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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. The game deserves attention for many reasons. It is, arguably, the second RPG produced, and it marks the first appearance of some concepts widely used in future products. Its most notable innovation is providing a detailed setting, something no roleplaying game had done before. And what a setting it is! The planet Tekumel, the brainchild of M.A.R. Barker, is one of the most exotic and elaborate alternate worlds ever to grace an RPG. 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. Broadly speaking, Tekumel draws on the civilizations of India and Mesoamerica, with added inspiration from authors like Howard, Burroughs, and Vance.
Barker’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). But E.P.T. itself has not been relegated to the scrapheap. It has been reprinted several times and is currently available in hardcopy from Tita’s House of Games and in PDF form from RPGNow. 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. as well as later systems. Blogs and notes on message boards show that the E.P.T. is still attracting players more than 30 years after its appearance.
Thus this review. I should make a few things clear at the start. I am reviewing the original edition (1975), not the current reprint or PDF version, so I cannot comment on their quality as reproductions. Though I have played and refereed the game, that was some years ago, therefore this is a capsule review. Finally, though I am interested in the extent to which E.P.T. remains a viable game today, I think it is unrealistic to evaluate it without taking its original context into account. It is more revealing to compare E.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. 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.
Components:
E.P.T. was sold as a boxed set. 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. 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.
Unlike the smaller booklets used for OD&D, the E.P.T. rulebook is a full 8 ½ by 11 inches and laid out in double columns of rather tiny type. 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. 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. Both of these represent an advance over the OD&D booklets, which had minimal tables of contents. The rulebook is sparsely illustrated, mainly with full-page drawings. 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. 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. Sketches by other artists mainly show the creatures of Tekumel. Karen Englesen’s rather abstract pictures are particularly atmospheric; they feel like native productions from the world itself.
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. The maps are clear, and brightly-colored, especially because regions dominated by non-human races are shown in red. 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. Many hexes are simply plains, forest, mountain etc. and nothing more. Regional maps covering a more restricted area in greater detail might have been more useful, but since these were among the first maps ever produced for RPGs this may not have been apparent at the time. The large-scale maps clearly show their derivation from wargame maps; they even use the hex-numbering system pioneered by the wargame publisher S.P.I., an unexpected example of cooperation between two companies that would later become bitter rivals.
The third map in the box is quite different, smaller in size (22” x 27” rather than 22” x 34”) and in scope. It depicts just one city—Jakalla, a seaport that is the designated starting-point for campaigns. Some 77 locations on the city map are numbered and listed in an appendix to the rules. These are mainly public buildings such as temples, palaces, bridges, etc. but a significant number of armories (where adventurers might purchase weapons) and tombs are noted as well. The maps have a pleasingly exotic, though quite readable, calligraphy for place-names. Because they are plastic, they are relatively immune to the beverage and snack stains that can bedevil paper maps, but they are also hard to fold flat.
Background Information:
After a brief introduction, the rulebook offers a short history and description of the setting (7 pages). Tekumel is an alien planet with several indigenous intelligent races and a rather inimical ecosystem which was terraformed extensively at some point in our distant future. Humans settled and thrived there along with representatives of other starfaring races, while the original inhabitants were driven back to zoos or reservations. Then, for undisclosed reasons, Tekumel’s solar system was cast into an otherwise-empty pocket dimension, isolating it totally. Natural cataclysms caused by the dimensional shift and depletion of resources (especially iron, in which Tekumel was never rich) combined to destroy the old civilization within a few centuries, and the planet’s original inhabitants and ecosystem began to reassert themselves. The climate also worsened. Tekumel was always a warm world but it became hotter still, so that conditions in the temperate zone resemble those of earth’s tropics and the equatorial zone became uninhabitable for humanity.
