I went through the past 21 years of DunDraCon programs and found only one Te’kumel game around 15 years ago.
According to DDC Events Scheduler Mark Schynert, spotlighted games tend to be spread out across all the subsets of games offered at DunDraCon, and spotlighting helps bring those games to the attention of the wider audience. The process of spotlighting is inevitably subjective, but DunDraCon sees value in picking out what they hope are some special games so they don’t get lost in the overall crowd.
Since the passing of M.A.R. Barker in March 2012, the Te’kumel Foundation is expected to release a nice range of previously-unpublished products as a result of archiving Professor Barker’s Te’kumel materials. That makes the present a nice opportunity to get more attention to this interesting and fantastic setting.
Victor Raymond, President of the Te’kumel Foundation, asked “so what’s holding people back from running EPT for themselves?” He considered the languages, background culture, and the weight of 35+ years of accumulated writing and background material, but thinks that the main reason Te’kumel is often thought to be too difficult to game is that people simply haven’t sat down with the rules as presented, and figured out what to do.
So, on the Original D&D discussion boards, Mr. Raymond wrote a series of posts detailing the stuff you need to begin a Te’kumel campaign using Empire of the Petal Throne, such as how to think about the stuff organization-wise, the themes for the different levels of EotPT characters, and an outline of the different main races on Te’kumel.
These tips formed a basis for my game at DunDraCon, so I am personally looking forward to exploring this space/science/alien/fantasy world as straight, “out of the box” EotPT. It’s a fabulous time for people to be exposed to something a little different than the average fantasy setting.
