Q&A with Jeff Berry

[Havard]

Oh oh! I know what Havard wants to ask next! Did you ask her about Toska Rusa?

Hehe, yes!

Or...could you convince her to come here and chat with us?

-Havard

[chirine ba kal]

I did, actually. She's of the opinion that Dave used her Tekumel character, Anka'a, as the model for the Queen of the Afridi; she says she doesn't reacall playing the latter as such in Dave's Blackmoor at that time, but there was so much cross-fertilization going on here in the Twin Cities at that time she can't be sure. She'll look in her notes, and see what she can find out.

As for chatting on this forum, she only has a dial-up connection at home and can't view these pages. Her work will not allow any web connections, so she's kind of stuck. She asked that you send any questions through me, and we'll get the answers back to you as soon as we can.

yours, Chirine

[aldarron]

Cool! Perhaps Anka'a adventured in Blackmoor before returning to the Afrdhi to become the High Priestess "Rosy Dawwn".

[chirine ba kal]

Cool! Perhaps Anka'a adventured in Blackmoor before returning to the Afrdhi to become the High Priestess "Rosy Dawwn".

Sorry to get back to you so late; it took a while to unpack all of the ships and miniatures from the event.

She's checking her game notes, and will get back to me. In any case, it was such a small group of people with so much cross-talk between campaigns that it wouldn't surprise me.

yours, chirine

[aldarron]

Hey Chirine, So the discussions on Marv's ODD74 forum reminded me of your explanation of the combat round in EPT, and you mentioned that both Dave and Phil allowed the option of a Parry instead of an attack. Do you know the rule that was used for Parries? There's one in the Holmes basic rulebook, was that it?

[chirine ba kal]

Hey Chirine, So the discussions on Marv's ODD74 forum reminded me of your explanation of the combat round in EPT, and you mentioned that both Dave and Phil allowed the option of a Parry instead of an attack. Do you know the rule that was used for Parries? There's one in the Holmes basic rulebook, was that it?

I'm sorry, I don't know; I've never read the Holmes basic rulebook, which I'm assuming is a D & D edition, and I doubt Phil did either.

The relevant section of the original EPT is Section 720 - Combat. If a player opted to parry an opponent's blow, the to-hit number from the tables in Section 720 would be used; if the parry was successful, i.e., the 'to hit' number or better was rolled, then this would negate any hits or damage scored by the opponent in that combat round. Phil later formalized this in both his unpublished RPG, "Skein of Destiny", and in "Swords and Glory".

yours, Chirine

[aldarron]

Hey Chirine, So the discussions on Marv's ODD74 forum reminded me of your explanation of the combat round in EPT, and you mentioned that both Dave and Phil allowed the option of a Parry instead of an attack. Do you know the rule that was used for Parries? There's one in the Holmes basic rulebook, was that it?

I'm sorry, I don't know; I've never read the Holmes basic rulebook, which I'm assuming is a D & D edition, and I doubt Phil did either.

The relevant section of the original EPT is Section 720 - Combat. If a player opted to parry an opponent's blow, the to-hit number from the tables in Section 720 would be used; if the parry was successful, i.e., the 'to hit' number or better was rolled, then this would negate any hits or damage scored by the opponent in that combat round. Phil later formalized this in both his unpublished RPG, "Skein of Destiny", and in "Swords and Glory".

yours, Chirine

D'oh I totally missed that! Thanks Jeff. Skein of Destiny? I haven't heard about that. Can you enlighten?

[chirine ba kal]

D'oh I totally missed that! Thanks Jeff. Skein of Destiny? I haven't heard about that. Can you enlighten?

Sorry to be off-line for so long! It's been a very busy month, with a lot going on for Tekumel...

"Skein of Destiny" was Phil's unfinished RPG that he did after EPT; it was easy to play, and reasonably clear, but was shaping up to be something like 1,000 pages long in manuscript. What he'd done was discuss a topic, then give all the players' game information, then all the GMs' game information. While the game system / game engine worked very well in playtest, it was very difficult to follow the game flow. He then stopped working on it, and reorganized the material into the three volume format that "Swords and Glory" used. Unfortunately, he also added a lot more detail to the game system, and that really obscured the game engine and the game flow. "S&G" was never finished, due to Phil's issues with Lou Zocchi, but the later "Gardasiyal" was pretty much all of the unpublished parts of "S&G".

yours, Chirine

[Big Mac]

I've been catching up on this thread and a lot of Jeff's links seem to be dead. I hope everything is OK with the Tekumel world, and that I can look at the linked stuff later on.

[Big Mac]

My personal take on the lawsuits is that Gary wanted very badly to be a 'respectable' author and publisher; the trade dress and format for what became AD&D was based primarily on what the largest bookseller in the US at that time, B. Dalton's, was dictating for their in-store display format. Boxed sets like the original D&D, were 'too crude' for the mass retail market, and any new products had to be either up to the standards set by Avalon Hill for boxed games or be 8 1/2" by 11" hardbound books. Period. Another driver in the marketing of AD&D was the tournament game, which was a direct follow-on from the historical miniatures world that both Gary and Dave came from. (Ancients were the worst of this trend; see also the WRG sets of rules, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. I have an opinion about tournaments and tournament players, and got entirely out of historical miniatures as a result.) The modules that these Gen Con tournaments generated provided new products, as they could be easily produced and shrink-wrapped to fit B. Dalton's retail format.

I do think that the newer formats work better. I even prefer the WotC-era hardbacks to the AD&D-era boxed sets. When I buy second hand boxed sets, I need to do a ton of research to make sure I know what is supposed to be in the box, before I can buy it. And boxed sets get squished a lot easier than hardbacks.

Ironically, the smaller sized books (like Suppliment II) are now much cheaper to obtain via Print on Demand technology, than the large hardback sizes that TSR started with and WotC focused on. Perhaps a return to the older ways of doing things will help minority settings to continue to be sold to a core-fanbase during the times when less people are buying stuff.

Once the game took off, the money started rolling in, and people got a little goofy. My personal experience, as well as my conversations with both Dave and Gary, was that both of the Blume brothers got just a little too greedy and thought themselves just a little too clever; the result was their cutting Prof. Barker and EPT off, as they were able to play on the fact that EPT out-sold D&D to persuade Gary to agree to drop Tekumel. (I've seen all the letters back and forth, between TSR and Prof. Barker; it makes for both interesting reading and a classic case of how to start a war by provocative letters.) When TSR refused to pay Dave a royalty on AD&D, Dave had no option but to sue, and Prof. Barker was only too happy to help him out. The Blume brothers made asses of themselves in court during their testimony, Gary was made to look like an idiot, and that was pretty much that after a lot of time and money was spent by the Blumes to try and wriggle out of a very bad business decision.

Erm, let me get this straight. TSR had the rights to sell Empire of the Petal Throne and it was more successful than D&D and they didn't want to pull in as much cash as possible from it? That seems like insanity to me. :?

Do you know if Kara-Tur was an attempt to make an "in-house" copy of Tekumel?

*Sigh*. Not pretty to watch, and not at all helpful to the game hobby / industry...

It is kind of ironic that Gary got pushed into shafting Dave and then got shafted himself a couple of years down the line. The people that did that were kind of cutting the heads off of the geese that were laying the golden eggs.

I never really followed any of those politics at the time, but it seems to me that the internal politics that have pushed several setting creators away from their product lines has cost TSR a ton of potential cash.