You have a number of points to allocate based on the campaign style Gritty Realism offers 30 points, The Middle Way offers 35, and Heroic Fantasy 40 or more. Fortunately, you need only pick one from a page or so of explanations.
There are 20 to choose from, and which one you should follow depends largely on your clan you can always be a rebel, but society on Tekumel hates rebels, so be prepared to be hammered into a round hole in play, however square a peg your PC is.
Otherwise, each player has to digest 4-5 pages of clans to pick one each clan has a social status, which will be important later, as well as a traditional set of occupations and gods and within each clan are lineages, which are mostly fluff rather than crunch. This requires you to understand, or be told, which clan is most appropriate for your character concept Patrick Brady’s campaign was based around the Clan of the Hall of Stone, which he deliberately designed to be a one-stop shop covering all the likely character concepts, and I recommend that the GM picks or creates a similar clan.
Step 2: Each player chooses a clan for his or her character. Fortunately, a table of sample names is provided, as EPT is notoriously difficult in this regard (although the last time I ran the game, one player called his character “Uptanogud”, which I loved). The GM and each player then work collaboratively to create the character. Each player comes up with a character concept, such as a scholar priest or a master swordsman. Stat points are for stats and attributes, and can be increased by taking defects skill points are for skills and resource points are for gear.įirst, the GM comes up with a campaign concept and discusses it with the players. YMMV.Įither way, you need to track three point pools separately during character creation. If you are an immersive roleplayer intent on a campaign which will last years or decades of real time, you’ll probably love it it doesn’t suit me, or my group. It’s a complex, point-buy character generation system derived from GoO’s Tri-Stat system, and a far cry from original EPT’s simple percentile die rolls. This is where the game rules and I part company, I’m afraid. It’s assumed that PCs live in Tsolyanu, and the game is focussed on that nation. However, trust me, if you have never played RPGs before, this is not the one to start with the rules are complex and the setting is delightfully different from anything you know.īefore I proceed, I should mention that Tekumel is the planet, and Tsolyanu is one of the five human empires on the northern continent. This highlights what’s different about Tekumel very nicely, as well as explaining the history of the game and the usual “what’s an RPG?” section. (I had the honour of playing in Patrick Brady’s Tekumel campaign, albeit briefly, and I consider him one of the best GMs I have ever met.)Ĭhapter 1: Introduction to Tekumel (4 pages)
In my case, a 243 page PDF from RPGNow written by Patrick Brady, Joe Saul, and Edwin Voskamp. This is the latest incarnation of EPT, published by Guardians of Order in 2005.