Far moreso than OD&D, Empire of the Petal Throne is a game that wears its pulp fantasy roots on its sleeve, provided you’re willing to look beneath its baroque surface. Tékumel is amazingly cool: a brilliant cross between a sword-and-planet and dying earth setting that evokes writers like Burroughs, Howard, Smith, and Vance without being a pastiche of any one of them. Barker, was a professor of linguistics with firsthand experience of India and Pakistan, as well as a lifelong love for the pulp greats, Egyptology, and ancient American civilizations pretty much ensure that it’d be like nothing anyone had ever seen - and it is. I knew of the setting, naturally, at least in broad outline - a colony world in the far future gets mysteriously shunted into its own pocket dimension where magic works. I never ever saw a copy of the original rules until the late 90s. It’s the fabulous pulp fantasy world that makes this game stand head and shoulders above its contemporaries… Of course, very few gamers love Tékumel for its rules. James Maliszewski posted about Empire of the Petal Throne on his Grognardia blog: While published as fantasy, the game is sometimes classified as science fantasy or, debatably, as science fiction. Over the subsequent thirty years, several new games were published based on the Tékumel setting, but to date none have met with commercial success. It was one of the first tabletop role-playing games, along with Dungeons & Dragons. Barker, based on his Tékumel fictional universe, which was self-published in 1974, then published by TSR, Inc. (Here is the link directly to the the books on DriveThruRPG.)Įmpire of the Petal Throne is a fantasy role-playing game designed by M. For those of you interested in Old School gaming, the Tékumel Foundation just announced the release of new new hardcover and softcover editions of Empire of the Petal Throne.