Klytus, I'm bored.

[oakesspalding]

Did higher-level characters die (especially those, such as you, that were friends)?

Was Ernie the only child to have a character? (You may not know this.) Or did all of his kids have a presence?

[Deleted]

I know Elise played a bit, and Luke had several characters. Don't know about Heidi and Cindy.

I don't know of any high level deaths, but death was never off the table. It was a wargame; any time we finished the night with no losses, we considered ourselves lucky. And we would have been deeply insulted if we'd had any intimation that Gary was "going easy" on us.

[ishmann]

Did Gronan have any cool magic items? How common were magic items back then?

[Deleted]

He had the usual stuff you'd expect a fighter to have; magic armor, shield, weapon. I had an ESP medallion that I got good use out of.

Magic items other than weapons or armor were quite rare. Well, scrolls and potions weren't too scarce. But when Robilar found a Staff of Wizardry, that was A BIG FRACKING DEAL.

[oakesspalding]

Feb 8, 2014 16:01:46 GMT -6 @gronanofsimmerya said:

Magic items other than weapons or armor were quite rare...

Well, given the high percentage of miscellaneous magic items in Greyhawk that were cursed (most with no saving throw) that may have been a blessing. Did those items show up often in actual play?

[Deleted]

Some, yes. You always had to be careful.

They were there to be a conundrum.

[grodog]

The true story behind thouls---a typo that got turned into a monster, or a monster that really was inadvertently left out of the rules? Any interesting encounters with them in the Castle?

Allan.

[Deleted]

Nope, sorry.

[Deleted]

Hi Mike,

Did you ever ref in any of those games back before you went to college? And did you play in college with any of your classmates?




As an aside, I always found it interesting how the dungeons dominated most of the campaigns I was reading about, since the guy that introduced me and my friends to the game never ran a dungeon, it was all wilderness and above ground ruins. The first dungeon our group played in was after I started reffing and I introduced a dungeon because I thought it sounded like way too much fun not to try, turns out I was right about that.

[geoffrey]

1. Though the GREYHAWK supplement wasn't published until 1975, did Gary use the following rules from it in 1974?
A) variable weapon damage
B) monsters getting multiple attacks and doing more than 1-6 points of damage
C) character classes using different dice for hit points (I. e., 8-siders for fighting-men, 6-siders for clerics, 4-siders for magic-users, etc.)

2. Were most of the PCs in Gary's campaign human fighting-men or human magic-users?

[Deleted]

Sorry, Geoffrey, I no longer remember the details. I know SOME stuff that showed up in Greyhawk was in use much earlier, but 40 years have dulled the exact memories.

There was a slight preponderance of fighters, if I recall correctly. But since pcs quickly acquired retinues, and we often played our own henchbeings, the lines get a bit blurry.

[cadriel]

1) What kind of tricks and traps do you remember from Gary's Greyhawk?

2) In either Dave or Gary's games, did any of the disease rules ever come up? If so, was it ever anything more than getting some unspecific "disease" and needing a Cure Disease spell cast on you?

3) If you were winning a fight against a group of humanoids (goblins, orcs etc), and some stragglers surrendered, what did you guys do with them? Or did monsters that failed morale checks just beat it and run?

[Deleted]

1) Lots of one way doors and secret doors, a fair number of teleporters.
2) "Disease". Generic.
3) Beat cheeks, although other players had nonhuman NPCs, so surrender was an option. Never happened to me personally tho.

[cadriel]

Thanks for the answers! A few more, if you don't mind ...

1) How was treasure hidden? Were there things like crates, barrels and so on in the rooms that you had to actively search, or was it mostly in obvious places like treasure chests? And were the rooms sparse and bare, or was there often "stuff" (not necessarily treasure) around?

2) Did you guys ever use lamp oil offensively? Either as grenades or to light fires on the ground / on existing things?

3) What were the weird things you remember from Greyhawk and Blackmoor? Stuff that stands out above the monsters and map-exploration - what were the payoff places you got to?

4) Out of pure curiosity, did Gygax ever talk in "Gygaxian" when he ran games? That is, did he use a lot of words that seemed drawn from a thesaurus when describing stuff? Or was he very plain-English matter-of-fact and only using that kind of mode when he wrote?

Edit to add: 5) Were non-locked doors always stuck?

[Torreny]

Quite a whirlwind of q&a, what, eh? Figured I might as well add to it this once, but do you recall any adventures or events pertaining to lizardmen shortly after their arrival, that stand out after this time? Did anyones‘ henchmen get eaten?

Cheers.

[Deleted]

1) Treasure could be hidden anywhere up to and including a ring on the telson of a giant scorpion. Some rooms were bare, some full of junk. You never knew where treasure was.

2) Flaming oil is your friend. Well, usually; see the chapter in my upcoming book, "The Night We Set Ernie On Fire."

