02-24-2016, 02:12 PM
finarvyn Wrote:I can only speak for myself, but I can say a little about why I find Tekumel so intimidating.
[snipped; great post!!!]
I am in awe of Tekumel but still not comfortable with it.
I guess that knowing that the Tekumel detail is out there makes me think that I ought to be familiar with it in the same way that knowing that Middle-earth is so complex makes me think that I ought to have a decent understanding of it if I want to run a game of that. But Tekumel is less intuitive so I never feel like I "get there" in my learning process.
Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does, actually, and I am very glad you were kind enough to take the time to reply! You are the very first person to reply to this kind of question from me in over thirty years - most of the time, I get what amounts to a 'knee-jerk' reaction that has no thought behind it...
I agree with your views, too. Tekumel is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a world-setting that is at all intuitive for us; it's (as Phil once mentioned) Mughal India with aliens, where Middle-earth is our shared cultural and folkloric heritage. It draws on tropes that we all have a pretty good feel for; Tekumel, on the other hand, starts out with a culture that very few people know much about, and then adds in a lot of tropes and concepts from the 'scientifiction' of the First Age of F/SF literature. Just about all of those authors have been forgotten, over time, and the two most 'popular' influences on Phil - Lovecraft and Howard - have had their work 'diluted' by adaptations and pastiches. (The 'Conan of the movies' is very different then the 'Conan of the original stories', for example.) Another of Phil's inspirations, Barsoom, is just as forgotten, and the recent motion picture didn't seem to help much.
I think that another major problem is that we've been publishing Tekumel since 1975, and we now have a huge pile of details that didn't exist back then; Phil developed a lot of what's called 'canon' as a result of game play over the better part of two decades. Sure, I've enjoyed being Phil's archivist, but it's a really large and obscure library that been built up. I don't know how to address all this, either.
As a side note, I find Blackmoor very intimidating, these days, and I would not even consider running any Blackmoor games for the very same reason that you mentioned. I played for a while with Dave, and the Blackmoor I played in was a very different place with a lot of details then the Blackmoor that you folks discuss here and on other fora. The Blackmoor I played in was closest to what was in FFG; the d20 book had, to my eye, so little 'Dave' and so much 'd20' that I simply put it back on the shelf; it's not the Blackmoor I knew and loved.
So, thank you again - you've been very, very helpful!
