Empire of the Petal Throne

Overview

Empire of the Petal Throne is a fantasy roleplaying game by M. A. R. Barker, set in his invented world of Tékumel. Barker self-published a small "manuscript edition" in 1974, and TSR, Inc. released it as a boxed set at Gen Con VIII in August 1975. Its rules are a close cousin of Dungeons & Dragons. Its world is something else entirely.

Most fantasy games of the 1970s borrowed a vaguely medieval Europe sprinkled with Tolkien. Tékumel instead offered a far-future planet whose civilizations evoke ancient India, the Middle East, Egypt and Mesoamerica; gods who are really vast extradimensional beings; alien races; ancient technology treated as magic; and a society so dense with custom, caste and ritual that newcomers must learn how to behave before they can hope to survive. It is often called the first published Campaign setting in roleplaying games.

Origins

Barker was a linguist — a scholar of Urdu and South Asian languages who had studied at the University of Washington and Berkeley, spent years in India and Pakistan, and moved to the University of Minnesota in 1972. He had begun imagining Tékumel around age ten, and from the 1940s onward he developed its histories, cultures and languages on thousands of pages, sharing it with a circle of friends in something like proto-gaming.

In Minneapolis he met the new game. Mike Mornard, one of D&D's original Lake Geneva playtesters, moved to the Twin Cities and introduced him to it. Barker saw at once that the rules could carry his world. In about six weeks he wrote his own version, self-published it in 1974, and began running it for a regular group — which soon included Dave Arneson, who called Barker his favorite referee. When Gary Gygax saw the work, TSR agreed to publish a revised version, one of the company's first roleplaying games after D&D.

How it plays

The framework will be familiar to anyone who has played early D&D: characters with rolled attributes, three professions — warrior, priest and magic-user — experience levels, hit points, spells and armor class, with a Game Master describing the world and adjudicating the players' actions. Barker added a few mechanical ideas of his own, most famously the critical hit. On a roll of 20 on a twenty-sided die an attack did double damage, and a 20 followed by a 19 or 20 was an outright kill — simulating, he wrote, "the 'lucky hit' on a vital organ."

The real difference is at the table. The default premise casts the players as foreign barbarians stepping off a ship into the port city of Jakálla in the Tsolyáni Empire, ignorant of its laws and etiquette. A session might involve securing a patron, joining a clan, avoiding a fatal insult to a noble, or descending into the Underworld: the buried remains of older cities, which the Tsolyáni periodically raze and rebuild in a custom called ditlána. Players who ignore the culture are likely to end up in the arena or on an altar. Advancement came, as in D&D, largely through treasure — measured in the local coin, the kaitar.

Reception & impact

Contemporary reviewers were dazzled by the world and wary of the rules. Rick Mataka in The Space Gamer called it "the 'now' game for all fantasy gamers." Jon Freeman praised it as "incredibly detailed, well thought out, and self-consistent," but worried that "there is probably no one other than Barker who can adequately run a campaign." Rick Swan later wrote that it "has less value as a game than as a sourcebook," while calling it "without peer" as a generic fantasy setting.

TSR's support was uneven, and the financial terms of the deal made the boxed set expensive and less profitable. After 1977 Barker took Tékumel elsewhere, and it passed through a long line of publishers and new rules — Swords & Glory (1983–84), Gardásiyal (1994), Guardians of Order's Tékumel (2005) and others — as well as five novels, beginning with The Man of Gold (DAW, 1984). None achieved broad commercial success.

Legacy

EPT established the idea that a world could be the product: that players would buy a setting for its history, cultures and maps rather than only for its rules. The World of Greyhawk folio, Chaosium's Glorantha in RuneQuest, and later Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance all walked through the door it opened, and its non-European, science-fantasy palette anticipated later settings that looked beyond medieval Europe. Tékumel is reported to have influenced settings such as Hârn and Skyrealms of Jorune. Barker's critical-hit rule, meanwhile, became one of the most widely copied house rules in the hobby — the "natural 20" is now a byword for luck.

The game's standing changed in 2022. Barker died in 2012. In March 2022 the Tékumel Foundation, which manages his literary estate, confirmed that he had written Serpent's Walk (1991), a neo-Nazi novel published under a pseudonym by a white-supremacist press, and that he had served from 1990 to 2002 on the editorial advisory committee of a Holocaust-denial journal. The Foundation repudiated those views and said it receives no royalties from the novel. Some historians, among them Stu Horvath in Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground (2023), have since chosen to leave the game out of their accounts; others continue to discuss it for its undeniable place in the history of the form.