Editing Empire of the Petal Throne (section)

== The Many Editions of Tékumel==
With a history almost as long as the basic concept of RPGs in general, it is no surprise that Tékumel had a long and erratic publishing history with multiple, sometimes wildly different, editions.
====Empire of the Petal Throne: Manuscript Edition====
The very first edition of Tékumel, the ''Manuscript Edition'', as it has come to be known, only had fifty copies made. It started off when a friend at Barker’s university’s wargaming club, of which he was an advisor, showed him this weird new thing called [[Dungeons & Dragons|”Dungeons & Dragons”]]. Barker liked it, and so he decided to adapt it to better fit his own world of Tékumel, which he had already been developing for decades at this point.
====Empire of the Petal Throne: The World of Tékumel====
Not long after, [[Gary Gygax]] and Dave Arneson got their hands on the manuscript edition, and they liked it so much that they had [[TSR Games]] publish it as a standalone game using modified [[Dungeons & Dragons]] rules.
====Swords & Glory====
Published in 1983 by ''Gamescience'', who you may remember as the people behind the “beloved” d100 golfball. Swords & Glory came in two volumes: The ‘Source Book’, a massive and unmitigated 140-page lore dump and pronunciation guide; and the ‘Player’s Handbook’ that contains the actual rules. Used a d20 exclusively. It should be noted that some poor sod had to mark each and every diacritic by pen prior to publication. It is normal for Tékumel books to have diacritics all over the place, but even the Koran was saying: ''"Dial it back a bit."''

====Gardásiyal: Deeds of Glory====
A percentile-based game from ''Theatre of the Mind'', published in 1994. It used both d10s and d20s, and had four separate books dedicated to character creation, letting you play a [[Fighting Fantasy]] type game to develop your PC. For some reason this line of books spelled role-playing as “Rôle-Playing”, because even more diacritics is exactly what Tékumel needed.

====Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne====
Not to be confused with the other game, ''Empire of the Petal Throne 2: Electric Boogaloo'', Tékumel: Empire of the Petal Throne was published in 2005 by [[Guardians of Order]], and used the ‘Tri-Stat dX’ system first introduced in the company’s [[Big Eyes, Small Mouth]] system. This is one of the more popular editions, owing to the ease of play and indexing of setting information, and high quality of art.

====Béthorm: The Plane of Tékumel====
The latest Tékumel game, Béthorm was written by former D&D artist Jeff Dee and published in 2015 by ''Uni Games''. This is the first Tékumel product to be made without M.A.R. Barker’s direct involvement, as he had died three years prior. Despite this, Barker is still listed as co-writer. The game uses the “Pocket Universe” system, which only uses d10s and is primarily based around percentile dice. Like the prior edition, Béthorm is generally user-friendly.

The key feature with this edition is the way jumping between Béthorm (Pocket Universe) is used to deal with the inevitability of discontinuities that form as new players learn more and more about the setting. That is, if a minor detail like Plebeian Aridani being normal in past adventures (the process of becoming Aridani is too expensive for the poorer clans), but when the GM corrects this, references to this can be be dismissed as "Oh, that was from another reality." Slipping into near-normal parallel realities happen enough in the history of Tékumel, people do not question when things suddenly become abnormal and just go with the flow.