Despite this origin, the overall feel of the setting is more sword-and-planet (or simply fantasy) than hard science fiction. A major reason for this is that all these events lie in the distant past—25,000 years or more before the game is set. After rapidly disposing with Tekumel’s beginnings, Barker then sketches the main outlines of several civilizations that have risen and fallen in the interim, culminating with the second Tsolyani empire, which at the game’s start has already endured some 2, 354 years. The introduction paints the earlier civilizations in very broad strokes, enlivened by telling details—like the several sentences on Nayari of the Silken Thighs, a thoroughly Machiavellian queen who rose to rule over her husband’s corpse and manipulated her court through her sensuality while building an empire by terror and atrocity. Barker also notes in this historical section the growing contact between humans on Tekumel and a group of extradimensional beings that come to be worshipped as gods. Overall, the descriptions of previous eras serve more to convey the flavor of the setting than to recount history in itself. The introduction then turns to current conditions, describing the government, society, and military of the Tsolyani empire and (more briefly) of surrounding states and nonhuman races. It concludes with a rather detailed discussion of the current political situation, noting major political factions within the empire and the threat of war with the neighboring state of Yan Kor.
Aside from a description of the divinities later in the rules, these few pages are almost the only section set aside to give background information on the setting. Some types of information that loom large in later Tekumel RPGs are almost entirely missing from E.P.T. For example, the details of the elaborate and restrictive clan system or ‘day in the life’ accounts do not appear here, and the emphasis on military matters perhaps reflects Barker’s own background as a wargamer (a set of miniatures rules for Tekumel was published not long after E.P.T.) Yet despite the very limited space devoted to setting the scene, Barker is quite successful in creating the feeling of encountering an actual alien world rather than a mere invention. He sustains this illusion not through a mass of information, but with vividly imagined and suggestive specific details. The Sakbe road system is a good example; these are elevated and fortified roads (think the Great Wall of China used as a throughfare). Barker notes that a Sakbe road has three levels, each open only to certain social classes or groups. The roads thus become not merely lines on the map or sites for travel and encounters, but reflections of a foreign social system. Similarly, the historical section of the introduction suggests several (imaginary) books one might turn to for further reading on each civilization. Barker lists the titles not just in English translation but in their original form and indicates where on Tekumel each work can be found. Such suggested readings remind us that there is much more to learn about these civilizations, create the impression of scholarly depth, and reveal that on Tekumel knowledge is carefully hoarded and preserved.
Language plays a major role in underscoring Tekumel’s reality. A linguist by profession, Barker created a suite of invented languages for his alternate world. Though he later published whole works on these tongues, their main reflections in E.P.T. are names. The book bristles with literally hundreds of these—names of people, places, and above all creatures. In addition, a few of Barker’s drawings are accompanied by lengthy captions, written in the Tsolyani language and script, with a transliteration and transcription. These seem (to my untutored eye, anyway) to have the complexity and integrity of a real foreign language—they do not look like disguised English, as the fragments of invented languages in some RPGs do. It is a measure of how seriously Barker approaches the languages of Tekumel that accent marks were added to the Tsolyani words throughout the rulebook, apparently by hand, before it was published; this must have been an immensely laborious task. The rulebook contains appendices explaining the Tsolyani language’s pronunciation and script. The discussion of pronunciation is rather forbidding, deploying the technical language of phonology (“voiced velar fricative”) and offering some analogies that most readers probably find unhelpful (gh is pronounced as in Arabic “ghayn”). Though this can make using Tsolyani words in the game somewhat difficult, the foreignness of the language reinforces the reality of the setting. I suspect many E.P.T. referees over the years have simply muddled through as best they can, following Strunk’s advice—if you are not sure how to pronounce a word, say it loud!
Given the importance of language in E.P.T., it is unfortunate that the book does not include a table of Tsolyani personal names, or guidance for generating them. Barker assures prospective referees “any brief series of syllables will do” but fake-sounding names would surely weaken the illusion of an alternate world. Barker corrected this oversight by supplying detailed rules for generating Tsolyani names in an early Strategic Review; this article is now freely available on the web, as are some lists of names and even a name-generating program.
