This set combines what were originally two separate products with distinct publishing histories. The maps derive from M.A.R. Barker's own
Empire of the Petal Throne campaign; Craig Smith drew them in consultation with Barker and they were subsequently published in 1981 by Adventure Games. Several years later, Thomas Thompson and Barker together produced a gazetteer of the map’s contents, which was published by Tekumel Games in 1986. In 1997, Tita’s House of Games reprinted both items together; it is that reissue which is being evaluated here. As far as I can tell, the reprint is just that—a reproduction of the originals, not a new edition.
The Maps:
There are six maps in all, printed in black and white on heavy-weight cream-colored paper, and measuring 11” x 17”. They depict the northwest section of the Tsolyani empire, the state that is the main focus for E.P.T. and other games about Tekumel, and parts of several lesser countries: Pijena, Milumanaya, and Yan Kor. Combined, the six maps cover a rectangle of 512 x 431 miles, two maps wide and three deep. In practice, the maps cannot be placed next to one another to form this rectangle, since each map has a 1” margin on its north and south boundaries, and there is an overlap of 14.8 miles between the eastern and western map in each row. The area covered corresponds to all or part of the large-scale (82.9 mile or 100 tsan) hexes numbered 4904-4910 through 4304-4310 on the maps provided in E.P.T. and the second (1984) Tekumel RPG,
Swords and Glory.
The region chosen is an attractive one for either RPG or miniatures campaigns. It includes a considerable variety of terrain, from the dense forests of the Chakas to the mountains of the Atkolel Heights and the badlands and deep sands of the Desert of Sighs, as well as some coastal areas along the northern edge of the region and rich agricultural plains to the south. It also features a number of significant cities, such as the Tsolyani centers of Khirgar and Chene Ho, and the Pijenani capital of Pijnar. The region is also one of the main theaters of the war between Tsolyanu and Yan Kor, an important part of the ‘metaplot’ for E.P.T. and S.&G. (though more recent Tekumel RPGs are set after that war’s conclusion). There are thus a fairly large number of fortifications shown on the maps. Like any part of Tekumel, this region has a very long past, and the maps are dotted with ancient ruins to explore.
The maps share many conventions with the wargame maps of the era. They have a grid of small (3/8”) hexes and features like rivers and the edges of hills follow hex-sides rather than cutting across hexes. The large-scale hexes from E.P.T. and S.&G. are also marked on the map in black lines so thick as to be rather distracting, and their identification numbers given around the edge of the each map. Each large-scale hex is 14 small ones across, which yields small hexes about 5.9 miles, or 7.1 tsan, wide. It’s not clear why this scale was chosen, rather than one which would yield a round number of miles or tsan per small hex. Though they are not particularly lovely, the cartographic symbols on the maps are for the most part straightforward and easy to interpret, especially for those with experience in wargames. The only symbols likely to be unfamiliar are the sakbe roads (elevated and fortified highways), which are shown by three closely-spaced parallel lines with guard-towers marked by rectangles every hex or so. Surprisingly, they are the only roads shown on the maps, though lesser roads and tracks certainly exist. In any case, labels like “Be-Urun Salt Flats” or “Oasis of Tiasel” help identify unusual or ambiguous symbols, and the gazetteer provides help as well. Almost all features on the map are labeled; the only nameless sites are smaller villages, shown as black dots. The lettering used is clear, though mechanical-looking; it has none of the visual appeal of the calligraphy in the original E.P.T. maps. Overall, the maps are more functional than aesthetically pleasing.
The maps do have one major flaw, apparently linked to the reproduction process. Rivers were marked in the original printing by wavy lines along hex-sides. In some places, those lines are still quite clear in the reprinted maps, but elsewhere they did not reproduce properly. For example, the river of Bazkur on map 1 essentially disappears from the reprint for hexes at a time. Using the reprinted maps will require making a best guess about the course of some waterways and drawing them in yourself.
