Games Blog

I’ve got out the habit of doing gaming memes, but I’ll do this one. Lunchtime Poll 30: Whaddaya Got?

What’s the last board, card, or roleplaying game you bought, and what do you think of it?

That would be Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne

Empire of the Petal Throne is one of those legendary games. It was one of the very first fantasy RPGs to follow in the wake of the original Dungeons and Dragons, and has been through several editions with wildly different rules. Earlier version had the reputation of being next to impossible to GM unless you were the world’s creator, Professor M.A.R.Barker. One of the claims for the new edition is that they’ve made it much more accessible for new players.

Tékumel is a a pulp fantasy, with a setting that’s not the usual generic fantasy mix of medieval Europe and American wild west. Instead, the cultures are inspired by those of India and pre-Columbian South America, with caste and clan-based societies, and polytheistic religions that fit naturally rather than looking crudely bolted-on. It’s a style of game that’s rather out of fashion nowadays, about deep immersion in a strange culture, some of whose values look barbarous to our own eyes.

The system is based on the d10 version of Guardians of Order’s “Tri-Stat” system. It avoids fashionably funky dice systems or dubious mechanical gimmicks in favour of something that looks solidly straightforward and playable, although I have yet to put this to the test.

I have to admit that this is a game I’m unlikely ever to run, although I may well sign up to a Tékumel game if I see one running at a convention. I’ve really bought it as much to mine for ideas for my own games as for anything else.

I’m still considering the possibility of writing a full-blown Kalyr RPG, to be sold as a PDF download. I’ve got as far as putting together an outline, and writing first drafts for one-and-a-half chapters The game will be based on Fudge, and is intended as a standalone game.

Although it’s based on the large amount of material already online, the whole thing’s going to be rewritten and revised, with some cool new things added, and cheesy ideas that didn’t work taken away. At least that’s the idea. Consider it as a second edition.

The outline reads as follows:

1. Introduction: 4-5 pages. This is an attempt to distill the essential flavour of the world in a few pages, without going into too much detail.
2. Character Generation, probably 15-20 pages. The template-driven system means this chapter also includes a lot of world background. This chapter will also include the full skill list.
3. Game System, another 15-20 pages, mostly taken from OGL Fudge material, with some Kalyr-specific examples. Covers skill use and combat, the usual stuff, in other words.
4. Psionics, probably 8-10 pages, covering both game mechanics and a brief overview of the Academy of the Mind. I’m in two minds as to whether to expand this chapter, or whether to cover just the basics, leaving the rest for a later supplement.
5. Technology, probably 8-10 pages again, with an overview of The Academy of Knowledge, and a list of available gadgets.
6. Culture, 10-15 pages. This one’s a bit more nebulous, and I’m wondering whether even to have the chapter at all, or whether to distribute the material through the preceding chapters. I do need to cover Religion somewhere, though.
7. Bestiary, 5-10 pages. Covers races other than kandar and human, as well as native flora and fauna.
8. Campaigns, 10-15 pages. The all-important GM’s chapter, covering campaign frames and scenario advice.

At the moment, I’m not shooting for a specific page count. I intend on writing a first draft of the manuscript and seeing how long it comes out.

If it actually reaches the stage of having enough material to playtest, I’m going to be recruiting playtesters. What I’d really like is a mix of Fudge experts who can scrutinise my rules, a couple of existing online players who can tell me how well I’ve captured the feel of the world, and gamers familiar with neither who can tell me if the thing can be understood without prior knowledge.

Good news from Silkenray

After almost 7 months being detained by immigration, my beloved husband is now a free man! Yay!

Now to get onto the same continent again.

I think I’ll give him a few days grace before demanding a response to the seven month old GM post in the Kalyr PBeM

Carl Cravens has a dilemma. He’s got an idea for a space opera setting, and wonders whether to submit it as an article to Fudge Factor, or whether to polish up a longer version to sell as a downloadable PDF product.

I’ve wondered whether there’s any commercial potential for a Kalyr RPG. In terms of quantity, I’ve certainly got more than enough material for a 128-page worldbook. Much of it’s pretty disorganised at present, and I will have to rewrite the bulk of the actual text. The game mechanics would be Fudge, which is released under the OGL. I don’t have any real idea as to whether I’d be able to sell the thing to anyone who wouldn’t qualify for a playtest copy (i.e. my current players) The other issue is that much of the material is already available online, and The Phoenyx have a non-exclusive licence to it.

