Well I am now a couple of months into my first ever Tekumel Campaign (I ran a one off game years back with the old GOO rules, but not long after the group disbanded as people moved away), so I thought I'd put up a post on my mussing. To be honest, I seem to recall some one on the Tekumel list asked if I would do this ages ago when I mentioned I was going to be running the campaign and I forgot all about it until now - I have a tendency to be a little scatty.

I am running the campaign in an online chatroom each Wednesday since my group is quite diverse and has trouble getting together physically. Not surprising when 1 of the players is a new mother with two tinny ones to look after, another is her partner and two more are also the mother and step father of young children.

Due to the medium, we have had to tweek a few of the rules here and there but to be honest far fewer than expected. In fact, the only thing we have altered is the miniatures based combat system. Even then the combat system has remained largely in tact, we have just dropped the use of miniatures which required way less adjustment than we expected.

My group consists of a mix of people who are or were, till the campaign began) totally unfamiliar with the setting and a few people who were on nodding terms with it. The latter being two of the women from my original one-off Tekumel game.

Similarly the group is mixed between people with a limited experience of different rules systems and those with a wider experiences. One of my players had never played and RPG other than a computer game until she joined the group.

Despite this, all of the players picked up the rules very quickly indeed - with just 2 or 3 sessions we found that most of the rules came as second nature to the players - even those with little or no experience of various rules systems. The idea of the 2/3/4 stile attribute for initiative and damage seemed to really befuddle some of them at first for some reason and I anticipated having to explain it time and again during the course of play but by the 2nd or 3rd session it came so naturally to them that they couldn't understand why they had found it troublesome the first week.

The players have now taken to both the rules and the setting in a BIG way, I am very happy to say and the game is flowing nicely with no rules confusions or arguments.

For my part, I've come to really love them. I was initially a little uncertain about if I liked one or two elements of the rules or not, but having actually gamed them now I've decided I do - a lot. Normally I'm strictly a d% sort of a guy, but I've re-evaluated that now.

I need to re-read the sorcery section to fully grasp the relevance of the "Sorcery level" vs Skill level in sorcery as I'm not immediately spotting what effects it has but then despite having 2 sorceresses in the party it doesn't seem to have come up.

So in short, for me and my group, the rules have been quite a hit. I just need to get that one last minor detail strait in my mind.

Yep, that did help. Cleared up my uncertainty and also told me I should have trusted my instincts, as that was what I thought it was. For some reason I started to doubt myself and thus confused myself. 🙂

Yeah, the rules are working really well. I'm very pleased my group has taken to them as well as I have. 🙂