Feeling Tekumel

[FYI: this may turn into a weird, haphazard series of posts]

Just got back into town...um, Paraguay Town (i.e. Asuncion) yesterday morning after a delightful 5- or 6-day (who can count?) mini-vacation in Mexico. Hope everyone had a happy Easter, by the way.

I've got a lot on my mind (as usual) but with regard to gaming, most of my thoughts these last few days have centered around M.A.R. Barker's world of Tekumel, a campaign setting familiar to folks who are familiar with the game Empire of the Petal Throne. Most of those readers fond of frequenting "old school" blogs have probably encountered articles on EPT, though it's not one I've written much about. However, being in Mexico got me thinking of Tekumel, and I've dug out my PDFs of EPT (purchased back in 2014) and took the time to reread them. I find there's quite a bit I'd like to say on them.

But  the question might be asked "what brings JB to the subject of Tekumel in the first place?" Well, Mexico, of course. Some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Oaxaca region...that's where I was over the Holy Week/Easter holiday. Oaxaca is a mountainous southern state in Mexico, bordering the Pacific Ocean. It has some great beaches like Puerto Escondido and Hualtuco...some nice resorts if you're into that kind of thing (I prefer the rinky-dink beachfront hotels with the hammocks), and good surfing. But we weren't at the beach, this trip...we were in the capital (the city of Oaxaca) up in the mountainous center of the state.

Oaxaca is a region of many cultures...eight major ones, by their count. The Aztecs really never conquered it because of the difficulty assaulting cities in a mountainous region (up until the last couple years, even the "good" highway to Oaxaca was incredibly long and curvy, if not downright treacherous in some parts). There is a lot of cultural pride in Oaxaca...they celebrate their indigenous traditions and dances on an annual basis (think "Hawaiian Luau" style at the hotels plus weeklong festivals in the summer), and the place is a center for traditional handcrafts ranging from elaborate brocaded shirts and dresses, to ceramics made from black Oaxacan clay, to elaborately painted wooded figurines, to painting and sculpture and music.

Their cuisine is considered the best in Mexico, which is saying something considering the overall quality of Mexican cuisine, and a lot of American chefs study in Oaxaca. They pride themselves on traditional foods including grasshoppers and grubs, worms and ant eggs...but they also have mariscos (seafood) from the coast, and their own tesado-style of cooking meats. They are probably best known for their mole salsas (you can get four or five different kinds in most restaurants: black, red, green, yellow, etc.) and their mezcal (that's the drink like tequila that has a worm in the bottle...I prefer it to tequila as it's generally smoother, more refined...plus, tequila is the devil). Their food tends to be more sweet and less spicy (they're big on chocolate)...but that's a trend one finds the farther south you go through Mexico and central America.

Religion is a pretty big deal to Oaxacans and they have a couple incredible cathedrals and old monasteries, the stonework and facades of which rival some of the better churches in Europe. The temple of Santo Domingo de Guzman is spectacular, its huge interior completely effaced in gold to a degree that would make a dragon blush...I kid you not (the screenshots I can find on the internet really don't do it justice). Holy Week in Oaxaca was packed to the gills with tourists from around the country as well as other parts of the world.

But the real highlight for me is Monte Alban...the 2000+ year old ruins of a pre-hispanic city-state that sprawls in an elaborate design on the top of a high hill. My son was very excited at the prospect of seeing pyramids and "looking for treasure" and while he didn't actually discover any gold (he did get a few keepsake souvenirs) he was duly impressed. Again, it's hard to find images on google that really do justice to the place...it's so extensive, so well preserved (being situated where it is and abandoned prior to the coming of the Spanish, it was protected for years before archaeologists started excavating in earnest), you really have to see it to take in its magnitude. And these are just the skeletal remains of a nation that thrived and conquered at the same time the Jews were chaffing under the yoke of Roman dominion. The culture that built it was every bit as sophisticated as anything found in Europe or Asia or the Middle East at the time...even without the large domesticated animals and iron/steel production.

Amazing stuff...especially when you factor in all the artifacts and actual treasure that was looted from the ruins and now resides in Oaxacan museums. I took a lot of photos of placards and historical texts that I need to translate into English (I might post some here, eventually). But it was looking through these things, and the museums, and the preserved culture, that got me thinking about Tekumel...because Barker based so much of his world on Mesoamerican culture. And the main thought that went drumming through my head was this:

It is so hard to hold onto one's culture.

Barker's campaign setting is an amazing one. Truth be told it's an infuriating one (to me), because it is so damn good...but I digress (I'll talk more about EPT's setting in a different post).

