Games and Art
John O'Neill at the Black Gate Blog has an article on M.A.R (Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman) Barker, a writer and game designer who created Empire of the Petal Throne:
Wholly unique, Tékumel was a science fantasy setting inspired by Indian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Meso-American mythology, a world colonized by humans and alien species some 60,000 years in the future. Perhaps most intriguing, Tékumel was largely free of Tolkien's influence as it was well established long before the publication of The Lords of the Rings — the only major RPG setting of the 20th Century that could make that claim.
I still have vivid memories of drooling over the copies of Empire of the Petal Throne at the tiny little bookstore we went to when I was a kid, even when I first saw it and had no idea what an RPG was. I didn't have anyone to play it with, so there was no point in trying to buy it. (My experiments in trying to turn the Clue boardgame into a form of Solitaire notwithstanding, there is nothing more depressing than being a kid with a great game and no one to play it with.)
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The list of artists for Spectrum 19 is online, and it includes the cover artist for The Cloud Roads, Matt Stewart, the cover artist for The Serpent Sea, Steve Argyle, and Todd Lockwood from Tales of the Emerald Serpent.
Wholly unique, Tékumel was a science fantasy setting inspired by Indian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Meso-American mythology, a world colonized by humans and alien species some 60,000 years in the future. Perhaps most intriguing, Tékumel was largely free of Tolkien's influence as it was well established long before the publication of The Lords of the Rings — the only major RPG setting of the 20th Century that could make that claim.
I still have vivid memories of drooling over the copies of Empire of the Petal Throne at the tiny little bookstore we went to when I was a kid, even when I first saw it and had no idea what an RPG was. I didn't have anyone to play it with, so there was no point in trying to buy it. (My experiments in trying to turn the Clue boardgame into a form of Solitaire notwithstanding, there is nothing more depressing than being a kid with a great game and no one to play it with.)
***
The list of artists for Spectrum 19 is online, and it includes the cover artist for The Cloud Roads, Matt Stewart, the cover artist for The Serpent Sea, Steve Argyle, and Todd Lockwood from Tales of the Emerald Serpent.
Published on March 30, 2012 06:53
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