The Gazetteer:
This is an 8 ½’ x 11” stapled booklet of iii + 23 pages; the covers are green heavy-weight paper and the front bears a line drawing of a bazaar outside a fortress, perhaps by Barker himself. The body of the text is presented in double columns of rather small print, without internal illustrations, city or fortress plans, or other embellishments. Each of the six maps receives its own section of the gazetteer. After an introductory paragraph that describes the major features of the map in question, each section is broken down into subsections corresponding to the numbered large-scale hexes found on that particular map. These subsections may have their own introductory paragraphs, and then typically provide a number of paragraphs describing the named features of that hex. Such paragraphs begin with the feature’s name in large type and underlined. In all, it is quite easy to go from a named feature on a map to its description in the gazetteer.
Given its brevity, the gazetteer unsurprisingly provides relatively little information about any given feature of the map, or even any large-scale hex. Named villages usually receive only a single, rather uninformative sentence, like Ao-Nene on p. 10: “This is a typical fishing village.” The same is true, more or less, for many physical features, such as the Ku Zhem hill on p. 20: “This is a large, steep, almost mountainous hill.” Rivers normally get somewhat longer entries, which note at least whether and where they are fordable. The gazetteer provides some basic description for fortresses, including siting, layout, and materials of construction. Entries for cities are usually a bit more detailed, noting the general city plan and defenses, and sometimes recent events in the war with Yan Kor. Yet entries vary widely in length and content, and sometimes include apparently random, if quite evocative, details. For example, the description of the city of Nrichan is mainly concerned with the glazed tiles that once faced the town walls, although the walls and the tiles have both vanished long ago. The introduction to hex 4806 notes that the clans in the region are matriarchal, and the entry for the village of Ao-Sheng explains that the prefix ‘ao’ means ‘place of’ in a dead language of the area. Such tidbits occur throughout the gazetteer, though they are more common in its early pages.
Broadly speaking, however, the gazetteer tends to concentrate on two types of information beyond basic physical descriptions. A fair amount of space is devoted to sketching the military situation: where Yan Kor’s troops have advanced into Pijena and Tsolyanu, which side in the war controls a given fortress, where military action has breached the sakbe roads, and so on. Besides the tides of war, the aspects of the maps that receive the most attention are sites for adventuring, particularly ancient ruins and structures where entrances to the underworld (Tekumel’s equivalent of dungeons) might be found. Most pages of the gazetteer feature several entries of this sort. The majority of these are fairly short and report vague rumors; for example, the description of the Temple to She Who Eats Souls on p. 8 concludes with a warning that “it is rumored that there are ancient things buried there that may want you more than you want them!” Some are tantalizingly mysterious, like the Hill of Triangles, where the locals for reasons unknown even to themselves perform a ritual that involves depositing triangles made of clay. In other cases, adventure sites have very detailed descriptions. The longest single entry in the gazetteer is for such a feature, the High King’s tomb; it includes instructions for bypassing a false tomb to find the real one, information about a booby-trapped sarcophagus, and hints on using a magical transporter found in the tomb.
The widely differing levels of detail probably stem from the origins of the gazetteer. At its root, it is a guidebook for players in Barker’s own campaign. It provides details about sites which they have investigated in some depth, but leaves others undeveloped. Indeed, the descriptions of some such sites state this fairly explicitly. The entry for the High King’s tomb notes that “it has been explored to its limits by adventurers in the past” and some entries on pp. 15-16 record the underworld explorations of one Korunme hiChaisyani, presumably a player-character. But for referees in other Tekumel campaigns, the alternation between vague descriptions of adventure sites with detailed accounts of their main features is rather problematic. If the gazetteer is made available to the players, then the adventure sites that are most fully described become relatively useless. But if the booklet is for referees alone, then more answers, and less mystery, would be preferable. It would be wonderful to know the secret behind the Hill of Triangles, for instance, or who dwells in the crystal tomb atop the Peak of the Sleeper, and why.