Character Generation:
E.P.T.’s system for generating characters resembles OD&D's, though with some significant variations and innovations. Players roll for their character’s basic ‘talents’: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, comeliness, and psychic ability. Rather than OD&D’s 3d6, however, these rolls are made on percentile dice. Scores in talents can yield a bonus (or minus) to combat rolls, though oddly not to hit points themselves. Psychic ability, which replaces OD&D’s wisdom, affects a character’s ability to use spells. The rules forbid swapping points from one category to another and insist that what you roll is what you get, though they do allow discarding substandard characters before the game begins. Further, talents may increase in the course of play; there is a 20% chance one talent will rise whenever a character gains a level. As in OD&D, characters have the choice between only three professions, as classes are called in E.P.T.: warrior, priest, and magician. The last two professions are closer in conception than in OD&D. Characters may be of either sex; though Tsolyani society is patriarchal, women may claim all of the rights of men by declaring themselves independent, or aridani. E.P.T. also permits characters from a variety of nonhuman races, though its rules for this are quite sketchy and more suited for generating non-player characters. Interestingly, although social rank is quite important on Tekumel, it plays no role in character generation. Hit points, as in OD&D, are based on a d6 for all classes, and do not simply increase by 1 die per level; instead a chart is used. The rulebook makes clear something that remained obscure in OD&D—characters are to re-roll their hit points from scratch at each level, but the total can never be less than it was before.
E.P.T. moves beyond its roots by including a simple skill system. Characters begin the game with a set of ‘original’ skills, which are divided into three groups: plebeian, skilled, and noble. In all, some 57 skills are available. Though Barker notes that the rules omit less-interesting skills and concentrate on those useful in adventuring, the range is still quite wide, from crafts like carpet-making (a plebeian skill) to assassin/spy/tracker (a noble skill). The rulebook explains the noble skills, but treats most of the other groups as self-explanatory. Players roll to see how many skills they have, and from which groups, but may choose whichever ones they wish. Additional skills may be acquired when gaining a level, or learned in-game by spending time and money.
A second set of skills, linked to professions (classes), works rather differently. Players again roll on a table to determine how many they start with, but the skills are arranged hierarchically, with a dozen for each profession. A typical result might be “choose 3 of the first 4 skills.” After that, characters get additional professional skills only by rising levels, beginning with the lowest-ranked skill they do not already possess and proceeding in order. The higher professional skills are thus available only to higher-level characters; even with the best starting roll, a character would attain skill 12 only at level 8. For warriors, most professional skills are weapons, and a fighter cannot use a given weapon until he has the requisite skill. Since most melee weapons have the same damage and hit profile, this has has little impact. Missile weapons, however, only begin to appear at skill 5 on the warrior’s list, and two-weapon fighting at skill 9. For priests and magicians, most professional skills are in fact spells or arcane abilities, though the first two priest skills are knowledge of languages. Although priests and mages can fight with some melee weapons, they never receive weapon skills—a slight rules glitch. A single table governs the chance of failure with all skills (though not combat rolls); this decreases from 60% at level 1 to 0% at level 9. High-level characters not only have more skills but are much more effective in using them.
Magic:
As already noted, priests and magicians receive some spells or magical abilities as part of their beginning skills. There is little overlap between the spells so available to the two professions. Those for priests resemble the magic of OD&D clerics fairly closely (cure light & heavy wounds, detect good/evil, etc.) while those for mages, though adapting some spells from the OD&D lists, are more original. For instance, the first spell gained by mages is ‘control of self’ which permits them to stop their respiration or heartbeat indefinitely without ill effects, recall memories perfectly, grip something with great strength, etc. The sharp difference between a priest’s and a mage’s arcane abilities erodes at higher levels, however, because both professions draw from the same set of 59 ‘bonus spells’. This is divided into three groups of increasing potency, though the even the lowest group includes spells causing permanent madness and a plague that will kill victims in 2 turns. At each level increase, a player rolls against a chart to determine how many bonus spells of which groups the character gains. At lower levels there is a good chance none will be gained at all. Therefore, there is nothing like the chart in OD&D showing how many spells a magic-user has at a given level; depending on die rolls this can vary widely. Barker explains each spell’s effects concisely—sometimes, perhaps too concisely. Compared to OD&D’s very terse spell descriptions, however, E.P.T.’s seem a bit expansive. Oddly, few of the spells have much specific ‘flavor’ of the setting.
