Wow, it's been over two years since I did this for issue 3 of the magazine. Let's dive in and see what the magazine of Fantasy, Swords & Sorcery, and Science Fiction Gaming has in store for us today, shall we?
Please note that while I don't own this particular physical issue myself (the earliest issue of Dragon in my collection is #15), I do own a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive, which came with the first 250 issues of the magazine in PDF format. This is where I'm pulling the images for this piece.
From the cover, we see this is a special issue devoted to Empire of the Petal Throne, a game based in a world called Tékumel, created by one professor M. A. R. Barker, and one you are unlikely to have heard of before unless you:
- A) ... have been active in the hobbyist gamer scene for over fifty years,
- B) ... regularly researched the history of tabletop gaming, or
- C) ... happened to have been lurking the RPG.net forums three years ago when this came to light.
The short version of that link is that Barker penned an infamous neo-Nazi propaganda novel in 1991 and for twelve years sat on the editorial board of a Holocaust-denial periodical. This information was discovered in 2012, but was suppressed by Barker's foundation for ten years until the truth came out. This makes discussion of EPT, Tékumel, and Barker problematic to say the least, especially for someone like me who has only a passing familiarity with the game and its author, gleaned mainly from reading articles in Dragon.
What makes all this exponentially harder to deal with is what Tim Kask points out in this issue's editorial: in the gaming world of the time, Barker was compared to an American Tolkien. Barker was a highly-educated and well-travelled man who studied and mastered several real-world languages, taught and created university-level study materials for those languages which were still in use in the early years of the 21st century, wrote five fantasy novels, and invented out of whole wargaming cloth the world of Tékumel and its numerous anthropologies, languages, and history starting in the early 1970s.
Regardless, since literally every article in the issue is devoted to Empire of the Petal Throne, I'm not familiar with the setting enough to even understand a tenth of what that all says, and Barker has come to light as such a problematic figure with the conversation about how to salvage the world of Tékumel and separate the art from the artist is still on-going, I hope you'll forgive me for skipping over most of this issue's contents.
That leaves literally the issue's two comics to discuss so, uh... Well, we still have the three-panel "masterpiece" Dirt by the eponymous 'jake' on page 25:
This might be the most entertaining installment of this odyssey yet, which is saying something for a strip that devotes itself to nothing but three panels of total darkness punctuated by two sets of eyes talking to each other.
That leaves us with another installment of Finieous Fingers on page 30, picking up right where he left off in the last issue, being nearly eaten by a wandering monster, while demonstrating the exceptionally handy skill Thieves in D&D have to climb and cling on to surfaces nobody else could possibly scale. Artist/writer J.D. Webster also manages to slide a naughty word into his comic by stretching it out over two panels. While it's the kind of thing you wouldn't blink at today, back in '76 this was something one didn't often see outside of underground comics. Having an expletive snuck into Dragon fifty years ago is pretty amusing to my mind, and goes to show this was a magazine aimed squarely at an adult market, as opposed to the all-ages bracket D&D now occupies in the cultural lexicon.
So, that's that, then. I'm declining payment for this post, and basically using it as a stepping stone to get to later issues. This is far from Empire of the Petal Throne's final appearance in the pages of Dragon, but this is the last time I'll bring up the controversy surrounding its creator. Expect me to gloss over future EPT articles as well, since I've no plans to become more familiar with the setting.