Well, here it is – as complete a version of Tirikélu as you’re ever likely to see. It flows faster that way and, with imaginative players, fights feel agreeably cinematic.
Empire of the petal throne names full#
“He’s going for a full attack.” “I’m going for a full parry.” Once you resolve that, you’re free to put any narrative interpretation you like on the result. ( GURPS, I’m looking at you.) Tirikélu works best if you keep it abstract till after you roll the dice. Nowadays there are quite a few role-playing games where you make a detailed decision about what you’re trying to do, then wade through pages of rules to find your chance of doing it. It’s all handled at the point the wound is taken. So taking damage above a certain percentage of your hits can reduce your skill, and may require a check to stay conscious, but you don’t need to keep a tally of how much damage each wound caused. It seemed almost too simple on paper, but in practice we found it allowed for rich tactical choices.Īlso I wanted to avoid hit location and lots of book-keeping, but not simply to revert to the amorphous pudding of hit points of D&D. In Tirikélu that became the principle of full- and half-actions. His contention was that a moderately skilled fighter could, by concentrating on defence, hold off a more skilled opponent who was dividing his attention between attack and defence. First, in a treatise by a duellist from the 17th century (quite possibly Sir William Hope) I came across the concept of “safe fighting”. Make combat quick to use but more than just the endless dice-rolling of, say, RuneQuest. Recapture the evocative magic of those early adventures by cross-pollinating EPT spells with ideas from The Book of Ebon Bindings. Simplify the system so that the rules didn’t keep tripping up the play. This was the early 1990s, so it seems a little early to talk of an Old School Revival (not a term I like anyway) but the aim was there. “HBS Factors” and “Healing G9s” gave the game a tabletop miniatures flavour rather too far from the freewheeling shared stories we were looking for.Īnd so I returned to my own rules and began to refine them into the game I had hoped Swords & Glory would be. The other book, the rules, appealed less. My group switched for a while, but it was the S&G Sourcebook that was getting dog-eared from use. I began constructing my own set of Tékumel rules from the fragmentary description in the Professor’s letters, like reconstructing an unknown animal from just a few bones.įinally “the new EPT” appeared. “We now have one roll to hit, one to get past the shield, one for damage (minus armour) and if one rolls 0 on a 10-sided die on this last roll, then a critical hit for more damage.” We were hungry for a more authentic experience of Tékumel, so we would pass around the Professor’s letters (he was always incredibly generous with his time) and pick endlessly over comments like this: This was the era of RuneQuest and The Fantasy Trip. The original EPT had served its purpose for a while, but my group were moving beyond those D&D-inspired mechanics. Barker in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I was treated to tantalizing glimpses of “the new Empire of the Petal Throne” he was writing.
0 kommentar(er)