Magic on Tekumel is less reliable than in the OD&D universe. When casting a spell or using an arcane ability, a priest or magician must roll for success just as for any other skill. Low-level magic users thus will fail more frequently than they succeed in casting attempts. Further, attack spells aimed at a single target require ‘to hit’ rolls on the combat table, though failure here means that the spell struck the wrong target. Of course, the targets of many spell would also be allowed saving throws, so a spell-caster might require three successful die rolls for an attack spell to take effect. With some exceptions, spells can be used but once a day and regenerate at 6 a.m. A few very powerful spells keep their casters from using any other magic for up to a week afterward.
Combat:
E.P.T.’s combat system is very close to the OD&D norm. Combat is abstract; rounds last an entire minute and there is no attempt to simulate every blow or parry that takes place. Instead, players roll d20 and consult a table, cross-indexing their own level against the target’s armor class. These classes are a bit more extensive than in OD&D, because of a peculiarity of Tekumel. Iron is rare there, and as a substitute for it people have learned how to treat the hide of the chlen, a dinosaur-like creature, so that it can be molded and then hardened almost to the consistency of steel. Common weapons and armor are made of chlen-hide, which allows them to take fantastic forms. A few more armor classes are needed to take into account real steel armor, which is rare and expensive. As in OD&D, only warriors can use all weapons and armor; priests cannot employ edged weapons and magic users are limited to steel daggers and no armor. The weapon restriction on priests seems an odd carry-over—certainly there is nothing in the religions of Tekumel to suggest that priests should not shed blood! Its main in-game function is to restrict the best magical weapons—all edged—to the fighters.
Following the lead of OD&D, most weapons (and most monsters’ attacks) do a d6 of damage, though daggers do a d4 and a few arms do d6 + 1 or 2. E.P.T. introduces some variations to this simple damage system. Any natural 20 on an attack roll yields double damage for the attacker, and a second throw of 20 indicates a lucky hit that immediately kills the opponent. When higher-level characters fight those with significantly fewer hit dice, their base damage rises considerably. An eighth-level warrior fighting opponents with 2 hit dice would do a base 3d6 of damage, for instance. These added dice of damage can ‘spill over’ from one opponent to another, allowing a high-level character to dispatch several considerably weaker opponents in a single round—mook rules long before the term was coined. E.P.T. also includes simple rules for grappling and subduing an opponent; this requires rolling under the average of a character’s strength, intelligence, and dexterity, with the possibility of a saving throw for the target. By current standards, none of these ideas seem innovative, but they were all new in 1975. Some, like higher damage or instant death for critical hits, have become standard in many systems.
Alignment and Religion:
Human characters in E.P.T. have the choice of two alignments—good and evil—which represent adherence to one of two pantheons. It’s odd that Barker chose those terms, rather than OD&D's law and chaos, since he explicitly notes that the distinction is not really a moral one and later Tekumel RPGs use the terms stability and change instead. Neutral alignment is available only to non-humans and represents attitude towards humanity rather than adherence to a set of gods. Alignment places some restrictions on character’s actions, but the game itself imposes stronger ones—members of a given party are forbidden to attack one another during an adventure, though ‘good’ characters can fight duels and evil ones declare enmity after an adventure is over. Good and evil characters do not associate with one another, and a party must consist of people of the same alignment (with perhaps some nonhuman neutrals).
