What are Zentek Tales?

You may be wondering, what is a "zentek tale" and why should you care? Actually, you're probably also wondering, what is a zentek anyway?

The easiest part of the above multi-part question is the caring part - because it's fantasy-adventure material!

In order to explain this properly, a little history is in order. I promise to keep this short.

Back in 1977, I was in the Navy, on a ship that had just steamed up to San Francisco for a 2-3 year stint in drydock. As a navigation specialist, I can assure you that being in drydock is like being bored out of your skull - what kind of navigation does one need to do when the ship isn't even in the water?

(Answer: none - we do grunt work, like sandblasting the hull, and boatloads of paperwork!)

My best friend at that time came to invite me to this really neat thing going on down in one of the other crewmen's room - a game unlike anything else I'd ever heard of. It was called "The Empire of the Petal Throne," and he said it was a lot like D&D. (I wasn't really up on most of this sort of thing, but I knew roughly what that meant.)

To keep this short, let's just say that, as a long-time fan and avid reader of fantasy fiction, I was completely captivated. I took this game home (which, by the way, saved my sanity, or at least I think it did) and continued to play and referee (act as the dungeonmaster) the game, convincing my fiancee and some college buddies to join me as well. (We even once did a 24-hour scenario involving 100 player-characters - crazy, eh?) When I graduated and got my first job as a software developer, I found other allies in our quest for adventure, and some new games.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of taking some of the concepts I found in several of the games and combining them into EPT, but the more I worked on this, the more it became clear that I was doing what I saw as "other people's work." So, I invented my own fantasy role-playing game, containing elements of many of the games I'd seen, read and played, but with a heavy content of as much original material as I could dream up.

A large portion of that original material was devoted to the invention of the zentek character type, and upon this the idea of the Zentek Tales is based.

Okay, you say to yourself, got that much. Now, what is a zentek? A zentek is what I called the spirit-warrior character type in the game, but they are neither spirits nor warriors.

It's late and this is getting kind of long, so I'll explain that in my next post!