The significance of this for this blog is that the Empire of the Petal Throne gives a Referee and players an entry point into a strange and exotic world… but doesn’t bury them under a ton of material as if they’re getting their Ph. It (like the best settings I’ve read) gives you enough information to run on and to make up your own games from without burying you in data. If anything, it’s this sketchiness that I like. It lays out a foundation sketch of the setting that is way less dense than say the descriptions of the various nations and regions in the Forgotten Realms 3e hardcover. The presentation in the 1975 EPT is far from dense.
If we can embrace transhumanist themes in our sci-fi and play games that cross over into lucid dreaming and fairy tales on a regular basis, we can definitely cope with a bit of alien detail like Tékumel. Today, we have tons of “different” settings and games out there. When it was released the common frame of reference was Conan and Middle Earth and everyone was fairly comfortable with the tech level and cultural framework of those settings and all you had to do was infer various things and the rest was handled by the mass knowledge base. I think the fear of its weirdness is an artifact of the era of its release. It feels incredibly accessible to me, and the very familiar yet slightly weird mechanics just make it more appealing.
The material in the EPT book is definitely no weirder than anything Jodo has written (and there’s an RPG of that), and definitely less detailed than anything published for the Forgotten Realms. I’m also struck by the whole “too weird and detailed to be playable” thing. Following up on the new print-on-demand version of Empire of the Petal Throne, here’s a link to a post Dyson Logos made about the game on his blog two and a half years ago after he bought the PDF, printed it, had it bound, and began reading it…
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