However, despite its excellence, his date/age ranges feel like their off by at least a decimal point. The premise of the setting extends over a timeline of more than 100 millennia...Tekumel is a lost Earth colony that was terraformed some 60,000 years from now before falling into a pocket dimension and "evolving/devolving" culturally over the course of another 50,000 years into the setting in which PCs find themselves.

That's just an incredibly long time, even in terms of science fiction. The idea that ANY remnants of human culture would remain after such a length of time is terribly far-fetched. Some of my readers are old enough to remember a time before wireless telephones and personal computers and television sets with more than half a dozen channels...and that's a piddling amount of time ago. Consider how different the human race is, culturally, from just 1000 years ago. Hell, consider that the Golden Age of classical Greek culture was only (approx.) 2500 years ago...and the rate at which we've advanced...politically, philosophically, and technologically...only continues to  speed up, the more we grow. 2500 years from now our advances...and changes...in culture should be more fantastic than anything present day folks can imagine.Will we even think like (what we call) humans 10,000 years from now? How about 20,000?

110,000 years? It's hard to even imagine what the next 20 years will bring to the world.

Look at how hard it is to hold onto one's culture. Many of the ideas about Monte Alban are based on pure speculation...we don't even know what it's founders called themselves (for that matter, etymologists are unclear of the origins of the name "Monte Alban")...and that's a culture that lasted for over 800 years, only dying out (well, being conquered by the Zapotecs really) around 750CE. That all the hard information on a culture that lasted for nearly a millennia, and that only disappeared around the time of the European middle ages, can be LOST...just gone!...is incredible. All that remains is a love of eating bugs.

[I should mention that the crickets are pretty tasty...I mean, they're toasted and salted, and if you throw 'em into a batch of scrambled eggs, you'd just think they were bacon. Chile and lime, or rolled into a taco is the common way to eat them, and I have. I just prefer smaller ones, as you're less likely to be picking insect legs out of your teeth]

Even the Zapotecs lost a huge amount of their culture...family trees and oral histories and their natural writing system and religion. A lot of that was, of course, by Spanish design and, while I think we can all admit that violent conquest, repression, exploitation, and cultural destruction are BAD, it's difficult to argue that human sacrifice, an extremely large part of Mesoamerican culture and religion would have been a GOOD thing to retain. In Oaxaca there were laws preventing the depiction of Christ on the cross for a couple-three centuries (despite the forced conversion to Catholicism), because they didn't want anything that had any appearance of human sacrifice as "spiritual." Stamping out the indigenous blood rites was at least as high a priority as digging the gold and silver ore out of Oaxacan mountains.

It is so, so easy to lose culture and cultural identity. Do you know what your ancestors were doing 100 years ago? How about 150?

I know I give Paraguay a hard time...often...but at least they retain their indigenous language (Guarani) and something like 80+% of the people speak it. There's no other country in South America that comes remotely close to that...and we're talking about a country where the poor people are as likely to be white and the rich people as likely to be brown as the inverse (THAT's not something you can say about most Latin American cultures...certainly Mexico's economic caste system can be distinguished in large part by the amount of melanin in a person's genetics). And they only managed that due to iron-fisted, isolationist dictatorships, and a subsequent backwater history (perhaps due in part to the former).

[even so, how much have they lost? Aside from their language...and perhaps chipa and a few handicrafts...Paraguay has no cultural identity of its own. They celebrate nothing of their pre-hispanic history, have no real cultural traditions. Their main "big" tradition, besides tea drinking/sharing, is the asado (grilled beef get-togethers) that occurs weekly, where family and friends gather and partake of their beloved cow meat. Oh, how they love their beef! But cows were only introduced to South Americans by the Spanish...what, then, was their "asado tradition" prior to the conquistador's arrival? Knowing a bit of their prehispanic history, I have my suspicions, but it's really not the kind of thing you can bring up with Paraguayans. As far as they're concerned, it's always been beef on the grill, forever and ever, Amen]

Tekumel is a fantasy world based on a premise that strange cultural evolutions occur when you submit people to a crucible of hardship (like being cut-off from your spacefaring empire, marooned on a resource-poor planet, surrounded by hostile lifeforms). Strange things occur, and strange cultures arise. Whose to say that, given the speculative theoretics of Tekumel's situation, it's impossible that a culture like the Tsolyani could arise after 50,000 years? Well, me, I suppose...but only because I've seen up close how easy it is for a sophisticated culture to disappear. AND I've yet to see a case where the culture that replaces is can in any way match the level of sophistication of the culture that was lost.

