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 tabletop role-playing games in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Barker tapped into this tradition and the setting he had developed from his childhood fantasies (much as H. G. Wells had done for his "Floor Games" leading into the better-known follow-up, "Little Wars") to further explore and develop Tékumel. His "Thursday Night Groups" were amongst the first roleplaying sessions anywhere and provided what was, at the time, an unusually detailed week-by-week development of the setting. In 1975, Tactical Studies Rules, Inc., the publishers of "Dungeons & Dragons", published Barker's roleplaying game and setting as a standalone game under the title of "The Empire of the Petal Throne" (a synonym for the Tsolyáni Empire), rather than as a "supplement" to the original D&D rules.