- Empire of the petal throne for indee games pdf#
- Empire of the petal throne for indee games full#
- Empire of the petal throne for indee games windows#
Many hexes are simply plains, forest, mountain etc. The information density of the large-scale maps is rather low, however they show relatively few terrain types and only major cities, roads, ruins, coastlines, and rivers.
The maps are clear, and brightly-colored, especially because regions dominated by non-human races are shown in red. Two of the three maps are large-scale, measuring roughly 83 miles to the hex and covering together some 5600 x 5000 miles of land and sea-the territory of the ‘five empires’, the main geographical arena for the game. Karen Englesen’s rather abstract pictures are particularly atmospheric they feel like native productions from the world itself. Sketches by other artists mainly show the creatures of Tekumel.
Empire of the petal throne for indee games windows#
A number of the illustrations are by Barker himself and hence valuable as windows into his imagination of the setting, including architecture, clothing, and armor. In places their draftsmanship may seem amateurish by current standards, but the art is much better than that in T.S.R.’s earlier offerings. The rulebook is sparsely illustrated, mainly with full-page drawings. Both of these represent an advance over the OD&D booklets, which had minimal tables of contents. The rulebook lacks an index, unsurprising for a game of this vintage, but makes up for this in part through a fairly elaborate table of contents and the division of the text into numbered sections and subsections. I would not be surprised to learn that it contains as many words as G.o.O.’s Tekumel, though the later has twice the page-count.
Empire of the petal throne for indee games full#
rulebook is a full 8 ½ by 11 inches and laid out in double columns of rather tiny type. Unlike the smaller booklets used for OD&D, the E.P.T. The box included a comb-bound rulebook of vi + 114 pages, a 4-page booklet of tables and charts, three plastic maps, and two d20s-though a full panoply of additional dice, from d4s to d12s, is needed to play. The box itself was of rather light cardboard and mine perished long ago-a shame, as it bore an atmospheric drawing of the city of Bey Sy by Barker. Finally, it is very hard to assign numerical ratings in a review of an early classic, as production standards in particular have changed so much over the years.Į.P.T. to the products of its day, particularly the original version of Dungeons and Dragons (hereafter OD&D) published in 1974, than to new releases of 2008. remains a viable game today, I think it is unrealistic to evaluate it without taking its original context into account. Finally, though I am interested in the extent to which E.P.T. Though I have played and refereed the game, that was some years ago, therefore this is a capsule review.
Empire of the petal throne for indee games pdf#
I am reviewing the original edition (1975), not the current reprint or PDF version, so I cannot comment on their quality as reproductions. I should make a few things clear at the start. is still attracting players more than 30 years after its appearance. Blogs and notes on message boards show that the E.P.T. The latest edition of The Book of Visitations of Glory, a Tekumel APA, includes an adventure explicitly designed to be usable with E.P.T. It has been reprinted several times and is currently available in hardcopy from Tita’s House of Games and in PDF form from RPGNow. itself has not been relegated to the scrapheap. Broadly speaking, Tekumel draws on the civilizations of India and Mesoamerica, with added inspiration from authors like Howard, Burroughs, and Vance.īarker’s world has been used as the setting for a number of RPGs since E.P.T.-most recently, Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne from Guardians of Order (2005). In the depth of its history and cultures it bears comparison with Middle Earth, but its roots lie in very different material than Tolkien employed. Barker, is one of the most exotic and elaborate alternate worlds ever to grace an RPG. And what a setting it is! The planet Tekumel, the brainchild of M.A.R. Its most notable innovation is providing a detailed setting, something no roleplaying game had done before. It is, arguably, the second RPG produced, and it marks the first appearance of some concepts widely used in future products. The game deserves attention for many reasons. I was surprised when I searched the database and found that T.S.R.’s Empire of the Petal Throne (hereafter E.P.T.) had no reviews.
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