Even within the limitations of a player’s guidebook, there are some types of information which the gazetteer unfortunately omits. There are almost no references to individuals, beyond the Korunme mentioned above and a few well-known figures from high politics, like Baron Ald or General Kettukal. It would be helpful to have the names of governors of cities, heads of monasteries, commanders of garrisons, fief-holders within the empire, and so on, even if full statistics could not be provided. Also, the entries on settlements typically say little or nothing about population. In some cases, the gazetteer provides a general range (e.g. 100-200,000) for a city, but in other cases it gives no indication. Villages scarcely ever have their population noted, and even the size of fortress garrisons often goes unremarked. Particularly within the Tsolyani empire itself, with its massive bureaucracy and effective taxation system, population figures would (one would think) be widely available.
When the map and gazetteer are combined, another problem linked to population becomes clear. Simply put, there are far too few settlements. For example, large-scale hex 4408, on map 6, is described as “very rich agricultural land” (p. 22); it is also far enough behind the lines that it should not have suffered directly in the war. Yet the map shows only nine settlements in the area: two fortifications of moderate size, three named villages, and four un-named villages. It is impossible to be sure of the populations of these settlements, but an introductory section of the gazetteer states that un-named villages vary from 20 to 800 people in size. Using maximum figures, and with the generous assumption that named villages and fortifications have populations double that of nameless settlements (some figures earlier in the gazetteer suggest less) we can estimate an overall population of 11,200 for a territory of some 8,846 square miles, or 1.26 persons per square mile, an impossibly low figure. In fact, given the pre-modern levels of technology and transportation on Tekumel, I would expect a rich agricultural region to have a village or estate center in every small hex—they are almost 6 miles across, after all. That would result in almost 200 villages in a fertile agricultural area like this large-scale hex. Of course, it is possible that many smaller villages are not shown on the map. Indeed, for certain spots the gazetteer explicitly notes that this is the case—though this rather implies that elsewhere it is not. Ultimately, though, to make the maps and gazetteer more realistic, I think we have to assume that average villages simply aren’t marked in the fertile and well-settled regions, and that the villages that do appear are exceptionally large ones, perhaps local market centers. They are just too thin on the ground for anything else.
Overall Evaluation:
Like many older products, these maps and gazetteer are difficult to assess, and numerical rankings of them are almost meaningless. Current products do not offer a reasonable comparison; obviously, advances in desktop publishing would make it far easier to create such a product today, and to print it in color, than was the case in 1981 or 1986. Even by the standards of their day, however, the maps and gazetteer seem somewhat unpolished, when viewed next to (say) Chaosium products like
Pavis or
Thieves’ World. Yet that comparison may be unfair, since Adventure Games and Tekumel Games had far fewer resources than Chaosium or other major players in the RPG business in the early 1980s.
Perhaps a more useful question is what utility the maps and gazetteer retain today. They remain essentially the only ‘official’ depiction of a region of Tekumel on this scale, which is a good one for RPG adventures—more useful in many ways than the very large-scale maps which have accompanied Tekumel RPGs from E.P.T. onward. The political/military information in the gazetteer is outdated, of course, for those who have kept up with ‘current developments’ on Tekumel, but is fine for people who are still playing—or discovering for the first time—E.P.T. itself. And though it would be lovely to have the many mysteries of the ancient ruins and other places of adventure explained, the absence of an official answer leaves great scope to the individual’s imagination. At their best, the map and the gazetteer are suggestive, opening up doors into our own versions of Tekumel.
It would be wonderful to have a real new edition of the map and gazetteer with more beautiful maps done in color and a lengthened and revised text. Plans of settlements and fortifications, and names and some details of important regional personalities could enrich it—even if no secrets of ancient ruins were revealed. It would be an invaluable aid to beginning referees and players, and help them to get a handle on this very rich and exotic setting. Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to see it.
Review Summary