Editing Tekumel

This set of pages relate to the MAR Barker's world of Tekumel, as depicted in the online game 'Shrine of Petrified Wisdom'.  

After much of dear old planet Earth got nuked civilisation was re-established by people from Central America, India and the Middle East. The civilisation that followed acheived interstellar travel and, with its alien allies, colonised numerous worlds throughout the galaxy. One such was Tekumel. When it was discovered it had two intelligent native species and was barely inhabitable by humans. The Humanspace Alliance wanted this world however and conquered and terraformed it with relative ease. For many centuries Tekumel was a luxurious pleasure planet and centre of interstellar trade. Then matters changed - the stars went out. Tekumel was wrenched from mundane reality and placed in a pocket universe of its own. The Latter Times followed, an age of chaos and destruction during which the high-tech culture of Tekumel decayed and faded from memory and finally became myth. Thirty millenia later Tekumel still struggles in a medieval quagmire of superstition abd despotism, but here and there the ancient ways survive and the nature of the catastrophe and the universe that the planet have been thrust into are remembered.

Tekumel owes comparatively little to the European cultures that dominate most FRP settings, the inspiration came from Professor Barker's interest in Indian and Central American languages. The Empires of Tekumel are more like the Incan, Moghul and Chinese empires than a European kingdom, its religions are reminiscent of Aztec and Hindu beliefs and the monsters are bizarre Lovecraftian nightmares. This is a planet that will bend your head.