themed room complexes—rolled up half of a section of the first level.

Then to really make it my own, I pulled out one of the maps of my own HC tried-and-true campaign dungeons bolted them together, filed off the serial numbers, daubed on Tsolyani setting dress and there you go: a Jakallan underworld of my own.

I’d be lying if I didn’t make some mistakes in the Google session. The exposition and set dressing featured way too many minutes of me yakking without pause, the train tracks leading to the underworld a little too obvious. Something I hate in the main because without fail as a player will make my eyes gaze over in less than five minutes time.  (At some point Zak S, one of the players mentioned that he had cast “Sense Plot”.)

But once we got down into the murky depths though it just really started clicking. It became increasingly not just mine but the players as the hours went by, something I anticipate growing with repeated play.

Speaking of that play, I am astounded on how much potential Google Plus is opening up for us an inter-connected group of gamers with the free video-conferencing. Once you plow through a few hurdles of the medium (check and play with your mike and camera before you leap into it), it’s a qualitatively better way to game online than Skype or chat.

Beyond the joy of laughing and playing with people I only have known from the distant authorial voice of their blogs, it really opens up doors beyond the confines of geography. Always wanted to play Esoteric Game X and couldn’t muster enough players in your usual digs? Well here you can. Brave new worlds and all that.

Now off I go to enjoy some of this fabled California sun.

North Texas Confidential, Day Two

Saturday 6:55

The Day of People Who Talk Too Loud begins with the painful screeching of the alarm clock—and the vociferous cursing of me and Skullcrusher. Apparently even in the depths of Bacchic excess my Czech obsession with being punctual can still function on a subconscious level (the depth of my crudo will eventually drown this out later in the day).

Despite feeling like ass and a quick worship session with the Porcelain God, I splash water on my face, throw on some clothes and we are off again.

Saturday 7:30

Breakfast buffet. I eat a massive amount of bacon. Breaking the kosher laws will lead later to Yahweh trying to kill us on the drive home, despite my Reform Judaism rationalizations. Our God is an angry God.

Not Erol Otus

Feeling like ass continues, but I enjoy the people watching. I am shocked, shocked to learn that Erol Otus has a flat-top and a somewhat conventional appearance. Don't judge a book by it's cover and all that. (In fact, no less than three others, including Malicious Mike, tell me in the course of the weekend that they thought I would be taller.)

We ask the Flaming Troll from Austin to join us and apologize profusely for drunkenly ruining his Caves of Chaos game last year at the Austin Mini-Con. He enthusiastically recounts his experiences with the Myth of Sisyphus game, I am so dense that I am I only realize later in the afternoon that this was the game we played last night.

Fortunately for the Dear Reader, Skullcrusher has chronicled our first encounter with Jeff D here , thus sparing me the verbiage.

Saturday 9:45

I manage to miss yet another game as I jibber jabber post-breakfast. Now note here that at a Con which is famed for having incredible sessions with multiple hard decisions to make at each and every one that I only actually make it to one of the six sessions I have signed up for—and that one 40 minutes late. Holding it up for the flake team.

The conversation with the Green Dragon Lord, Urutusk Gal, and Mr. Brown, is at least worth the damage to my already shaky reputation (and my even shakier head at this point in my hangover).

Urutusk minis painted by Jeff Berry. The two missing are in my pocket. 

Urutusk Gal has the working prototype of the boxed set iteration of her game. It makes me cry with the beauty—and not just because she manages to actually make good on many of the things I am stuck in the blah, blah, blah phases with the Domain Game—the components are indescribably good with all the gleaming platinum dice, intricately carved jade screens, small crystal vials of mutant blood and the like. (I leave the details to the interview I am conducting with her.)

After making soft whining, placating sounds for missing her Thursday game, I prostate myself on the floor and beg for her to run a pick-up session. Graciously she agrees and she begins to set up the game.

Near our table I notice a woman sorting through stacks of paper miniatures with a sign inviting people to join her Tekumel game Sunday at noon. Hardcore Tekumel lunatic fanboy that I am (is there any other kind for Barker's setting?) I am instantly drawn to walk over there like the proverbial moth to flame.

I notice that the paper miniatures are the same well-drawn, FREE ones that I was pumping up here on the blog last year and I wax enthusiastic about them. Turns out she is Manda, the artist responsible for the critters to which I respond with a torrent of “No Shit?” style witticisms.