Though OD&D had clerics, it did not include information on religions, leaving this up to the referee. E.P.T. presents a full set of divinities for characters to worship. In contrast to earthly polytheistic religions, characters are supposed to devote themselves to only one god. It is possible to shift allegiance from one god to another, but this requires time spent at the temple, money, and a successful die roll. Each pantheon consists of five gods and five cohorts, or demi-gods, one for each main divinity. Barker provides very atmospheric names and titles for the gods ('Ksarul, ancient lord of secrets, doomed prince of the blue room'), indicates their main areas of activity or sponsorship, and describes their priests, including ritual costumes. Unfortunately, the whole account is so compressed that relatively little of the richness of Tekumel’s religion comes through. Indeed, the setup appears rather mechanical. The good pantheon has five main gods: a supreme/ruler god, a war-god, a god of magic and scholarship, a goddess (wife to the ruler), and a god of the dead. The evil pantheon has precise counterparts to these. Further, with one exception (the wonderfully-named 'Dra the Uncaring’) the cohorts of each god are quite similar to the gods they serve. The overall effect is roughly the same five divinities repeated four times over. Later publications have fleshed out the gods of Tekumel enormously and it is a pity that some of that information did not appear here.
The gods of Tekumel are not merely a social fact; they act in the world (and the game) very directly. E.P.T. simulates this through divine intervention rules, the first such to appear in any R.P.G. Divine intervention is not available at all to first-level characters, and to more advanced ones once a week at most. An attempt at attracting the gods’ help may have three outcomes—divine retribution for effrontery, no effect at all, or actual divine aid. For lower-level characters, retribution is by far the most likely outcome, but by level 6 both retribution and aid occur 30% of the time (and divine inaction 40%). Petitions to the cohorts rather than the chief gods are more likely to be met with favor, and less likely to bring retribution, but the aid they offer will be less fulsome. Priests and magicians have small bonuses on their divine intervention rolls, and any character may sacrifice gold, gems, magic items, and even intelligent creatures to boost his or her chances. The good gods accept the undead or certain hostile nonhumans as sacrifices, while the evil ones demand human victims. Even successful appeals for divine intervention are likely to have unlooked-for consequences, for the gods will interpret requests as they see fit!
Campaigns and Adventures:
E.P.T. presents a straightforward frame for beginning campaigns. All characters are presumed to be foreigners who have reached the seaport city of Jakalla (which has its own detailed map). Since the Tsolyani are a rather xenophobic people and quick to take offense at even unwitting violations of their complex etiquette, characters do not wander about the empire, or even the town, at low levels. Instead, they are supposed to reside inside the foreigners’ quarter of the city and wait for natives to seek them out as potential employees. The rulebook gives tables for potential employers and the jobs they offer, such as joining a trading party, searching for particular thing or person, participating in a quarrel or intrigue, serving the empire in a secret mission, etc. It also presents tables that can be used to figure out pay, either for player characters or n.p.c.s. Though artificial and in some ways limiting, this frame for the early stages of a campaign has its advantages. Because characters are foreigners, their players need not know a great deal about Tsolyani society and culture; that information can be introduced gradually. Their hiring for some mission explains why the group of characters have come together in a party and supplies a direction for the session.
