Published works
Barker was a Professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies at the University of Minnesota during the period when David Arneson, Gary Gygax and a handful of others were developing the first role-playing games in Minneapolis and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Barker tapped into this tradition to explore and develop the Tékumel setting. His "Thursday Night Groups" were some of the first roleplaying sessions anywhere and provided what was, at the time, a unique, week-by-week development of the setting.
In 1975, Tactical Studies Rules, Inc., the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, published the Tékumel fantasy setting as a standalone game under the title of The Empire of the Petal Throne (a synonym for the Tsolyáni Empire). It brought a level of detail and quality to the campaign setting which had previously been unknown in the RPG industry, and could be considered a turning point away from the tactical roots of RPGs. The game was the subject of articles in early issues of Dragon Magazine, but factors including inconsistent support from TSR led to its decline in popularity. Over the subsequent thirty years several new games based on the Tékumel setting were published, but to date none have met with commercial success. While published as fantasy, this edition of the game is sometimes classified as science fantasy and erroneously as science fiction.