OSE EPT

A longstanding backburner project of mine is a revision of the Empire of the Petal Throne rulebook into something that's both easier to use/reference than the 1975 original and more in line with Tékumel as it developed in the years since. I've struggled with the best way to do this, starting and stopping it several times, often despairing of ever being able to complete the project to my satisfaction. I had assumed, simply by virtue of having successfully refereed an ongoing EPT campaign since early 2015, that I possessed the necessary insight into how to re-present Empire of the Petal Throne for contemporary audiences. How mistaken I was!

Recently, though, while working on Urheim, I began looking much more closely at Old School Essentials, which is a restatement of the 1981 Moldvay/Cook/Marsh D&D rules. OSE is truly excellent and I highly recommend it. Not only is it a very close restatement of the B/X rules, it's extremely user friendly. That's exactly what I had hoped to do with my revision of Empire of the Petal Throne. That's why, as an experiment, I sat down and and tried to see if I could take inspiration from OSE's presentation to improve the presentation of EPT. A small fruit of my labors is shown above.

I'm quite pleased with the result, both because it's compact and intelligible, but also because it got me thinking about certain matters inherent in the original EPT rules (e.g. the OD&D-style hit dice progression). Seeing rules laid out in a clear way like this has been helpful to me and I've finally begun making more serious progress on this long stalled project. Whether I'll ever actually finish it, I don't know, but this is the first time in several years that I feel as I could finish it, which pleases me.

(I should add that this is not an official project of either Old School Essentials or The Tékumel Foundation, but a personal endeavor for my own private use – for now anyway)