a travel narrative would handle the sweep of travel with a paragraph, evoking emptiness just long enough to give you that feeling, and then smack you with another action scene or moral conflict (or action scene which embodied or addressed a moral conflict). Also, having dungeons with vast swathes of wide-open space was a very cool effect it gave you the feeling of wandering around in a vast underground ruin, which is what it was (the old city of Jakalla).īut here’s the thing. There is a genuine contribution to the exploration in general which a limited dose of all that cool Tekumel visual imagery made. As color, and dealt with quickly, the scenery was incredibly cool and made the dungeon way more fabulous than it would have been otherwise. Standard clash between Sim and Gam priorities, no? Almost, but there’s a ‘but’ which made me want to post this in the first place. I was like, ‘come on, already, let’s get to the fights!’ ‘Where’s the loot?’ One other player at the table, who knows me from more ‘highbrow’ RPG contexts, was looking seriously askance at me when I held up the party to loot dead bodies every time one of our slaves, henchmen, party members etc. I’ve even corresponded with him privately about some serious arcana concerning the world.īut in a game billed as a dungeon crawl, I TOTALLY lost patience with the detail. I’m a Tekumel nut and I eagerly await every scrap from Phil’s notebooks. Furthermore, there are vast tracts of the dungeon that were essentially uninhabited: in between bribing a Sro-dragon with a big-assed sword and the awesome final battle with hordes of Ssu and Qol we essentially wandered around staring at scrolls and trying to figure out what broken devices of the ancients were the whole time.
But it definitely slowed down the action. This was, on the one hand, very cool, as a backdrop.
There are bizarre people in bizarre situations – we talked to a sailor who was waiting to be a sacrifice to Durritlamish before we spirited him out of there. For instance, if you look at the inscriptions, you can tell whether they’re Bednjallan or Engsvanyali, assuming you know the languages, and you might even be able to pick out a scribe. A dungeon in Tekumel has things most other dungeons don’t. Victor had Phil’s dungeon key too – he was essentially running a historical artifact of RPGing.Ģ) Hard-core Sim and Crazy Color. I mean, these are crazy-huge graph paper maps with a very high level of detail everywhere. We were playing in Phil Barker’s original dungeon under Jakalla, the map of the first level of which was practically the size of Undermountain. There were a couple things that struck me hard about the experience:ġ) Phil’s maps. I should add that this was not a typical con game experience, in that I had roleplayed with everyone at the table before, though not in this group or with Victor as GM. The game was billed as a ‘retro dungeon crawl’ and it indeed was.
Barker’s Thursday Night Group and the author of a nice essay on the early history of RPGs I posted a link to here a long while ago, ran us through the dungeons of Jakalla using the rules to the original 1975 Empire of the Petal Throne.
So at UCon this year, Victor Raymond, a player in M.A.R.
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