Question about what books to buy

[Gurkhal]

Hi there!

A few months back I came into the possession of the Swords & Glory 1 book, three volumes of “lone wolf” adventures, a beastary as well as the Book of Ebony Bindings and I have a question regarding what books to buy next. I’m planning to buy Swords & Glory 2, which will cost me about $ 60. Now with this being a significant investment for a student like myself, I was wondering how much information regarding the temples and the deities? Or is it necessary to buy Mitlanyal vol. 1 and vol. 2 to get a proper hold of that side of Tékumel?

Secondly how much information does the novels set in Tékumel aid in understanding the world and how it works? Can I make it without them, or is it necessary to read them to get a hang of things? Once again they represent an investment for me of about $ 80 or so for the latest three so it would be interesting to know if they would be worth it, or if I can happily let be on ice for a while and maybe buy them in the future.

Thank you for your time

[dulahan]

Personally, I loved the novels. Though can see how being in Sweden they might be a bit expensive, shipping wise.

Mitlanyal is pretty much THE place to go for Temple and Gods stuff. Though the Book of Ebon Bindings has a touch of the Demonology side. Together they make for an awesome three books though.

Swords and Glory Volume 1 - 1-3 (Since there's 3 volumes in book one) are great places for pretty much everything Tekumel, I don't think there's any single book with that much information in them. They do have some info on the temples' organizations and on the gods too, even a lot. It's just not anything like Mitlanyal if you're -really- interested in the religion side of things. (Since Mitlanyal is pretty much two books at least as, if not bigger than Swords and Glory and all about the Religious side of things.)

[Gurkhal]

There's been some change of plans as the guy who sold Swords & Glory 2 won't ship it to Sweden . But I'll probably will be able to get my hands on the Mitlanyal series from Amazon.com. I saw that there was someone on this forum who wanted to sell this book a few years back so I'll probably check with him before giving up on that front. If I would somehow stumble across any of these books I'll of course try to buy them, but since that's not really likly to occur I'll settle with some other solution.

And that leads me back into the use of novels, pre-made adventures and articles on this site and the Interspace as my sources for further knowledge about Tékumel culture and society, complementent by downloads from Drivethroughrpg.com. What novels are more telling about the Tékumel universe? I've heard that The Man of Gold and Flamesong were litterary better works, but know for a fact that the later triology is easier to get hold of and cheaper.

A short note is that its a shame that not more stuff regarding Tékumel has been put up onto Drivethroughrpg.com, but that's just a short rant from me.

[Lubidius]

"A short note is that its a shame that not more stuff regarding Tékumel has been put up onto Drivethroughrpg.com, but that's just a short rant from me."

I have to agree. Also, what they do have on there should have been scanned with text parsing software, as what you get is basically photos of each page into images. This basically makes them worthless to search through.

I wish all Tekumel products would be scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) capable text parsing software into pdf, and available for sale on drivethrurpg and similar sites for reasonable prices. What they have already scanned and placed online for sale are reasonably priced, but they should have included text searchable formats. They are still worth the price though, regardless.

[Gurkhal]

For those that it may concern I've ordered Mitlányal book 1 and 2 but failed to aquire Swords & Glory 2 as the seller simply demanded a price above what I was willing to pay.

Nevertheless my efforts to preapere for a game set in Tékumel continues and I have decided to shift the setting from a city of my own creation, Itzáyal on the southern coast, to Jakálla. Due to a lack of official information in my possession I will have to mix what information I can get with my own ideas.