[1] As a youth he had an interest in "fairy stories, history and literature" which would be further influenced by such films as The Thief of Bagdad; all of which helped to turn his casual "wargames" with toy soldiers more towards fantasy.

From this his fictional lands of Tsolyanu and others, in what was later to become Tékumel, emerged and were embellished further in middle and high school years during which time he commenced construction of armies of hand-carved figures to represent his creations.

Also at an early age, Barker's interest in languages was piqued by neighboring children of Basque origin who were able to exclude others from their secret conversations in their native tongue.

[2][3] In, and just before, 1950, while Barker was studying at the University of Washington under Melville Jacobs, he became involved with science fiction fanzines, writing articles, short stories and contributing reviews to Portland-based Fanscient and to the local clubzine Sinisterra,[4] the latter of which contained his review of, and content from, Jack Vance relating to his recently published book, The Dying Earth.

[5][6][7][8] Also at this time, Barker corresponded with other authors who contributed to those same publications, including Lin Carter in whose writings and linguistic experiments[9] he took an interest and with whom he finally put to paper the story line of his own created world.

After six weeks, this was self-published in August 1974 as Empire of the Petal Throne and play commenced forthwith, including such occasional members as Dave Arneson – who singled out Barker and Tékumel as being his favorite Dungeon Master and roleplaying game, respectively – from early days.

[28] Despite having had a head start on other in-depth campaign settings and seeing his game released no less than four times with various supplements and magazine articles, many of which he contributed to, and having authored five books using the same setting, Barker's Tékumel in both roleplaying and literary domains is still well known to only a relatively small audience, leading German magazine Der Spiegel in 2009 to publish an article on Barker's life entitled "Der vergessene Tolkien" ("The forgotten Tolkien").

The article quotes friends and acquaintances who posit that this may be, at least in part, due to the unfamiliarity of the setting[29] compared with Western society, echoing Fine's observations from 1983, and possibly even that Tékumel was released to the gaming world too early on, when players had only just started to experiment with their own invented worlds rather than fitting their play into preconfigured, non-literary domains with novel backgrounds.

[33] Serpent's Walk is a science fiction story,[34] that features an alternate history where SS soldiers begin an underground resistance after the end of WWII, with their descendants rising up a century later to take over the United States of America.