It certainly will. If I may offer a comment:

As I reported on my blog earlier this year, I was asked by Luke Gygax to come down to Lake Geneva to run a room full of Tekumel-based programming for Gary Con, to be held at the beginning of March this year. I submitted a proposal for this to Luke, and he accepted it. I formed a working group of Tekumel fans to help me put this together, and got a great response from Tekumel fans from all over the United States. I really appreciated this, as while I'm very good at running miniatures games and Braunsteins, I think I'm more then a little weak on the RPG side of the house.

(Some players may feel differently; thank you for your compliments!)

Luke's concept for the room, which I thought was a really great idea, was to continue his dad's high regard for Tekumel by providing a space where Tekumel's fans could run games and present programming to introduce and explain Phil's creation to all kinds of gamers, old and new. This would build on what I did at Gary Con this past year, and take advantage of the much larger hotel space that Gary Con was moving into for this year's convention. My brief was to provide four full days of programming, on four tables, and to have something running at all times. I put together two RPG tables, one miniatures table, one 'multi-use' table that could be used for board games and RPGs, and an 'events screen' to show videos about Prof. Barker and his world. (I was also asked, by Paul Stormberg of 'Collectors' Trove, to provide a display in the "Legends of Wargaming"area about Dave Sutherland.)

One of the cornerstones of Luke's planning for this event was asking me to contact the Tekumel Foundation and extend his specific invitation to be a part of this event; Luke thought that this invitation would be good for the event, and get the Foundation some good exposure for Tekumel and for their efforts. I duly contacted the Tekumel Foundation with this invitation, and got an e-mail back saying that they would get back to me.

I had had issues with using an LCD projector at Gary Con this past year, due to the lighting conditions, and so for this event I wanted to have active displays that would not suffer from ambient lighting issues. The Missus, Queen of the Internet, found me some very good bargains, and I allocated the various screens to the different areas: the 42" screen that had the most power (in lumens) would show the Dave Sutherland PowerPoint display throughout the convention in the "Legends of Wargaming" area; the 40" LCD screen would provide the display for the various videos in the room; and the 32" screen would be used as needed for the 'multi-use' table. I also got all of the 'convention trade show booth' equipment and decor items that I'd built up over the years all sorted out and prepped for the event.

I also contacted several companies that had had historical connections with Tekumel, and invited them to participate in the events in the Tekumel room; I got a tremendous response from all of them, with offers of events and assistance. I made sure to keep Gary Con informed of what I was doing, to make sure that I was not exceeding what Luke had asked me to do.

All of this was moving along very nicely when I got a phone call from Gary Con, stating that Dr. Victor Raymond, the President of the Tekumel Foundation, was raising very serious objections to this event. As I understood it, Dr. Raymond was stating that only the Tekumel Foundation had the legal right to run events such as this one at conventions, and that if the event was to take place he and only he was to be the sole coordinator for the event. I took this information back to the working group, and everyone emphatically stated that if this was to be the case, then they would not participate in the event and would not be attending Gary Con. I thus lost all of the event and logistical support that was needed to make this event happen.

Over the next few months, Luke Gygax attempted to negotiate some sort of compromise with Dr. Raymond, and I attempted to see what was 'the art of the possible' in the working group. Lawyers got involved, and I had to spend a lot more time on this matter then I had expected to - and the expenses for running the event were also increasing dramatically, with all the requirements and conditions being placed on Gary Con by the Tekumel Foundation.

After we'd all put so much time and effort into this event, I finally had to draw the line and cut our losses; I won't be going to Gary Con this year, and neither will quite a number of the people in the working group. I'm in the process of scrapping and disposing of a lot of materials that we'd bought for this event; The Missus got the 32" for the living room, I got the 40" for the game room, and we're donating the 42" to someone as we don't have a use for it. Most of the 'trade show' stuff will get sold as well, as I don't have a use for it here at the house.

Now, I think there are some positive aspects to this affair; Gary Con gets a room back for their programming, the Tekumel Foundation gets total and absolute control of their 'brand identity' (as Dr. Raymond puts it), and I get my all of my disposable vacation time (two weeks) and disposable income (about $2,500) for 2016 back. I also don't have to maintain and store all of the resources and assets that I had been holding for this event, which will clear out both the garage and the basement of a lot of stuff.

I am, quite frankly, sick to death of ' gaming politics'. I'm done.

Hi Chirine!

So sorry to hear about this.

Last November, the Gygax brothers were forced to leave the new TSR company and Gygax magazine. Both Dave and then Gary were forced to leave TSR and D&D.

Our pond of gaming is too small for these squabbles. Everybody looses from it.

Sounds like you had a great plan for GaryCon. I really liked the idea of the Dave Sutherland exhibition as well.

Really disappointing that this won't be happening.


-Havard

I'm really sad to hear about this whole thing. I bought and played the TSR version of EPT back in the 1970's and think it's a wonderful world. Although a bit strange for me to run as a GM, I read all of the articles in Dragon magazine and still own my boxed set of EPT to this day. I like EPT enough that I set aside a portion of my OD&D Discussion board for the game and I think that Phil Barker's campaign was a huge part of the development of RPGs and support ways to expose newcomers to that setting.

In that way I was really happy to see that the Tekumel Foundation was gaining traction as a national group, and that lots of folks were gaining exposure to EPT. How nice to hear that this world would be supported and that gamers could experience the thing. This news that the Tekumel Foundation has been acting poorly reflects in a negative way upon our entire hobby-industry and I'm sad that they would crush an event that sounded like a really fun and amazing experience at GaryCon. The Tekumel Foundation may be doing some great things for EPT, but based on this story I will not be buying any of their products and will not attend any of their events. That's just a crappy way to treat people.

One of the biggest problems that our hobby-industry has nowadays is that folks don't show enough respect for the "I was there" crowd. Folks who played in Dave's game and Gary's game and Phil's game and Jim Ward's game (and so on) are a resource to be treasured. Folks like chirine ba kal spend hours of their own time to spread the word about a product (in this case Tekumel) and some suit decides that it's "not official enough" unless he can have his hand in the pot. Rubbish. :evil:

Not surprised to hear about this, at all, as sad as it is. - I commented extensively on a similar affair, when news on the Gygax family lawsuit broke at the K&K's Alehouse.


Short version is:

RuneQuest, 30++ years old, doing great. Traveler, great. GURPS, great. Even HARP, doing well enough. Just old D&D, and old TSR-related D&D, in particular, like matrimony in the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, which is to say, morally and intellectually empty, and profoundly desperate. Like, it's not even the kind of bad news that one would in any way get emotional about, any more.

Those guys, altogether, whether it's the Tekumel Foundation, or the Gygax Trust, or the "men of ill intent" that Tim Kask represents, are the single biggest threat to our hobby at this moment - because they do their darndest to unnerve the small guys, not realizing that RPGs, in general, withstand the test of time precisely because of the creation of such "wild", testbed infrastructures. The RPG business doesn't work within a classic horizontal or vertical market structure, but all about externalizing, or outsourcing. "Gaming culture" is simply an economic structure based on tapered integration, or, in other words, the more you share, the more you gain. Successful people in the business long know that; that's why Wizbro is not going after smaller conventions, unsanctioned events, and so on. And that's why Games Workshop lost about 50% of their company value when they did.

And that's why all those scion funds are textbook examples of general unsuccessfulness.