3) Too long ago, sorry.

4) He used big words but not as much as in his writing.

5) Almost always

6) Don't remember any lizard men, sorry.

[grodog]

Falling damage---how was it calculated in Castle Greyhawk? What about Blackmoor and the Jakallan Underworld---any differences?

Allan.

[scottenkainen]

I once played with an Old School gamer who took the rule about how monsters don't have to roll to open doors very literally. Doors in his dungeon magically opened for any type of monster just on approach. We spent a while chasing a fox between rooms that we could never corner because of that.

Did you ever play in a game where dungeon doors worked like that?

~Scott "-enkainen" Casper

[Deleted]

1) Falling damage, no idea

2) Monsters always opened doors.

[Stormcrow]

Were there ever players who whined "no fair!" at things like monsters opening doors automatically or the dungeon master not helping players draw their maps? If there were, how were they dealt with?

[Deleted]

Yes.

"Tough."

[Porphyre]

Hi, Gronan.

Did the aerial and naval combat rules found in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures often used? Or were most adventures dungeon and/or hex-crawls?

[Deleted]

I did mostly dungeon and hex crawls, but I wasn't the most active player. I'd ask Rob or Ernie.

[geoffrey]

I seem to remember reading somewhere that when you first started playing in M. A. R. Barker's EPT campaign, you were kind of non-plussed by the immorality of society in Tekumel, what with the human sacrifice and all.

Is that correct, or am I misremembering?

[Deleted]

May 11, 2014 22:12:30 GMT -6 geoffrey said:

I seem to remember reading somewhere that when you first started playing in M. A. R. Barker's EPT campaign, you were kind of non-plussed by the immorality of society in Tekumel, what with the human sacrifice and all.

Is that correct, or am I misremembering?

I don't want to seem like I'm hijacking the Glorious General's own board - I'm really looking forward to hearing his reply to you, geoffrey, as he is a Stability person; Temple of Karakan, the Stability war god, whereas I'm Temple of Vimuhla, the Change war god. Both of us sacrifice warriors and soldiers to our deities; that's what we refer to when we talk about "Noble Action". Interestingly, at a Gen Con in the early 1980s, a D & D player was giving me grief for being an 'Evil High Priest' under the D & D rules; he was politely corrected by a man who was listening to us, who told the player that Chirine was - in his opinion - a true 'paladin', as Chirine was a devout cleric who fought evil at every opportunity, healed the sick and wounded, fed the hungry, treated non-combatants with proper respect, and fed sacrifices into the Flame. The player freaked out, and challenged the guy about how he could say this about D & D - what did he know, and just who was he, anyway?

It was Gary. Yes, that Gary.

See, we all went through a form of 'culture shock' with Tekumel - it was a totally different society with totally different social references then what we were used to; most of us had no experience of other cultures, whereas Phil had been all over South Asia and knew it and it's peoples very, very well. His Tekumel world view was very informed and shaped by that experience; for us, India, Pakistan, and all of the other diverse place and societies he talked about with us were just as alien as Tekumel was; and sometimes much, much more! Keep in mind that this was the late 1970s, and the culture of middle America was very, very different then from what we live in today; my 'new' players find it very easy to become 'assimilated' into Tekumel's cultures, because they have a lot more open and a lot more broader world-view then we did back in those far-off days.

Glorious General? Over to you, Lord...

-chirine

[Deleted]

Aw, crap, I hit the wrong key and just lost my reply. Crumbs.

Oh, well.

First, *bows to Chirine* my inestimable aide-de-camp has done an excellent job of summarizing the situation.

Also, when I first hit Tekumel, I was quite young. I was a bright eager 19 year old kid from a small town in southern Wisconsin. It had only been about five years since I discovered Lord of the Rings and Conan; it had only been about three years since Gary had introduced me to Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, and a host of others. I was still boggling on all THAT.

(EDIT: This is important. REALLY REALLY important. "Fantasy" wasn't a huge portion of a bookstore section. They hadn't even decided whether "Fantasy" or "Swords and Sorcery" was the official name of the genre. Fantasy was a fringe adjunct to the already fringe genre of science fiction. It was NOT bloody everywhere. No Star Wars, Star Trek was only just coming into reruns, no Harry Potter, no Game of Thrones...)

And Chirine's second paragraph is worth careful pondering. 1975 was a bloody different world from today in ways I can't even begin to describe. For one thing, with no Internet and three major TV networks, the amount of outside information one got was extremely limited. If you lived in a small farm town, Pakistan might as well be the Moon.

And honestly, the notion of human sacrifice wasn't all that big a deal. In high school I was fascinated with the Aztecs so I'd certainly heard of it before. I played in Tekumel on a weekly basis for over a decade until I moved to Boston, so I must have liked it, neh?