The post by Mike Mearls about core stories also makes me think. Successful RPGs have a standard storyline for adventures; D&D has “Adventurers kill monsters, take their stuff, and go up in levels”, Call of Cthulhu has “Investigators explore strange places, discover Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and go horribly insane while saving the earth. What’s the core story of Kalyr? (As the GM and worldbuilder, I think I know this, but I wonder how clear it is to anyone else)

Unlike those people who start new RPG campaigns every six months or so, I’ve been using the same setting for almost all the games I’ve run for the past fifteen years or so, including the eight years old PBeM, the face-to-face game I ran for about five years before that, and the convention one-shots I’ve run in the last couple of years. Even after all this time, the setting is still evolving; you get a lot of depth after all that time.

The Kalyr Wiki has been around for quite a while. Originally it merely duplicated all my existing static web pages, but more recently I’ve added some new stuff. The latest entries cover Political Systems and Crime and Punishment. Food and Drink and Family Life and Customs, howerver consist only of a few sketchy ideas.

The great think about a Wiki is that other people can contribute and add ideas. I’d appreciate comments or further ideas, especially for the entries above.

Steve Jones‘s commented on my previous posting, comparing Ken Hite‘s subjective film review with the factually inaccurate ‘OK at normal viewing distances’ nonsense you get in product reviews in model railway magazines.

He got me thinking, and my mind started making connections between apparently unconnected things, especially the comparisons between my two hobbies, RPGs and model railways. Is the misshapen Farish class 56 equivalent to the broken dice mechanic of Deadlands. Do E Gary Gygax and Cyril Freezer occupy equivalent positions in the two respective hobbies, very influential in the founding years, but now rather stuck in the past? How much does the clunky class-and-level mechanics of D&D parallel the steamroller wheels and tension lock couplings of ready-to-run OO gauge?

Or am I talking complete rubbish?

You review Star Wars Episode III, and come up with lines like this

But Lucas doesn’t care about his script, under which gelid wodge of pork fat he immures the cast, especially Natalie Portman. They suffer like the damned frozen beneath Cocytus, mouthing clunking, mud-brick dialogue — “wooden” dialogue is several TLs above this stuff

I actually went to my local multiplex on the opening night to see a different film (Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) which I really ought to have reviewed by now. I wondered why there were people dressed as Jar-Jar Binks wandering around.

A thread on DreamLyrics has got people waxing nostalgically about legendary online games of the past, both in Dreamlyrics itself, and in it’s predecessor, the CompuServe RPGAMES Forum.

My most memorable game has to be the very first online game I ever played in, HVG: Maughn Matsuoka’s Hawaiian Vacation.

The system was GURPS Cyberpunk, and Maughn put together a very detailed near-future dystopian setting, with pages and pages of background material. There was a plethora of megacorps, all detailed, and massive changes in geopolitics. The EU had fused into a single state while the US had fragmented into several smaller nations. Ebola rampaged unchecked across Africa turning the continent into Hell-on-Earth.

The pace was fast and furious, with a whole sequence of set-piece battles; the roadside rest stop attack and the ninja attack in the Frontier Hotel were particularly memorable. The latter was a real ‘so this is it we’re all going to die’ moment, much scarier than many supposedly horror games.

Despite all the fights, my character, the techie Neil Jones, wasn’t really a combat character; he spent one entire fight cowering in a ditch while bullets flew overhead. He considered mere survival to count as victory.

The climactic finale had us foiling a Russian plot to set of a load of nukes along the San Andreas fault, calculated to set off a massive tsunami which would have taken out the whole of the Pacific Rim. Nicki Jett’s scary cybered-up amazon Kiko took out a whole squad of Israeli special forces who were supposed to have been our allies! Fortunately she took out most of the Russians as well.

It’s notable as one of the few online games that actually ended, rather than suffer the usual online game fate of fizzling out.

After far too long an absence, Fudge Factor is back! The format is changing slightly; rather than monthly issues, they’re aiming for one article each week. Starting things off is a modern-day adventure, Ghost Hunters of New England.