The Girls of Talislanta

Different artists have drawn pin-ups of the many (and varied) races of Talislanta. It started as a joke, but it has become something of an institution to Tal fans. Many of the drawing are NSFW.  

Batrean Concubine, not sure who the artist is. 

The Werewood

Dhuna Witch. by, Nathan Rosario

Talislanta.com is looking to bring the so-called 'Lost Books' up to a more official capacity. These were books commissioned and written but never published (including my own Festival of the Bizarre). The call was put out for those willing to edit and format these documents into a more presentable form, and I was lucky enough to snag the Werewood folio.

I'm really looking forward to it as I haven't had much of chance to do much gaming wise of late. A friend of mine got me a place at a table-top 2ndEd D&D game that I was looking forward too, until job related realities crushed it like a cave rat under the foot of a 12th Level Paladin.

If it goes well, I might just see what I can do with old issues of the Tamar (an old on-line zine) as well as the New Tales of Talislanta, a 'Thieves World' style group fiction project run by the old mailing list. Which is just my way of saying that I have a lot of old files from the ancient days of the internet.

The Weight of Water: Part 1

In 2004 Morrigan Publishing put out a call for abstracts for new Talislanta books. I sent in as many as I could think of which, if I remember, consisted of two adventure ides and two sourcebook outlines; one for a Northern Regions and another for the Kang Empire. I was beaten to the Northern Regions (which turned out to be a break, because I love this book) and the Eastern Empire book never got beyond the note stage, but the two adventure ideas were accepted. A month later I was able to submit the first adventure; an low-level romp called The Weight of Water. In retrospect, it is railroady as hell, but I am still quite proud of it and it was hands down the funnest writing I've ever done. I even have have a file full of ideas for a sequel called 'The Glimmer of Glass' (set in and above the Sea of Glass) which I may revisit one day.

I also completed and submitted the second book, but it was never properly published as Morrigan Press soon folded (not unusual for small press, sadly). I'm still quite proud of the second book, which was a cross between an adventure and a sourcebook for the Thaecian Isle chain called Festival of the Bizarre, Inspired by some readings I had done some reading on game design and inspired by the Grand Theft Auto series of all things, I tried t make the Festival of the Bizarre a sandbox with as many adventure ideas as I could think of scrammed throughout the text. Its available through my site and (was available? link is there but it seem to be dead) on the official Talislanta page. I'll revisit FotB at a later date, but a quick skim through unfortunately reminded me that, oh boy did I ever rush that ending! 

Anyway, the real purpose of this post was to celebrate the artwork that accompanied The Weight of Water. I cannot begin to describe the sensation when I first saw the works done by Adam Black, who was nice enough to send them to me soon after he'd finished them. That he had perfectly encapsulated what I was trying to convey still blows me away. And then the book came out with an honest to zod P.D.Breeding Black cover! Copies of many of these still hang in my 'study' (read as: clutter room). 

Cover, by artist, PD Breeding Black
This pic shows Sunbeam, the Muse Queen of Astar in her royal procession into the city of Cymril. It will be her unfortunate assassination that is the inciting incident of the adventure.  

Rajan Death Priest, by Adam Black
Book inlay. This suitably creepy picture hints at who the true villains of the adventure will be. 

Guard Duty, by Adam Black

The players are pestered by Whisps while working as guards for the Procession of Kings.

Assassin, by Adam Black

The ultimate fate of poor Queen Sunbeam.

A Promise of Escape by Adam Black

I particularly like this image as it perfectly captured what I tried to describe in the text. A mysterious stranger offering the captured PCs a chance to escape.

Bartender, by Adam Black

Another favourite. A simple piece describing a mobile tavern-cart run by Pharesian Renegades deep in the Cyrmil Woods. 

Talislanta.com is back in business!

Peaceful Mandalan

 GO NOW
Turns out it was a simple issue, easily rectified.

I really must preach the book of Talislanta more often. I forget how much I have loved this game over the years. Simple rules (one chart handles all actions), 100+ Playable Archetypes with dozens of original races (No ELVES!) set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world directly inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth. It completely blew my mind as a teenager and was my gateway into the weird and gothic realms of Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, Ashton Smith, Burroughs, Wolfe and more!