Proof that I didn't make this up.

Turns out that not only is she running a Tekumel game, but it is a playtest of a port of the notorious Sword & Glory rules to a new Tekumel supplement for Jeff D's new Pocket Universe rules. (You'll hear more about this later in my upcoming interview.)

Saturday 10:40

Meanwhile Urutusk Gal is politely tolerating this tangential delay, but finally grabs me forcefully by the back of my shirt and drags me over to the game table. We are joined by Urutusk's Gal's Special Lady Gnome Friend, Chinchilla the Serving Wench, Navy Joe, and The Boy (with patient Rather Gamey Dad still basking in the thrill of being murdered with great relish by his party mates in attendance behind him).

Saturday 15:01

We finally finish chargen. After carrying the value of my Height, Frame, Hand Size, and Muscular Tone to the third power divided by the value of my Caste, Alertness, Age, and Performance and multiplied by the Violet color value I finally break down into tears and with big doe eyes I turn to our hostess and plead for her to do it for me. The deadlock is thus broken and my character Ty' Sumker aka The Black Ratter lives (see character sheet complete with foppish hat below).

The scenario is after my own heart, we are playing the exploratory team for a colonizing expedition that exists in our hostess's home campaign. And what a competent bunch of would-be conquistadors we are. In the first five minutes we manage to have our ship veer off course and flounder on a coastal barrier island two weeks travel from the colony.

We spend the entire session mostly mucking about the island with our greatest accomplishments being discovering an undiscovered species of aquatic poisonous centipedes (dubbed Centifins by Navy Joe), an empty village, and a violent home invasion of some peaceful grasslands dwellings golden children.

Saturday 17:30

We take a half hour break for dinner. Of course, not wanting to break my flake streak, I never return.

I am instead—despite a new wave of landlocked sea sickness--whisked away to dinner by Skullcrusher and Mr. Brown. Due to my extreme queasiness we settle on a stomach-soothing choice of nuclear-hot chicken wings at the local Crazy Chicken outlet.

Now Jeff , this is where the less than smooth attempts to do some wenching by my party mates come in (I am too nauseous, monogamous, and apparently old to join in). Skullcrusher impresses our chipper, pretty Theology-grad school waitress by promptly smashing his Gin and Tonic glass on the table after the first sip (I am not making this up).

The Crazy Chicken staff masochistically and mysteriously instantly loves us for this transgression. We pay the waitress 20 bucks to sing all the words to Rebecca Black's famous ballad about Friday and the manager lady even comes over to sit in Mr. Brown's lap.

Saturday 18:10

We make it back to the Con just in time for me to wander off for a worship session again. Apparently the hair of the dog is a myth for people who talk about celebrating the annual anniversary of their 39^th birthday.

Saturday 18:40

Refreshed and embarrassed for missing the remainder of the previous session, I notice that I am incredibly late for the Green Dragon Lord's game. In a daze I shamble over there and am jocularly accosted by said lord. I roll up a 12^th level cleric, Mogg the Mendicant, in record speed despite the coke-fueled monkeys banging on steel drums in my head.

The session is an experimental, play-test of the adventure, Castle Mind-Fuck, designed the previous day in the lord's workshop. One hour in I see the obvious mistake I have made in choosing of my own free will to play in a dungeon designed by a committee of old school sadists.

Two hours in and we are still putzing around trying to figure out the two entry-way traps. We are THE WORST SET OF IDIOT PLAYERS EVER. How do I know this? Because the Great One screamed it into each and every one of our ears as he systematically went around the table choking us.

I mostly survive the evening by courageously hanging inside the pack and doing nothing more than casting a cure light wounds spell on myself when my toe nail breaks.

The Green Dragon Lord scoffs at our idiocy

Sunday 1:45

The game is still going on and I am begging for a mercy kill. Bad Finch and I make eye contact and mumble the special code word “broken arrow” to which we have conspired to both bring down simultaneous Flame Strikes to kill us all.

The Virgin Mary appears and instructs me not to drink any more and miraculously I follow her directions and head off to bed.

Last installment this afternoon coming your way.

Urutsk Rising Part II

We take up where we left from yesterday with our interview with Kyrinn Eis. 

