The Forgotten Role Playing Game

The Forgotten RPG Almost everyone in gaming, and quite a few non-gamers, have heard of "Dungeons and Dragons". Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson first published the first real "Dungeons and Dragons" books in 1976, which most gamers call "Original D&D". They developed it from an earlier booklet called "Chainmail" which was basically rules for adding fantasy elements to war games. Quite a few gamers have heard of Greg Stafford, who first published material from his "Glorantha" setting, which he called "Rune Quest", also in 1976. But even most gamers have forgotten the real first role playing game. In 1974, M. A. R. Barker privately published his game world, which he called "Tekumel", also known as "The Empire of the Petal Throne". The first professional publication of Tekumel, strangely enough, was from the same company as Gary and Dave founded, called "Tactical Studies Rules", commonly called TSR. Today, that particular edition garners very high prices on eBay and other sales sites, if you can find someone willing to part with it. But, for some reason, Tekumel (abbreviated "EPT") never caught on as well as did Runequest, and certainly not as well known as D&D. Tekumel is far better detailed by Mr. Barker than is either D&D or RuneQuest. Barker even developed his own language for his game world. The rich setting certainly is very similar to J. R. R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". Fortunately, Barker had enough of a following that a company was set up called "The Tekumel Foundation" which is quietly reprinting some of Barker's works. If you are interested in following up on this, I can do no better than to direct you to: ( https://www.tekumel.com/ ) wherin the Tekumel Foundation sells and distributes reproductions of some of M. A. R. Barker's Tekumel material. I would like to suggest you start with purchasing the three reprint books, "Empire of the Petal Throne", and the two volume set of "Swords and Glory", the Player's Handbook, and the Tekumel Sourcebook. I do not think you will be disappointed.