The author and creator of the game, Stephan Michael Sechi has graciously allowed all of the works (almost all, a few books have not been scanned yet) to be turned into free PDFs. So, if you're a fan of esoteric rpgs, or are looking for something new to spice up your game, then you owe it to yourself to check these out.

And I'm not saying this just because I was lucky enough to write one of the official adventures.

Wild Jaka

NOTE: I have literally only just discovered this gallery. It contains dozens of images that were only in the French Edition. They illustrate the different archetypes and give an incredible example of the diversity of playable races in the game.

Noble Gryph

Below is a quick gallery. All works are copyright of their original artists. One pic NSFW.

A Danuvian Virago gets the drop on an Aamanian Knight. by Adam Black

Kang Warrior on his Strider. by, Nathan Rosario

Dhuna Witch. by, Nathan Rosario

 Thrall Huntress by, Nathan Rosario

A night in Zandir. From the French edition, of course.

Shan Ya, The Madness Known as Talislanta

In 2013, some Talislanta fans attempted to jumpstart a fanzine that unfortunately, like most efforts of this type, never made it past first issue. What they did create was impressive and as a new year's present, they have released the finished issue. I was going to link to the official site, but it seems to be down. 

An Ahazu warrior caught in the grips of Shan Ya, the battle madness. A popular player class! 

Day 20: No Elves.

First non D&D game you played?

'Talis*fucking*lanta,

I discovered Talislanta through Dragon Magazine and ads like this and a glowing review in some issue or another. About the same time, I found The Chronicles of Talislanta* in my LGS and saved up for a month to buy it.The book has no rules, it is simply a travelers' guide to the different regions and I was immediately hooked like a pot head on nachos. The rules were also a revelation. Instead of the randomness of D&D with its THAC0 and %rolls and wonky Stats (Str 18/76?), Talislanta had a nice clean system where everything was rolled on one D20 chart. 

Then in 2005, I was lucky enough to add my own stamp on the lost continent when I wrote two (semi-)offical supplements for the game. The adventure, 'The Weight of Water' even got properly published, which has been the highlight of my gaming career to this point. I'll be the first to admit that the adventure is rail-roady as hell, but I'm still proud of most it. Much to my amazement and delight, it even got a P.D.Breeding Black cover!

Download it free (and legal)!*

The second was a based on more of a sandbox idea, which combined a sourcebook and an adventure for exploring the tropical island of Thaecia during the week of their (not just famous, but) in-famous 'Festival of the Bizarre'. It was never properly published and needs a good edit or six, but I still like to put it out there. 

*Talislanta.com has all old material available for free! 

Rare Talislanta Article!

Image by Liz Danforth, 1994.

I came across this very rare gem while doing some research for the D&D 40th Blog event.

The Iron Dragon of Quaran, 

A Talislanta Article by Steven Michael Sechi written back in 1994.

The Blue Heart

In a frozen citadel in Trackless Wastes, a Mirin witch cuts the blue diamond heart from corpse of an Ice Giant.

I am trying to find the proper situation for this pic, if you know please let me know!

Talislanta is fucking awesome.

Gamers' Common: A Manifesto

Of Dice and Men brings up the concept of Gamers' Common. Originated by Frank Mentzer, it is an idea designed to get around the Edition Wars and bring all roleplayers together, regardless what game they happen to be playing. What it means is writing game supplements using terms that are common to most games, or at least understood by all gamers; things like Rounds, Hit Points, Experience etc. It then falls to the game-master (and players!) to choose what rules set they want to apply. This might seem like a bit of work, but isn't any different than trying to convert a really good adventure that might not exactly fit your current game, edition or preferred OSR. More importantly, it leaves things open-ended enough to allow for GM improvisation and adaptation. I don't believe that you should play anything straight out of the box.

Two of my all time favourite role-playing supplements are The Chronicles of Talislanta (available all free and legal here) which outlines the continent of Talislanta, the primary setting for the game of the same name; and Titan which describes the world of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! gamebooks. Neither has a single rule in them, but both are utterly bottomless in terms of ideas and inspiration.