To judge by the encounter tables and examples provided, adventures are expected to take place outdoors (including at sea) or in the underworld, as E.P.T. calls its dungeons. The setting offers several rationales for such large underground labyrinths. In Tekumel’s ancient high-tech past humans burrowed deeply beneath the surface, leaving among other things a subterranean railcar system that is still in operation. Tekumel’s post-catastrophe history is so long that many ruins from previous civilizations, some now mostly buried in the passage of time, dot the landscape. The rulebook provides a suggestive partial list, with entries like “the curious city of Hnakyal, where dwells He Who Has No Tail.” Moreover, in a custom known as ditlana, many cities ceremonially renew themselves every 500 years by leveling their sites and rebuilding over the ruins of old city, leading to underground complexes of many layers. Barker assumes that readers will be familiar with the concept of dungeons already, but does give advice on how to create them and some brief examples. He stresses the importance of ‘Saturday Night Specials,” that is, unique and carefully planned complexes with special inhabitants or challenges. His examples include the ‘River of Silence’ under Jakalla, which leads characters to an island on which Death himself dwells, and the ‘Tomb of Mnekshetra, the Lesbian Mistress of Queen Nayari of the Silken Thighs’ which can transport unwitting characters thousands of years back to Nayari’s own throne room. Despite its inclusion of a detailed map of Jakalla, E.P.T. offers no guidance or tables for urban adventures—a characteristic shared by OD&D, which mentioned town adventures but supplied no rules for them.
Players used to versions of D&D in which challenges are carefully calibrated to the power of the player-characters may find E.P.T. a bit of a shock. As in OD&D, some encounters are likely to prove overwhelming except to the largest or most skilled parties. This is particularly true of outdoors encounters; parties may find themselves facing as many as 600 bandits, for instance, or 400 Chnelh, an apelike creature. Rules for hiring N.P.C.s and some examples in the text suggest that Barker envisioned outdoor parties as including dozens or hundreds of retainers along with the players. Of course, not every encounter is meant to be fought—or is even hostile. Still, adventuring on Tekumel is definitely hazardous. It is revealing that, while the example of play given in OD&D concludes with a party member saying “Onward, friends, to more and bigger loot,” the equivalent in Petal Throne apparently ends with an imminent T.P.K.
Some of the mechanics for outdoor adventures have been copied a bit too directly from OD&D. For example, the daily chance of becoming lost in clear terrain remains 1 in 6. That figure made sense in OD&D, where wilderness adventures were supposed to be the exploration of unknown terrain. In E.P.T., in contrast, movement through ‘clear’ hexes will likely represent travel through the well-settled and mapped countryside of the Tsolyani empire, perhaps even along lesser roads. Similarly, the 1/6 daily chance of becoming lost that E.P.T. assigns to sea movement in coastal regions would make ocean-going commerce impossible.
Nonhumans and Monsters:
E.P.T. offers a rich assortment of nearly 70 alien creatures to fight, evade, bargain with, or even befriend, divided between flying, terrestrial, aquatic, and underworld ‘monsters’ and nonhuman races. Some are leftovers from Tekumel’s native ecosystem, others are interstellar species imported long ago, and some were created on Tekumel through technology or magic. Barker’s descriptions of them are typically a full paragraph; while this may seem short by the standards of some rulebooks today, it was expansive for the time. In any case, the descriptions supply enough information for play and often evocative details that make the creatures seem more real than those in some fantasy bestiaries. The Ssu, for instance, a hostile nonhuman race indigenous to Tekumel, “smell like musty cinnamon and make a high, sweet chiming sound.” The atmospheric descriptions make up for the sparseness of illustrations; the rulebook includes pictures of only about 16 of Tekumel’s alien lifeforms. Many of the creatures, both native and interstellar species, have six or more limbs, and insects and crustaceans are also common.
In keeping with the rest of the setting, the creatures have a sword-and-planet feel, rather than belonging to hard science fiction. They serve mainly to provide challenges to adventurers, rather than being part of a realistic ecosystem. Monsters in E.P.T. are often deadly opponents. Roughly a fifth of the creatures have poisonous stings or bites, and quite a few others have special attacks or powers that can disable or kill an opponent very quickly. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the Sagun, a fungoid creature artificially created to guard treasure, which emits poisonous spores. Surviving these requires both a saving throw to avoid immediate death, and a cure disease spell within two turns—otherwise the spores germinate within the victims’ lungs and kill them.
