House of Worms Humor

Tékumel, despite its outward appearance, is actually a science fiction setting – a "secret sci-fi" setting, as I sometimes call it. Clarke's Third Law is in full effect and pretty much everything that is seemingly fantastical has a rational explanation (for a given definition of "rational," admittedly). I've leaned into this quite heavily over the last few years. I decided that the Achgé Peninsula was a storehouse of lost and forgotten ruins of the Ancients, many of which contained some remarkable pieces of "sufficiently advanced" technology. Likewise, the culture of the native Naqsái (and that of their west coast cousins, the Hnákho) owed a lot to the presence of these technologies, however misunderstood they are in the current age.

As a result of events almost two years prior in game-time, the characters inadvertently released three malevolent otherplanar entities from their prison. They were then bidden by the prison's equally otherplanar guardian to find and defeat them. One has was beaten at the Temple of the Ages to the west of the city-state of Mánmikel. The location of the second is now known: occupying the body of a Livyáni woman in the colony of Nuróab (in a strange parallel to what happened to Aíthfo) and causing havoc throughout the Peninsula as a result. The location of the third entity remains unknown.

Currently, the characters are searching for a transplanar energy siphon, a type of Ancient technology known colloquially as a "god trap." Their researches suggest that such technology might be found on an island old texts call the Isle of Sweet Gentility but that the local Naqsái call the Isle of Ghosts. The island is many weeks travel westward along the coast of the Peninsula in the direction of the Hnákho. Part way through their sea journey, they stopped to re-supply (among other things) at the city-state of Chámara. 

The people of Chámara have two great loves: trade and bureaucracy. The last couple of sessions have focused on the characters' attempts to wade through the city's seemingly endless procedures for doing pretty much everything, hence the image above, created by a player, who found the temporary derailment of the characters' goals amusing. Truth be told, these sessions have been amusing, especially as the characters grapple with the fact that, unlike the Tsolyáni, the Chámarans don't seem to go in for bribes and other forms of peculation. The rules are the rules and, if they want their supplies, they'll need to put up with all the interrogations, forms, and waiting in queues that the Chámarans throw at them.