I thought of both of them when I came across of Mentzer's idea of rule neutral supplements. I've been struggling to find a focus for this blog for a long time and my own game writing has been all over the freakin' map.

I find the D&D Edition Wars to be tiring and pointless* and my own pet favourite games (Talislanta, TWERPS and WEG D6) are a little too esoteric to fill out a regularly posted blog. Homebrewing is fun, but again appeals only to a very small niche market (basically, myself). Still, I want to share my ideas, or at least put them down in one place so I can refer to them later. Writing in Gamers' Common allows me to do this, and I don't have to cross reference anything to make sure I converted the THAC0 correctly.

So I am leaving the rules behind and embarking down the GC path. I might occasionally dip into a rules specific post from time to time (if I ever bother to finish that TWERPS GI:JOE supplement, for example), but otherwise I am going to concentrate my energies on being as general as possible.

*For the record, I am an OSR Grognard at heart, but I am a believer in playing the game in front of you. If the GM puts the time and effort into running a 4thE game, play that and don't bitch how AD&D or the Red Box or Labyrinth Lord or Pathfinder does it better.  

Talislanta Blog: Still no elves!

a new blog about a Talislanta campaign.

Stealing Critters for Old Campaigns.

Darkling

As a DM there can be limited options for low level encounters, especially when you’re starting a whole new campaign with long-term players who yawn in the face of kobolds and laugh in the presence of giant rats.

However, my buddy, Blade (not his real name) who is running a D&Dpi game had an excellent idea for making low level monsters a little more interesting.

Back in our college days we played a lot of different games, all depending on what we’d picked up on our last visit to the LGS. My favourite was (and is) Talislanta, and over the years, I played the group through a few adventures.

Thrall

Blade remembered the pseudo-alien world while setting up his new campaign and instead of the usual suspects, he used Talislanta beasties instead; Darklings instead of kobolds, Ferrans instead of goblins, Thralls instead of Orcs (which is just plain mean) etc.

It’s a freakin’ brilliant idea! My advice to GMs, plunder every Bestiary, Monster Module and Critter Catalogue you can get your hands on and anything that strikes you as interesting or different, apply liberally.

The nice thing about Talislanta is that you can get all the books for free HERE, including the OGL Bestiary.  

Festival of the Bizarre

I have exactly one professional writing credit. Back in 2004 I was lucky enough to write a Talislanta adventure module for Morrigan Press entitled “The Weight of Water”.

The biggest thrill for me was seeing artists like Adam Black and Ron Spencer turn my words into some spectacular illustrations. I even got a cover done by the preeminent P.D.Breeding-Black!

After that, they commissioned me to write a second book entitled, ‘The Thaecian Isles: Festival of the Bizarre”, but the rpg business being what it is, the book never saw the official light of day (there were also plans for a sequel to ‘WoW’ called, “A Glimmer of Glass’ that unfortunately never made it past an outline). Nevertheless, I did complete a draft of ‘Festival of the Bizarre’.

Both Weight of Water and Festival of the Bizarre are available for free at Talislanta.com, but I wanted to host a copy here on my own site.

Pondering what I am Pondering.

So the question on my mind of late has been; why bother to write a brand new RPG anyway?

By that I mean, why not just fit my ideas around one of the many excellent systems that already exists, rather than try to launch something entirely new and may not ever appeal to anyone else but me?

I have been following with great interest and have given serious thought to embracing the OSR movement, writing for Labyrinth Lord, Castles and Crusades, or even just busting open my old Red Box and going from there. Then I have to be honest and admit that while I love rolling-it Old Skool, when it comes to writing I much prefer a sinmple, cohesive system rather than the 'different dice mechanic for every rule' approach.
So why not start my own D6 Renaissance, or even a TWERPS Revival Association. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.

I could even tinker with the Omnisystem, but to me that is forever bound to Talislanta, and thus, pretty much sacred. BTW, one of these days remind me to get into how Talislanta was directly responsible for 3D&D.
If I had to choose a system to work with, my choice would probably have to be RISUS, which is distilled awesome.