E.P.T.’s nonhuman races deserve notice. The game presents a full dozen of these—indeed, a few more if we include a few semi-intelligent ‘monsters’ like the dragonish Serudla. Most are interstellar species, once allied to humanity (though for many this is no longer true), but several are natives to the planet and confirmed enemies of mankind. Barker lavished extra care on the nonhuman races and they are one of the most attractive and original parts of the game. One of my personal favorites is the Ahoggya, a hairy, radially symmetrical creature with four legs, four arms, and four ‘faces’ but no head—instead, a horny carapace surmounts their shoulders. The rulebook is too short to permit much discussion of nonhuman cultures, but Barker does suggest how they are likely to interact with humans, and offers a few other tidbits here and there—we learn in passing of an Ahoggya political/religious role known as ‘the dancer in the circle’, for example.
E.P.T.’s rule-system creates one problem for dealing with intelligent foes that OD&D’s did not. Parties may of course encounter either humans or aliens of higher levels. The rules helpfully supply tables to determine what magical armor and items these will have, so constructing higher-level warriors is reasonably straightforward. This is not true, though, for priests and magic users. As already noted, the number and types of spells that these professions have is not standardized by level, but the result of die-rolls at each increase. As the rules stand, there is no way to generate this information for an n.p.c. except to roll for original spells and for increases at each level, a rather lengthy procedure, especially when it must be done for a random encounter. A table giving the average number of spells of each type known per level would have been a very useful addition to the rules.
Treasure:
Although E.P.T. adopts the OD&D treasure system nearly wholesale, including magical swords with personalities, it also includes many magical items which are redolent of the setting. Eyes are a good example of this. These are small, oval devices crafted by an ancient civilization, with an eye-like aperture on one side and an activation stud on the other. They may have an inscription in an ancient tongue identifying them, and a gauge showing how many of their 100 charges remain. Eyes have a wide variety of functions, anything from resurrecting the dead to providing a blast of intense cold or serving as an inexhaustible storage unit. They are usable by any profession and offer warriors more magical opportunities than they would have in OD&D. They also have striking names, such as the Abominable Eye of Detestation, or the Excellent Ruby Eye. Miscellaneous magic items likewise have evocative names, sometimes referring to famous figures of the past (the Cup of Subadim the Sorcerer). Some are actually remnants of ancient high technology, for instance, the Chariot of the Gods is in fact an air-car and the Lightning Bringer a self-propelled artillery piece. Barker frequently notes how many of these items are known to exist and where at least some of them are, a touch that adds verisimilitude (and offers adventure hooks).
Experience and Careers:
Characters advance in levels by collecting experience for treasure and killing opponents. Awards for slaying monsters are 50 points per hit die, a nice compromise between the 100 points in OD&D and the drastically reduced schedule introduced in Greyhawk. Yet there appears to be a serious glitch in the experience system. OD&D introduced a rule giving characters reduced experience for dealing with easier challenges; a seventh-level character would receive only 2/7 experience for killing a 2 hit-dice monster, for instance. E.P.T. generalizes this rule so that at higher levels characters simply receive a fraction of the experience regardless of the threats they face. At very high levels, this reduction is severe—an eighth-level character gets only 10% of the normal experience award, for instance. This is problematic in two ways. First, it would have been more straightforward simply to raise the number of points needed to achieve higher levels, which would have essentially the same effect. Second, the rulebook states that above level 9 a flat 10,000 points are needed to achieve the next level. It notes that since ninth-level characters receive only 10% of their experience value, attaining level 10 really means accumulating 100,000 points, and that since at level 10 and above characters get only 5% , higher levels require 200,000 points. The difficulty here is that, according to the table, moving from level 8 to 9 requires 90,000-120,000 points (depending on profession), and because eighth-level characters only acquire 10% of experience, they actually need roughly a million experience points to reach ninth level. It is hard to believe that Barker intended this, or to square this with the much smaller number of points needed to rise above ninth level. Of course, it is possible that Barker simply never noticed the problem. In an early Dragon, he stated that no character in his game had risen beyond eighth level—and this was in 1976, when his campaign had been running some two years.
