I grew up within a 1/2 hour drive of Lake Geneva Wisconsin, home of TSR Hobbies. My eldest brother David discovered D&D soon after its first publication when I was about 13 years old, and I started playing shortly thereafter.

We made frequent trips to the Dungeon Hobby Shop, and we picked up Empire of the Petal Throne as soon as it came out. During one of those visits I showed some of my artwork to the TSR staff - which led to one of my very first professional art assignments. I did some of the drawings in the EPT Miniatures Painting Guide article in Dragon Magazine #6. Mine are the ones signed with the little -D-

Dave went off to college about the same time that I started high school, where I met my new best friend Jack Herman. Dave had taken all of his RPG stuff with him - except for EPT. So when Jack and I came up with the idea of writing our own RPG about superheroes, and we wanted to test out the idea, we made up stats for Spider-Man and the Human Torch and played out a fight between them using the EPT game mechanics. I can't remember who won, but the outcome convinced us that yes one could role-play a superhero - and we went on to create Villains and Vigilantes.

Over the decades I've had a little more Tékumel artwork published; an illustration of some Hláka harassing Hlútrgu in The Imperial Courier #3, a picture of a Tinalíya peering out from beneath the leg of some large reptile for the cover of The Imperial Courier #4, and so on. More recently I did a large number of drawings for Howard Fielding's Tékumel Project (some illustrations, and many costume design guides for his sculptors).

Back in 2008 I was finally able to acquire a much more complete set of Tékumel-related books, and I decided to run another Tékumel campaign. In fact I wound up running three simultaneously, the longest of which went on bi-weekly for about 3 years.

With no ongoing support available for any of the Tékumel games that had been published so far, and armed with my own notions as a game designer, I decided to go ahead and convert the games which I felt most completely represented Professor Barker's own vision for Tékumel role-playing - Swords & Glory and Gardásiyal - to Pocket Universe, the system I'd developed and published with my partner Talzhemir through our company UNIgames. Talzhemir has her own Tékumel street cred by the way, having created a Five Empires map that was published in Book 1 of the Tékumel Source Book from Different Worlds.

Our Pocket Universe-based Tékumel game is the one we're planning to finish up, illustrate, and publish as the Béthorm RPG. We both love Professor Barker's astounding creation to bits, and we're determined to give it the treatment and support that it has always deserved.