Hill Cantons: Alongside your world, the gaming components seem to have evolved in stages too. By the looks of what you brought to NTRPG Con it looks like you are making a big qualitative jump with the game. Where's that at?

Kyrinn Eis: I have to stay more than one step ahead of the competition. In the years since I started working on Urutsk: World of Mystery, I found my focus change from trying to target the OSR, to making a product I was truly happy with. At each stage along the way, when I was a bit doubtful or aimless, an older, more seasoned gamer would come along (Rob Kuntz and then Jeff Berry) and encourage me to stick to my vision –not selling out for a quick buck and the temporary interest of a fickle crowd.

Careful readers of my blog, from the beginning, will see little hints of my planning a boxed set of rules, of non-D&Desque rules methodologies, and of my lack of complacency regarding everything from aesthetics to rules mechanisms. I love system-work, but I also have a strong artistic side, and the two have married happily with my own nostalgia and homages to bring the world I have inhabited for most of my life to this world, for others to explore with me.

HC: One of the things that made him very happy was to see that you are taking up a number of themes—domain-level, solo, and multi-level play--that I've been trying to explore myself either on the blog or in the Domain Game. Tell us what we can look forward to in your game.

KE: The boxed set's premise is that explorers, businesses, entrepreneurs, slavers, convicts on the run, and religious refugees travel from the Vrun Continent to start operations/new life on the Marnharnnan Continent. This was done to help ground readers in the setting, providing researchable topics (Early European Colonisation of the Americas) to tether them in their exploration of Vrun-ness as well as the varied terrains of the Sunken Continent.

Players can decide if this is to be a one-off competition game of several colonies (somewhat akin to, but not actually as monotone and finite as the Euro-games: Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, or Puerto Rico), a competitive campaign game, or a co-operative campaign game where Players control PCs in the same or allied communities. As exploration is necessary to find the resources needed to maintain the colony/group, new challenges are uncovered or roused from their slumber to plague the Vrun attempt to claim the virgin continent.

Secondly, the game had to be friendly towards solo gamers, and to that end, the Control Sheets and system work not to define what can be done, but to establish the foundation of what has been done in certain instances in other times and places.

This means that as a solo game, the amount of work one puts into it determines the value of play one experiences, and that the solo gamer has to live with the sense of going too easy one themselves, or taking a sense of pride in surviving more challenging play.

Solo gaming when scored against an un-moving target is essentially masturbation: Roll x to get y. But, if the scaling of the challenge is set to synch +n with the detail and involvement the Player puts forth, there is no need to speak of re-play value – instead, conversations will be of Continued-Play-Value.

HC: You have some tactical combat rules to work with this too, right?

KE: Vanguard, the soon to be released skirmish warfare and tactical RPG rules set, is designed to dovetail with the “basic combat” of the boxed set, and both are the immediate sibling of the Vrun Players' Module–the Vrun Sourcebook where why you are the way you are is explained in detail – it really ought to be thought of as a comprehensive line of interconnected parts, each of which is useful on its own merits (the VPM, for instance, may be just what grognards voicing their desire for a sourcebook that they can then stat as they see fir for their preferred system).

The complex, then, of Vanguard plus the boxed set plus the VPM and subsequent titles yields a deeply textured and detailed world setting in one period of its history, allowing for decades of play, invention, and re-combination I have only previously seen in various versions of EPT/Tekumel or Glorantha (although Skyrealms of Jorune, and perhaps Blue Planet had it in them if they had been taken in those directions).

As I have kept this setting going through every major time period in its history, I know others are capable of doing so-in the same way Tekumel and Glorantha players have been able to–to a degree of full immersion limited only by their imaginations (see the Aethervox Gamer's Tekumel costumes, let alone their collection of scale-props and thousands of vividly painted miniatures if you don't think gaming fandom can exist to Star Trek or Star Wars levels of intensity).

Do I want you and everyone else who plays an RPG every once in a while to come to Urutsk? Absolutely!

Will everyone want to make it their go-to game and setting? You'll only know for certain if you want to do so by giving it an honest try. It isn't D&D.

As Steve Winter told me at the 2010 NTRPG Con, “It isn't Gamma World”, and by extension, it isn't Mutant Future or X-Plorers, either. Nor should folks think that it is my version of Tekumel– Shr.d-forbid!–it is simply, Urutsk.