Empire of the Petal Throne

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An elaborate, impressively detailed fictional world created by a distinguished English linguist as a setting for stories. Features fully-realised history, languages, geography, and cultures with a richness that can only be envied and aped by lesser creators.

Wait, what was I talking about? EPT? Oh, it's okay I guess, if you like eating bugs.

The world is called Tekumel and the author was Professor MAR Barker. There are some novels set there, the first being the Man of Gold.

In the 1970s, people used to learn the languages of this world apparently.

If you can't tell, this is not a setting you can just jump into like a generic Dungeons & Dragons setting. It should be called "Culture Shock: The Role-Playing Game" as it needs a damn primer just to better understand what your characters can and cant do! Just the act of sarcasm or cracking jokes, even with a friend, needs to be handled carefully (if at all) or else you offend someone's honor and you'll have to fight it out, to the death, at the local arena. On top of that, the setting is filled with hard-to-pronounce names with some letters lacking English equivalents (this is basically language porn). Despite being the vary first RPG setting ever published (if you ignore Greyhawk and Blackmoor, as they where nothing more than rule-supplements) the game never reached mainstream popularity in the role-playing community, maintaining only a cult following with mostly old-time gamers.

The main appeal is where settings like Greyhawk and Blackmoor are the kiddie pool of fantasy settings — fun for what they are, but lacking in dept — Tekumel is the deep-end. This is for players who are sick of vanilla fantasy and want something different, exotic, and challenging.

It could be argued that the actual appeal would be all the topless women in the art, if not for the fact that this game requires a degree of maturity to get into. Although, its got a lot of nice, tasteful nudity.