I was going to say that it reminded me of Skyrealms of Jorume in tone, but given their respective publishing dates, I think saying the reverse would be more fair. This is a vast, richly-detailed, and totally alien setting. If all of the above hasn’t piqued your interest, I’m not sure what will.
The natives freed themselves, civilization collapsed, anarchy reigned. After millennia, “Something Bad” happened (I swear to God this is part is canon), and Tekumel was shunted into a pocket dimension, marooned from Galactic civilization. Mankind’s starfaring civilization at the side of its alien allies, colonized and terraformed an alien planet and segregated the native inhabitants. Suffice to say that the earliest dates in the setting are some thousands of years in our Earth’s future. The history, as written, spans 10 eras, the third oldest of which is described as occurring some 25,000 years in the past…the dates associated with the earlier two are lost to antiquity. So I will attempt to radically summarize the million, billion-year backstory of the setting.
’s “summary” of the background of the setting alone stretched into 1200+ words, and many of the assumptions we as gamers make about settings (and this product has brought into focus how many assumptions we-or I at least-do take for granted) simply do not apply here. According to the introduction to this new edition by Guardians of Order, the good professor still runs a weekly Tekumel game (known colloquially as the “Thursday Night Group”), and has done so since the game’s creation.Īnd this, loyal readers, is where the wheels could leave the wagon. Barker, a linguistics Professor from Minnesota who, according to (which I assume is an authority on the subject), first started writing material for Tekumel in the late 1940's. The University Professor in question is one M.A.R. I suppose this is what 50-odd years of development by a university professor can drum up in terms of consistency and coherence.
And given how freaking odd a lot of the setting elements are, that is quite a feat. The setting is airtight the effects of nearly every peculiarity of design are properly extrapolated into the larger society. I’ll take his word for it.īut toss in the presence of magic, high technology, active Gods (who seems to be largely without stated direction or purpose), an incredibly hostile ecosystem including monsters and it sounds like you would have had the “Kitchen Sink” setting to make World of Synnibar look like Harn. I’m told by a friend who has a much greater knowledge of the setting, its pedigree, and anthropology in general than I that the human culture presented contains elements of Aztec theocracy, the Indian caste system and the clan/honor systems associated with feudal Japan. Humanity, as presented, had a culture I was unsure I had ever seen described anywhere in the real world. The setting was human centric, but there were some truly non human races detailed for use as player characters (no “pointy-eared graceful” humans or “small humans” made the cut).Įxamples from the pear-shaped, artichoke-headed Pachi Lei, to the radially-symmetrical four-armed/four-legged, Aghoyya give a better idea of what was presented under the banner of “Non-Human” and are not any more or less odd than the others half-dozen presented…consider them a “Strangeness” baseline reading. Though decidedly low-tech and high-magic-which would lead you to think that this was a sword and sorcery genre piece-it was set in the distant future following a cataclysm and thus, highly advanced technology was still present and semi-available to the characters. Which I will grant you, makes reviewing it prety tough The culture was very complex, well-detailed and unique almost to the point where it defied summary.
Even the swords are made from specially-treated Dinosaur hide rather than steel. Firstly, it was nothing at all like Tolkien. Now what I can recall of Empire of the Petal Throne is mostly positive. We are talking about the original release date of the second RPG ever published ( Empire of the Petal Throne), and Tekumel, the setting on which it hung it’s coat. Two years before the release of Star Wars, two years before the death of Elvis Presley, two years before the discovery of fire…we are talking history here folks. Jump with me in the way-back machine, and return to the year 1975. Here, folks, we have a blast from the past.
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