Does that make sense? It takes hundreds and/or thousands of years to reach a level of cultural sophistication (architecture, art, government, religion, philosophy, etc.). When that is DESTROYED...whether by natural forces or a savage conquest...it doesn't just get replaced with a new sophisticated culture. Cultural sophistication takes TIME; Oaxaca, despite clinging hard to its past, is only a shadow of what it once was. Like its people, its culture is a mix, a mestizo. Beautiful  in its own way, wonderful in its own way, but hamstrung in part because of its synthesis. Because it hasn't had enough time to cook yet.

Which I suppose would make Barker's world appear even more plausible...it's had the thousands of years to "bake" and (culturally) establish itself. I guess I just find it difficult to believe that the people struggling to survive in the wake of a post-apocalyptic galactic catastrophe could get it together enough that they'd survive the overt hostilities of the Hluss and Ssu. With everything else going against them, how did humans manage to fight off those homicidal maniacs AND build multiple thousand year empires?

I guess that's why it's a fantasy game.

I plan to write more about Tekumel and EPT in the coming few days (and probably more stuff about Mexico), but I also want to do this A-Z Challenge thang (it's a good "blogging" exercise). If I get to everything I want, it's probably going to mean a LOT of text. I better wait till Sunday to post this.

Quick Addendum to Might and Magic

And I mean really quick.

In my last (very early morning) post, I mentioned (briefly) M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne and its skill lists. For those who don't have EPT for reference, here's how it works:

In EPT you receive a handful of skills during character creation that help round out your character. These come in a couple different varieties. First there are background skills, similar to AD&D's "secondary skills" in that they are professional skills with no real game mechanics attached. These include things like butcher, carpenter, and wheelwright, as well as physician, poet, scholar, and slaver.

Actually, some have some mechanical benefits: the assassin-spy-tracker (that's one skill) can hide in shadows, and the alchemist can brew elixirs and poisons, for example. There are a few, but most don't  have more effect then, "Oh, fisherman? You know how to fish." New characters receive a random number of these skills...as few as one, or as many as ten.

In addition, characters receive from two to five professional skills. These come from a list based on the character's class, of which there are only three: warrior, priest, and magic-user. Warrior skills are pretty much weapon proficiencies (spear, axe, crossbow, etc.) but priests and magic-users have a selection that ranges from additional languages to spells. While the starting number of pro skills is random, characters receive an additional skill with every level, so eventually a character can claim all on the list (each list has a dozen or so). The interesting thing is that they must be chosen in order...a warrior can't learn bowman until he's learned crossbow, for example. The most advanced skills cannot be claimed until all the lesser skills have been learned.

Summoning The Vapor of Death. Ooo!

In addition to this, priests and magic-users have a random chance per level of learning bonus spells from one of three separate lists ("groupings"). The spells in these groups are very similar to the ones in OD&D, and they are grouped by power (so Group I spells are the "weakest," though many are still plenty potent). Group III spells cannot be learned until 4th level, but with enough experience, EPT spell-casters can become quite powerful.

Over-all, a very interesting system and very "magical" in feeling. I very much like the "knowledge needs to be built on knowledge" attitude of the professional skills. The random bonus spells are appropriate for a campaign setting that features psychic abilities (and the, perhaps, spontaneous development of such abilities), but probably doesn't make much sense for my current project.

Ok...got to go. More later (I hope!).

A Model Wargame

Recently I've had the chance to encounter Chirine's Workbench, a blog by a war gamer and modeling aficionado who happens to have discovered Empire of the Petal Throne and Professor Barker a couple-three decades ago, and has been gaming in Tekumel ever since. Chirine describes himself as a modeler first and foremost, and was first tasked with painting and creating miniatures for the Prof's EPT games "back in the day" before becoming enamored with the world setting; now he continues to play (and model) using the richly detailed setting along with a home-brew rule set that combines EPT with pieces of OD&D and Chainmail.

Watching videos of his recent mini-skirmish campaign (posted to YouTube here), a couple thoughts strike me, besides the obvious comparisons to Mordheim and its (online, unofficial) expansion, Lustria: Cities of Gold.

A) With regard to D&D (and all its variations, everything from EPT to my own Five Ancient Kingdoms), we just don't give enough consideration to the game's wargaming roots. So many things about the game...what might be called, I suppose, "D&Disms" are based in and on the needs and wants of the wargaming subculture. 3rd editions five foot squares are a poor substitution for the games originals inches and scales (from a war gamer's standpoint) yet is an attempt to make sense of the need for ranges and scales anyway. Personally, I have never worried all that much about whether or not a person was shooting their short bow at long range or short range...or the radius of light sources...or even (usually) the f'ing diameter of a fireball spell! Instead, I'm just "roll to hit with your bow" (assuming the character's not engaged in melee) or "you see the monsters" or "you're going to launch that thing underground into a tiny chamber? What exactly are you hoping to occur?"

