Interesting Description of EPT

[greentongue]

Originally Posted by Richard R.

Jesus...this is so eccentric, personal, trippy, bizarre, jagged, beautiful, crude, and imaginative. It's Edgar Rice Burroughs meets 1960's psychedellic culture meets Imperial China meets the Aztecs in a dark alley behind a brothel in Tangiers, where they bump into a drunken Tolkien and violently sodomize him on a pile of garbage while he begs them not to stop. I can f**king smell the hash smoke coming through the screen of my monitor.

This old version is raw, uncut T'ekumel: You are savage barbarian adventurers living among the dregs of an ancient, racist empire on a world with no white people, no horses, and no stars in the sky.You crawl down into the Underworld with your wicked zig-zag swords and fight acid-trip nightmares for glory, citizenship, and the awesome power of ancient technology. Then you crawl back up to blow all your gold on sex slaves and drugs at the temples of insane gods in teeming, decadent cities. f**k that wannabe Dark Sun... this is the real deal.

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Found here:
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=425129&page=5

[Finarvyn]

I like the observation that you "shake" the dice rathter than roll them, as well as the observation that the term "dungeon master" hadn't been invented yet. :-)

Yeah, I think that people tend to forget how early EPT was in the release cycle of RPGs, and how different it was from anything that anyone had ever seen before. I mean, most fantasy books were Tolkien and science fiction was Star Trek, and when both Metamorphosis Alpha (mutants on a starship) and EPT (alien planetary adventure) came out they were simply different.

Nowadays there are lots of RPGs that want to "push the boundaries", but EPT was one of the first!

[harami2000]

Cute quote: thanks, greentongue.

It's Edgar Rice Burroughs meets 1960's psychedellic culture meets Imperial China meets the Aztecs in a dark alley behind a brothel in Tangiers, where they bump into a drunken Tolkien and violently sodomize him on a pile of garbage while he begs them not to stop. I can f**king smell the hash smoke coming through the screen of my monitor.

Heh, heh... perhaps so, except that that's disjointed from the actual pulp background roots which are decades before, of course.

...set in his world of T'ekumel, a fantasy setting that he allegedly first created in the 40's and turned into a lifelong obssessive project.

"Allegedly" ^^
Ah... Start from a false presumption and end up in the wrong decade. Barker's world-building in the late 1940s is not a far cry from that familiar to an EPT audience: darned fine work in both cases, and especially for one so young in the former...

d.

[bigjackbrass]

Nov 20, 2008 14:33:00 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Yeah, I think that people tend to forget how early EPT was in the release cycle of RPGs, and how different it was from anything that anyone had ever seen before.

I've often wondered whether we would ever have seen EPT if that early window had been missed. Would a publisher have taken a chance on it in, say, 1984? TSR certainly wouldn't, I'm sure, as by that point they were concentrating heavily on the "family-friendly" side of the hobby, which Tékumel really isn't.

When you look at some of the pre-1980 games (and even pre-1977) they were a surprisingly wild bunch, as if the sheer range of possibilities was exciting and entirely accepted, rather than the endless D&D clones that many seem to assume was the case.

[harami2000]

[OT]

Nov 22, 2008 4:19:19 GMT -6 bigjackbrass said:

I've often wondered whether we would ever have seen EPT if that early window had been missed. Would a publisher have taken a chance on it in, say, 1984? TSR certainly wouldn't, I'm sure, as by that point they were concentrating heavily on the "family-friendly" side of the hobby, which Tékumel really isn't.

Nice "what if"... For the big names, 1984's perhaps just a fraction late for Chaosium: I can't quite see EPT launched alongside Elfquest, say. Would also fit better within "early period" FGU.
If I suggest Games Workshop, how much of a smile would that get? Might even have helped delay their eventual introverted gameplan, if so.
Still, it would probably have been easier to go self-published/small press in the first instance; following the path taken by Jorune, for example.

Nov 22, 2008 4:19:19 GMT -6 bigjackbrass said:

When you look at some of the pre-1980 games (and even pre-1977) they were a surprisingly wild bunch, as if the sheer range of possibilities was exciting and entirely accepted, rather than the endless D&D clones that many seem to assume was the case.

Mhmm... I'd be hard pressed to say when "endless D&D clones" really started. Reading back, the first 10 years do feel like a pretty wild ride within which the first third of that really was formative territory.