A Typical Day in Jakálla!

Here in Kingston, Ontario, the temperatures are in the high 30's - 38 or so if you count the Humidex. In Jakálla, the "City Half as Old as the World", located on Tsolyánu's southern coast, that would be an average day with temperatures getting as high as 51 degrees C on the hottest summer days.

And Professor Barker doesn't even mention the Humidex! :-0!

The Hlutrgú - Update

Hlutrgú

I have had word from Rod Campbell of Highlander Studios today that he expects to have the Hlutrgú sculpts finished for the first week of June, at which point they can be sent off for master and production molds to be made. With luck there will be no hiccups in this process and I will be able to put in an order for castings before the end of June.

As mentioned before, this will be our first release through our "Tekumel Club". It's a bit of an experiment really, as I have never handled the miniatures production and sales before. A couple of things are apparent, however:

1) We cannot afford to stock inventory;
2) As such we will be ordering only moderately-sized orders from the manufacturer, so there may be delays in orders if someone orders and we don't have anything in stock.

This may mean that the best way to go is through pre-orders only. That is we only cast up what people order. At this point, I haven't got a good idea how many people are actually interested so I think production runs are going to have to be of limited size.

I still don't have a final costing yet. I posted a list of preliminary prices a while back, but it still depends upon how many figures will fit on the molds. (And whether the molding or metal costs have changed in the last several months.)

I'll post more when I am able to fix these items down a little better.

Best regards,

Howard Fielding
The Tekumel Project

Those Blanks I was talking about....

Some finished females

Another view

Work-in-progress males

Here are two of the finished female blanks mentioned previously, and two in-progress male blanks. The full list of stuff I'm hoping to fit into our master mold is:

1) Princess Vrisa;
Male blanks:
2) Male Advancing;
3) Male Attacking;
4) Male Running;
5) Male Firing Bow;
6) Male Standing at Ease;
7) Male Sitting Cross-legged;
8) Male Kneeling on one knee;
Female blanks:
9) Female Advancing;
10) Female Attacking;
11) Female Running;
12) Female Firing Bow;
13) Female Standing at Ease;
14) Female Sitting Cross-legged;
15) Female Kneeling on both knees;
16) Female Kneeling on one knee.

It has occurred to me that the Princess's sword might limit space, but we shall just have to deal with that issue when it crops up.

Princess Vrísa Vishétru of Saá Allaqi

Princess Vrísa Vishétru of Saá Allaqi

The first "Reward" figure for our Tékumel Club program has been completed, sculpted by John Winter of TinMan Miniatures. The first of many, I hope, which will be very expensive for non-club members but very cheap for those that join. Membership - as they say - has it's privileges! ;-)

This figure will not be available for a while yet, as master and production molds have yet to be made and we are waiting on some other figures to fill the master mold with...

Speaking of which, those additional figures are a series of male and female blanks that John is also working on. Several are completed and I've slowed things down a bit (sorry) by adding even more pose variants to the mix. This was done both to fill out the Master Mold and add standing and sitting poses suitable for civilians. The intent is to have groups of civilians made for each of the distinctive regions in their regional form of dress.

One thing I always like to have in my games - if available - is "entourage", which as used by my old Architecture Profs meant to add people, cars and trees and the like to your architectural drawings. I want to be able to do a game set in a market filled with vendors and customers and passersby. :-)