Friday, December 16, 2022

The Hidden Influence of Empire of the Petal Throne

Though Empire of the Petal Throne is a game with which I am now intimately familiar, I didn't really know all that much about it until the early 1990s, when the growth of the Internet made it possible for me to make contact with RPG players outside my local circle. Prior to that, I only knew two things about EPT: it was very expensive and that its setting of Tékumel was weird and inaccessible. Because I never ran into anyone who was actively playing the game in those days, I assumed that it was due to a combination of these factors, particularly the latter. 

There's almost certainly some truth to my youthful surmise. Empire of the Petal Throne and its setting of Tékumel have never had much mass appeal, even in a hobby filled with creative, imaginative people with a high tolerance for eccentricity. However, that doesn't mean EPT didn't leave its mark on the development of the hobby – quite the contrary, in fact. I was reminded of this the other day when I stumbled upon the following image:

This is an illustration of a monster from Tom Moldvay's Lords of Creation RPG. Called a "scavenger wheel," it appears in the game's The Book of Foes and is described as having "a 4 foot wide spherical body covered with tentacles between two 6 foot tall wheel-like appendages." Compare that illustration to this one, which appeared in issue #4 of Dragon (December 1976):
The creature in the back is the Vriyágga (seemingly illustrated by Dave Sutherland, though the style doesn't quite look right to me). The article it accompanies describes it as having "a huge pair of wheel-like appendages [that] revolve around central axes like the treads of a tank" and "from the lower part of the parody of the face depend four (or more in larger specimens) great tentacles covered with powerful suckers." The Vriyágga is such a singularly bizarre thing that I think it highly unlikely that Moldvay wasn't inspired by it.

However, that's not the only instance where a monster from EPT inspired one in another game. There are (at least!) two others that come immediately to mind and, in these cases, we have confirmation of this fact from none other than Gary Gygax. The first is the Ngóro, which is described as "huge (30 feet in length) creatures lie flat upon the floor of a chamber and appear much like the rough stone flooring of the Underworld, although they may feel a little springy to walk upon." The second is the Biridlú, "cape-like, black, flying creatures which cling to ceilings and drop down upon the unwary. They then suffocate their victim, gibbering and shrieking in their powerfully muscled folds." These are very clearly the original sources of the trapper and lurker above respectively.

Though not a popular success, I increasingly get the impression that Empire of the Petal Throne was much better appreciated by many of the roleplayers who would one day become game designers themselves. As a result, its influence was much wider than many might imagine, given its seemingly small footprint in the hobby at large. After all, we have EPT to thank for the introduction of double damage critical hits to roleplaying and that's got to be one of the most well-known and pervasive house rules of all time (and eventually an official feature of D&D's own Third Edition, despite Gygax's earlier denunciation of the concept). 

I now find myself wondering where else EPT might have left its mark on the hobby without our realizing it.

20 comments:

  1. I'm reminded of what Brian Eno said of The Velvet Underground's first album - only 30,000 people bought the record, but every one of those 30,000 people started a band.

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  2. completely off topic, but reading Savage sword of Conan #30 today, Jeff Easley has the frontpiece (inside front cover). 1978, so way before D&D?

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    1. That's fascinating! I'd love to see the piece he did.

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    2. now I feel stupid. He is in the Grand Comic Database, if I can link it:

      https://www.comics.org/checklist/name/Jeff%20Easley/

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    3. After your comment, I poked around and found the very illustration you mentioned earlier. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. I had no idea he'd been involved in comics before his time at TSR.

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    4. This might be an easier link:

      https://www.comics.org/creator/6217/

      You can also generally find creator listings for the Big Two by searching Marvel (name of artist) or DC (name of artist) (although he doesn't seem to have worked for DC) so:

      https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Jeff_Easley

      His own site is here if you somehow missed it:

      https://jeffeasleyart.com/

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  3. I was recently reminded of this while thumbing through the Tekumel Bestiary. Now I need to go over the book creature by creature, as I know there are more Tekumel monsters that made it into D&D over the years. And there are many more worthy of being ported over...

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  4. Kuntz's _Bottle City_ level in Castle Greyhawk (dating from 1974, before the publication of EPT) also features three EPT monsters in its infamous picture gallery: the Kurukú (the Small Giggler), Ngóro (the Whelk), and the Biridlú (the Mantle).

    Allan.

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  5. Barker didn't come up with the dual-wheeled body plan for aliens, not by a long shot. EE "Doc" Smith's Zabriskan fontema showed up in 1950's First Lensman (and he had the single-donut Wheelmen a bit later in Gray Lensmen), Simak's Goblin Reservation came out in 1968 with the Wheelers as the more-or-less villains of the piece, and I can remember reading two different pulp scifi mags from the Forties that included side-by-side dual wheelers, one of which included a spot-on description of the scavenger wheel from LoC right down to the lamprey sphincter mouth and the spikes on the rims. Whatever short story that was is almost certainly the real source of AvHill's critter - but in the roughly forty years since I first saw the Book of Foes I've never been able to track down name, and it doesn't look like I can do so now. Maddening - read my grandfather's disintegrating copy when I was eight years old and never seen a copy since.

    If anything, I suspect Barker probably read the same magazine.

    There are plenty of other rollers out there too, including bicycle-style dual wheelers, the Slash and the Polarians from Piers Anthony's early scifi (befor ehe turned into the Xanth guy), Keithe Laumer had a whole planetary ecology of bio-mechanical rollers (some of whom had adapted their wheels into rotors and could fly), and there's even the nightmare fuel of Frank Baum's Wheelers.

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    1. Lyman Frank Baum. Still the undisputed king of childhood fantasy nightmare fuel, still baffling that the only faithful adaptation of his work to the big screen is the criminally underrated Return to Oz.

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    2. There's a wheeled race in David Brin's Uplift Saga: the G'Kek https://uplift.fandom.com/wiki/G%27Kek

      My favorite are the disc-shaped Wheelies from Fighting Fantasy:
      https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Wheelie

      Get four of them and you have a self-propelled chariot!

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  6. Although the Biridlú do seem to owe a debt to the things that stalked Clark Ashton Smith's Vaults of Yoh-Vombis, no?

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    1. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were the case.

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  7. Interesting factoid about EPT: it also influenced the German roleplaying scene quite a bit, as the first published German RPG (Empires of Magira, 1977, with a whopping 20 copies) was basically a Tekumel-less EPT, and some of the elements of EPT were subsequently used and evolved in later editions (Abenteuer in Magira in 1981, and the Midgard rules after 1987).

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  8. It's commonly noted that Raymond E Feist's Midekema novels were inspired by Tekumel and more recently the Chronicles of a Future Earth RPG, has a strong Tekumel influence.

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  9. I always thought the mantle-like Biridlu were the origin of the Cloaker in D&D. I even wrote a scenario with a cloakroom full of Biridlu.

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