[alternatively, I'll just say, "ok" and roll saving throws for the bad guys]

The micromanaging of ammo and light and rations and encumbrance and ranges, etc. is just so low down on my priority list, it just often slips through the cracks of my games (I'm writing this as a DM or "referee"). It's just not IMPORTANT...and yet we still pay dutiful attention to it when noting movement rates and tracking how many arrows are left in the quiver. This attention to detail during the game (to be clear, shopping for high, soft boots or short, hard boots during character creation can give you a distinct image of the PC you are playing), slows the pacing of the game...and when you are trying to keep a group of players engaged and enthralled in your imaginary world, it's important not to disrupt that pacing.

Having said that, I have played and enjoyed war-games in the past and my personal preference is to have those games move along at a good pace, too. An over-abundance of "realism" can make a long, slow game even longer and slower...which I detest (yes, I realize that this stance is anathema to many die-hard war-game fanatics). I don't know...maybe I just have a problem with opponents taking a shit-long time to maneuver and measuring every measly half and quarter inch when my assumptions of battle are that they tend to be kind of fast-paced and (at times) sloppy.

I will say this: Chirine's skirmish/battle was a lot quicker paced than some war-games I've seen, and faster than many (recent) edition D&D games, despite maneuvering several teams of miniatures for each player, and using two different playing surfaces.

B) Models are cool.

That's something I keep forgetting or letting slip from my mind, and not in the way I do with "D&D's wargaming roots" (the latter is something I always know "intellectually" but simply fail to process or consider or give weight to). I remember models from when I was a kid...and here I'm talking painted miniatures that represent characters/monsters...models that were owned by older players I knew but with whom I never gamed. They did not have the fantastic, realistic paint jobs you see in those Golden Demon award winners or anything, but they were still so cool...they inspired me, made me want to play a game that used them. I can see the same glow in my son's eyes when we see miniatures in a game shop...he wants to have them and hold them and play games with them. I saw it with the teenagers that I introduced to Warhammer back in the day, too.

I don't know what it is about gaming minis...they're not dolls (or "action figures") that have posable limbs for play. But their sheer static nature makes one want to fill the void...the lack of movement...with story and imagination. "This is my adventurer X; here's what he's going to do." Anyone ever see that old Henry Thomas movie, Cloak & Dagger? It's about a kid that talks to his imaginary friend, personified in an RPG miniature (from a secret agent game) that he carries around with him.

I love miniatures, love to paint them, sometimes even love to modify 'em. Here's the thing though: few of us (outside the truly dedicated) have the time and money to really go whole hog with the miniature thing. Certainly, I could never afford them as a kid...I shoplifted one once (as a pre-teen), but didn't have any paints or tools or knowledge and so did nothing with it. We never used minis in our games as kids anyway...using those stand-up cardboard cut-outs and "area maps" in Marvel Superheroes was a novelty for us (and one that we eventually dispensed with).

As an adult, I found myself (for a time) with an excess of both money and time, and became a collector and painter of minis. Since then, the money has receded somewhat (kids, dogs, mortgages, debts) and the time has dwindled to almost nothing (kids). I still have plenty of unpainted (or half-finished) minis, just no time to paint. As for modeling...wood-working and sculpting set-pieces...well, I'm fairly hopeless with anything requiring much "hands-on" creativity. Comes from being 1) a perfectionist (stopping before I start) and 2) never wanting to 'get messy.' Just beginning to paint minis in the first place (circa 1997) represented a bit of a breakthrough for me.

[and, yes, improvement does come with practice]

Killed some PCs with a very similar model.

However, using "found objects" for models (as Chirine does at times) or re-purposing other things for minis/models (like rubber frogs, plastic animals/monsters, those giant packs of generic zombies, etc.) IS something I can do...and something I experimented with good results, back when I was still running a B/X game down at the Baranof. It was a lot of fun to use minis in a game...but it sure was a pain in the ass hauling all the props and whatnot to the venue (something that really hit home when I was transporting my gear to last summer's Dragonflight convention). If you have the stereotypical basement or garage or unfinished concrete bunker in which to play with your buddies, that's certainly ideal...though I'd imagine enticing new players down to your "lair" might be tough (ugh!).

ANYway...those were my main thoughts when watching Chirine's videos. It's after 3am here, so I better hit the hay.

[oh, yeah...go USA!]