There was a time when I had found a game and thought; this was it, this was going to be the only game for me. Everthing thing I did forthwith, was going to be based on THIS ONE game. I also had a night job at the time and was watching a lot of pirated anime. That game was BESM. I quickly created a world called the ‘Moonlit Empire’ and ran my players through a couple of good to satisfactory adventures (gotta dig up those world notes one of these days).

Then with every successive book and supplement that “a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardians_of_Order>GoO released, the disillusionment grew. I railed in the forums and even sent letters to the company to get it back, get it back! This had been a pure and useful system, what where you doing to it?! Cock Fighting Seizure Monsters? Obscure licences to shows I barely recognized? Where was the frackin’ basic Fantasy Supplement? Finally, I gave up and sold all my books on ebay a few years before GoO finally imploded.

BESM aside, with all these great systems available, why break new ground? There are thousands of unplayed and abandoned homebrew systems out there littering the dead pages of the intraweb. Do I really want to add one more?

Frankly, yes. My time to write is limited and if I am going to do this at all, I might as well play in my own sandbox; play by no one else’s rules or restrictions. Do I care if anyone else ever plays the game as is? Not really. If someone ends up plays one of the adventures using a different set of rules, or even just gets a good idea, or a laugh out of something I put out there, I’ll consider it worthwhile.

If anyone is interested in starting up a TWERPS revival movement, leave a comment!

I Suck at Roleplaying Games

When it comes to the rules, I’m usually more lost than a Baptist at Dragon Con. I would honestly LOVE to crack into a game like FASA’s Mechwarrior or Renegade Legion and start rolling dice. I’ve read over the books and lovingly caressed the complex diagrams and stats a dozen times, but I still do not have the first clue on how the game is actually played. My brain is just not built that way.Might as well be written in ancient Swahili as far as I'm concerned
When I was a kid, I’d read articles in Dragon Magazine containing detailed charts for falling or drowning damage, or weapon speed/length/weight. I can even remember a semi-serious article containing some fairly intricate rules on telling jokes for the Jester class.I would seriously play this character.
And I found every bit of it fascinating even if, like my ill fated attempt at a Latin class, it left me utterly befuddled. As a result, my interest began to wane as AD&D continued to pile on the rules and we began to drift to other systems. We played RIFTS for the world, not the rules and we tended to ignore everything but the combat system anyway. It was rare that anyone wanted to play a straight magic-user or psi since there was a reason the game called regular humans, “squishies”. What Palladium ultimately left me with is a deep distaste for character sheets with long lists of skills and overall incongruous game mechanics.

I also found other systems like WEGs Star Wars which I found to be gloriously simple and marvellously easy to play. Then there was TWERPS, one of the grand-daddies of rules-lite which I never actually got to play, but revelled in its ability to boil things down to one stat and one dice. I still have a complete set of TWERPS supplements on my game shelf.Does anyone else remember this game?
But the one that really opened my eyes was Talislanta. I’m certain that I will gush about Tal a lot in this blog and I’ll save the raving fandom for another time, but sufficed to say seeing everything boiled down into a simple chart was nothing short of a double-rainbow moment for me in terms of how simply a game could be played.
Judge this book by its cover.
No matter what you play, how long you have been playing, or who you play with, something or someone is going to throw you a curveball. The player is going to suggest something completely out of left-field or the game is going to go in a unexpected direction exactly like some other baseball analogy.

In order to compensate for this, the game must have a specific rule for every scenario, or an overall system that any scenario can be plugged into. Talislanta did this with a chart outlining success rolls for Combat, Magic and Skills/Everything else. Want to know how long your character can tread water in full armour before the other PCs realize he fell down the well? You can either find that specific article in Dragon Magazine, or simply make a Swimming skill roll with modifiers for the armour, strength and time on one easy chart. Maybe the rules don’t specifically cover falling in a well in full armour, but the overall system is flexible enough for the GM to improvise a solution that the player will accept.

I can certainly see the appeal of having a rule for every scenario, and every scenario its rule. For tech-heavy games, this is almost a must. But my natural inclination will always be towards simpler systems and has deeply influenced me both as a GM, and as a game designer. While the rules are the framework of the game and should be adhearded to, they should never get in the way of good game.