Now I admit Phil did like to emphasize certain things just to shake us up a bit in our small-town Midwestern USA thinking, but that's all to the good. And I also have to say that looking back from age 59 (or even 40) I see things far differently from the way I did when I was a stripling of 19. I can see how, in a culture concerned with status, honor, noble action, and a certain fatalistic attitude, it could be that it is better to accept a noble death as a captured soldier than an ignoble existence -- one could not really call it "life" -- as a slave. We all die sometime, and perhaps how we die really matters.

And for that matter, in the Temple of Karakan, if the sacrifice accepts his or her fate with resolve and marches to the altar (cf. Sean Connery's last scene in "Man Who Would Be King") they have earned a swift, clean death and a prayer that the God will notice their courage.

Really, though, the biggest shocks I got in Tekumel came not from the world, but from the other players. It sometimes frightened me to consider what some of them called "fun."

And it caught Phil with his kilt around his ankles early on as well. A PC did something early on that disrupted the entire Tsolyani society, and sadly Phil was so shook by that that he never gave his players that much freedom again. Bill Hoyt and I were talking about that just on the way back from GaryCon this year.

As Bill said, "The real moral of the story is, don't play with psychopaths."

[Deleted]

What the Glorious General said...

I think that's a very good summation of the acculturation process that we went through. Please keep in mind that we played in Phil's Tekumel with him for over a decade; we rose in society and became Mighty Generals and Imperial Governors because we did things well, not because we gained XP; Phil didn't play that way.

The very best compliment I ever got from the Professor was after the other group - Phil's Monday group, which was made up of the old original group's players - tried to have Princess Vrisa (Kathy Marchall) arrested and executed. (They though it would be funny; see also Bill Hoyt's comment about playing with psychopaths.) In my capacity as Governor, I insisted on the proper paperwork - no verbal orders - and Phil had to spend two weeks of pouting doing up the proper Tsolyani documents. He shoved the beautiful thing at me, I read it, and told him that if he'd filed the right paperwork two weeks ago we wouldn't have had to have all the bother. Phil went purple, especially after I handed the arrest warrant to Kathy and she said "Your tent or mine?", and then got very quiet. He finally looked at me and said:

"Chirine, you've gone native."

The Glorious General references the incident where Tim Cox, as the priest Dutlor, hits Princess Ma'in hi Tlakotani with an Eye that changes her alignment from Stability (she was an Avanthe worshipper) to a Change (Dlamelish) person. It really shook Phil, and I don't think he ever really recovered from the shock of seeing a bunch of people do their very best to trash his creation because they thought "It would be fun!"

It's that kind of very destructive play that Gary Fine documents in his book, and why we in the original Thursday Night Group split off from the original group; we wanted to explore Phil's creation, not wreck it. Gronan came to play with us, because he felt the same way, and we had a lot of very fun adventures as a result.

- chirine

[Deleted]

"Some men just want to watch the world burn." -- Michael Caine as Alfred in that Batman movie a few years back.

It's not unusual to see young players, especially postadolescent males, engage in sociopathic behavior for a while when they first get into RPGs. I get the whole mindset of "I'm a college freshman with virtually no actual influence or power over my own life so I'm going to pretend to smash things to vent my spleen." What was unusual about Tekumel is that instead of destroying villages or castles or temples, the players of that bent were trying to burn down an entire empire.

[thorswulf]

Chirine and Gronan, thank you for your observations and comments about Tekumel. I discovered it in in 1986, and I have never looked back. I guess the fact that Tekumel was not mainstream fantasy really appealed to the part of me that was not mainstream either. Some people have a feeling like they are a total outsider, and I guess that is how I would describe myself. The joy of feeling this way is that you are emotionally and intellectually free to enjoy a unique point of observation. I welcomed the difference of Tekumel as a creation because it was not only a true creative labor of love and imagination, but also culturally diverse.

[Deleted]

May 13, 2014 7:50:50 GMT -6 thorswulf said:

Chirine and Gronan, thank you for your observations and comments about Tekumel. I discovered it in in 1986, and I have never looked back. I guess the fact that Tekumel was not mainstream fantasy really appealed to the part of me that was not mainstream either. Some people have a feeling like they are a total outsider, and I guess that is how I would describe myself. The joy of feeling this way is that you are emotionally and intellectually free to enjoy a unique point of observation. I welcomed the difference of Tekumel as a creation because it was not only a true creative labor of love and imagination, but also culturally diverse.

You're very welcome, in every sense of the word! We learned so much from Phil - even when playing his "Moghul Monopoly" game; he did a Tekumel Monopoly one as well, for gosh sakes! - we learned. "What's Panipat, Phil?" and he'd tell us all about it, from his time there. He did this with Tekumel, too; we'd ask questions a lot, and he'd tell us all about the people and places in his world. (Occasionally, we'd roll dice.) It was, by any standards, an amazing journey...

yours, chirine