As characters rise in level, they also rise in society. At level 3, they have gained enough status to travel at will within the Tsolyani imperium. At level 6, they attain citizenship and may seek a post, a military command for warriors, an office in the temple hierarchy for priests, or a consulting position for magicians. With these positions come salaries, but also responsibilities and duties. At level 7, characters may petition the imperial government for a fief. If successful, they get a non-heritable grant of an entire map hexagon within the empire, where they act as governors and gain a cut of imperial taxes. Obviously, this parallels the OD&D system where higher-level characters were expected to construct their own strongholds and become lords. E.P.T. provides some simple rules for determining income from fiefs, based on the terrain type of the hex, but gives less information about buildings and their costs than OD&D does. E.P.T. also makes a nod towards generational play. Players can marry, produce children (rather inaccurate chances of pregnancy are given) and are expected to write wills disposing of their property.
Overall Assessment:
I hope this too-lengthy review has clarified E.P.T.’s worth within its original context. Gygax himself, in his forward to the rules, called it “the most beautifully done fantasy game ever created.” Yet what does the game have to offer today, over 30 years after its first appearance? It is, after all, resolutely old school. Character generation is insistently random. There is nothing like a unified mechanic or even approach to die-rolling—skill-checks and many miscellaneous die rolls use the percentile system, but attack rolls and saving throws use d20. Further, the rules are often terse, sometimes ambiguous, and require a good deal of interpretation by the referee. Assuredly, the system is not for everyone. Yet these apparent flaws are, from another point of view, strengths. Random character generation avoids the sort of min-maxing of virtues and flaws that G.o.O.’s Tekumel requires. It does not, of course, allow players to carefully craft their characters to a preconceived concept, but that is not the system’s goal. In games like E.P.T., beginning characters were supposed to be nearly blank slates. They gained depth and individuality in play, not by pre-design. Further, the speed of character creation is a real benefit in a game where death tolls are likely to be high, particularly for low-level characters. Likewise, the rather disjointed system, though it lacks the elegance of more unified ones, makes it relatively easy for referees to tinker with the game and adjust it to their own requirements. There is little reason to fear that tweaking one element of the system will have unexpected cascade effects in some other part. Like OD&D (though perhaps to a lesser extent) E.P.T. expects its referees to be tinkerers, comfortable with interpreting ambiguous rules, ignoring inappropriate rolls on tables, or inventing their own subsystems or ‘Saturday Night Specials’.
The great appeal of E.P.T. is of course the setting. Certainly, later RPGs about Tekumel present a good deal more information about the planet. The first book of Gamescience’s Swords and Glory (1983) is in fact nothing but a very detailed worldbook and G.o.O.’s Tekumel supplies a good deal of information about the Tsolyani clan system and daily life that is missing from E.P.T. Further, the background in E.P.T. is at this point out-of-date or slightly non-canonical. Barker’s novels and other source material have moved beyond the situation of 2,354 and he has changed his mind about a few things (magicians on Tekumel no longer use any metal, for instance). If you are seeking a game that immerses you in the baroque etiquette and alien social system of the Tsolyani empire, then E.P.T. is a poor choice. But again, from another perspective, this may be an advantage. Some prospective players, and indeed referees, are put off by the sheer volume of information available about Tekumel and the setting’s alien-ness. In particular, some have complained about the restrictiveness of the clan system. E.P.T. prunes back the vast thicket of setting data, making it more accessible to newcomers. Moreover, it supplies frameworks for adventures that are familiar (the dungeon-crawl, the mission for the patron) that will be familiar even if the setting is not. By disregarding the niceties of Tsolyani social life, E.P.T. is truer to the setting’s sword-and-planet (or sword-and-sorcery) roots than later versions are. In E.P.T., it is fairly easy to imagine your foreign barbarian rising ‘to tread the jeweled thrones of the earth beneath his feet’, something out of keeping with later versions of the setting.
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