Tékumel is very well suited to the long-form tabletop roleplaying campaign. It has cultural, social, and historical depth, it covers a vast area, and has tremendous detail to it. It is also incomplete, which invites further participation by game masters wanting to contribute their own ideas to the game. So it should not be surprising… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: Starting My Campaign
This is the first Dispatch to the Petal Throne, and is highly appropriate, since it involves an adventure undertaken by one of Bill Hoyt’s characters, a priest of Keténgku… “ . . .Know ye, O Perfumer of the Nostrils of the Gods, that an intelligence has come from your city of Urmish of most curious… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: The Haunted Sákbe-Road
Just got back from Gary Con XVI, so this is about how to run Tékumel convention events and how to attract players for a Tékumel campaign. At Gary Con XVI I ran three different adventures, all based out of the northern Tsolyáni city of Khirgár. Here is the description for the second one: Deep in… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: Gary Con XVI
Starting in The Strategic Review, Vol. II, No. 2, published in April 1976, reports of what was happening in Prof. Barker’s campaign began to appear. These were written in the form of dispatches sent through the Imperial bureaucracy, possibly requiring some sort of action – thus giving readers a window into the World of Tekumel. … Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: What About All Those Dispatches?
Probably the biggest issue that people have with running Tékumel is that the setting is an unknown and foreign land, and nobody is actually from there. Original Dungeons & Dragons seemed to assume that the adventurers were on the edge of civilization, and beating back the forces of darkness. Tékumel, by contrast, seems like you… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: Fresh Off the Boat
In my Tékumel Thursday post last week, I talked about making a decisive change to my Tékumel, essentially creating my own branch on the Tree of Time. I did this by eliminating one character and their later actions from the campaign. Put another way, I decided that the starting “canon” for the campaign would come… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: What About All Those Player-Characters?
My World of Tékumel Having played in the world of Tékumel for over 25 years in the original campaign, I never fully understood what Prof. Barker meant by his statement in the Tékumel Sourcebook, “…we cannot keep your Tékumel from drifting away from mine. This is as it should be. You have just bought MY… Continue reading Tékumel Thursday: My World of Tékumel
Setting Up Your Tekumel Campaign Having played Tékumel for a very long time with Prof. Barker, I didn’t anticipate some of the choices I would be faced with when running my own Tékumel campaign. I think a lot of Tékumel fans attempting to start a campaign try to encompass all – ALL – of the… Continue reading Tekumel Thursday: Setting Up Your Campaign
I’m writing a short essay for people who are new to Old School gaming, but who are considering running an Old School campaign. There’s lots of good advice out there about doing that directly, but not as much about how to think about it – Matt Finch’s excellent Quick Primer is good, and if there… Continue reading Advice for new referees, Part One
