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For years now, I’ve hardly taken notice when the name “Talislanta” was bandied about. I’ve heard the claims that it is one of the richest fantasy settings ever, and I knew that it has had a staunch and loyal following since it was first published 17 years ago. But none of this ever caused me to look into the game. I just wrote it off as yet another in an endless line of fantasy settings, one that I didn’t need because I already owned a fair collection of fantasy settings that I thought covered the range of my interest in the genre.
Wow. I was wrong.
Previous Editions of Talislanta
I’m brand new to Talislanta, and this 4th edition is the only one I’m familiar with. However, I understand that older editions had character levels, so you could be a 15th level Kang Warrior for instance. They also had a magic system based on picking from a list rather than the current improvisational system. So if you’re familiar with older editions, flush those ideas. Characters never level-up in this edition. Instead, they spend experience points to directly improve values on their character sheet or add new ones. There is still a spell list in 4th edition, but it is fairly small and meant mostly as an example. The meat of the magic system has you, the player, making up your own spells on the fly! Also, previous editions had random damage calculation while in this edition all weapons do fixed amounts of damage (see Combat). The 3rd edition was published by Wizards of the Coast in their pre-Dungeons & Dragons days, but it was sold back to the original owners after the acquisition of TSR.
Book Organization
Talislanta is a massive tome weighing in at 502 pages. But don’t be intimidated. Below are the major sections of Talislanta’s table of contents. Pay special attention to the page numbers:
Chapter One: The Rules: 7
Chapter Two: Combat: 23
Chapter Three: Magic: 31
Chapter Four: Skills: 91
Chapter Five: A Traveler’s Guide to Talislanta: 109
Chapter Six: Gamemaster’s Section: 424
Chapter Seven: Equipment: 452
Chapter Eight: Appendix: 489
Did you notice anything? The rules are only 16 pages long. Combat is only 8 pages long. The chapter on magic is mostly a spellbook giving example spells. If you don’t count that list, the chapter is only 16 pages long. The skills chapter is nothing but a big list. So, if you add up the rules sections of the first three chapters, you’ll see that you only need to read 40 pages in order to completely understand how to play this game!
See, I told you not to be intimidated. Unless you’re a GM. In that case, you may have noticed the whopping 315-page chapter in the middle of the book. This describes the setting. But don’t fret just yet. While it is easy to classify Talislanta as setting-heavy, a term that might seem stifling to some GMs, I’m actually going to make the opposite argument. Actually, I’ll argue that it’s heavy and light at the same time. See the Setting section below for details. Also, the last 50 pages of this section consist of character archetypes, so that cuts a big chunk out of the setting length.
The equipment section is mainly a description of various weapons, siege equipment, vehicles (land, sea, and air), and so forth. There are very few rules in this section, just pictures and descriptions. The appendix is full of charts like equipment costs, lifespan of the various races, and so forth.
Character Creation
Normally this is one of the first sections of an RPG review, and indeed, it’s one of the first things covered in the book. However, I’m going to defer this section until the end of the review, because it’s important to understand a bit about the setting in order to appreciate the chosen method of character creation.
The Setting
Talislanta is a truly fantastic world, with a myriad of unique and exotic races and cultures that, frankly, make the standard “elves and dwarves” campaign settings seem somewhat mundane in comparison. Talislanta does not have elves or dwarves, but it has so many other interesting races that those old standbys will not be missed at all. There are bird people, cat people, reptilian people. There is a fanatically religious race that reminds me an even more extreme version of the Children of Light from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. There are brutal desert nomads who sail the sands in ships mounted on giant skids or wheels, savage jungle tribes that practice cannibalism and headshrinking, and yellow-skinned gypsies that travel the world entertaining and practicing the arts of thievery. There are sea-faring buccaneers and corsairs, introspective mystic warriors who practice the arts of unarmed combat, and arctic dwellers who are immune to the effects of cold and travel the icy wastes in ice schooners and sleds. There is a race of genetically-engineered warriors, great trading nations who travel the very skies in flying ships, and in the east there is the great Kang empire, ruled by a brutal, militaristic race trained in the arts of war from the day they can hold a sword.
Sound like a lot? Truthfully, this only scratches the surface of Talislanta’s rich setting. There are dozens upon dozens of unique and interesting cultures…enough to fuel just about any type of fantasy campaign you’d like to run. It’s important to note that very few of these races are considered inherently good or evil. They are just different peoples with different ways of life. In this, Talislanta reminds me somewhat of Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria, the setting for his Conan the Barbarian stories, where there are many nations but it is not a black and white world where you can easily pick out the “good guy” nations from the “bad guys.”
Talislanta’s setting has a bit of a learning curve attached, for two reasons. First, there is no “baseline” race that populates most of the world. In most fantasy settings, humans are everywhere and non-humans are less common and live only in certain areas of the world. This makes those worlds easy to comprehend because humans act much like they do in our real world. Talislanta doesn’t have humans. Actually, several of its races are descended from the same ancient race and are designated the “Races of Man,” but most of them could not be called normal humans. They might have pointy ears or green skin or some innate magical abilities, not to mention cultural differences. So each is really a race unto itself. No single race dominates the world, so you can’t learn about one race and thus have knowledge of how most of the world works. Every race has its own geographic homeland, although many of them do travel the world and intermingle for business and other purposes. The lack of a standard and overly dominant human race really adds to exotic and fantastic nature. If you’ve seen the film The Dark Crystal, which also has no humans, I think that film has a very similar feel to the world of Talislanta.
The second reason Talislanta may take a little time to warm up to is because all these races and lands have unique names that we haven’t seen before. Most fantasy settings have elves and dwarves that fill familiar stereotypical roles, so you essentially are already partially familiar with one of those settings before you even crack open the book. Not so with Talislanta. The races have names like Kang, Djaffir, Cymrillian, Aeriad, Moorg-Wan, and Castabulanese. Once you’ve spent some time with the game, these names will be instantly meaningful to you just as “elf” and “dwarf” already are. But when you first open the book, they are unrecognizable and alien terms. Enter into Talislanta determined to pick up a new vocabulary as you learn about a wondrous land which, to be honest, is so varied that it will make you see other, more standard fantasy settings as more-or-less the same idea over and over, only with nitpicky differences between them.
Earlier in the review I said that Talislanta is both setting-heavy and setting-lite at the same time. What I mean by this is that Talislanta focuses on breadth instead of depth. While there are so many different lands and cultures in the book that I won’t even attempt to count them all due to the time and effort it would take, each of these lands or peoples is described in an average of about 3 pages. Most sections cover the same common areas: Ancestry, Society, Customs, Government, Magic & Religion, The Arts, Language, Defenses, Commerce, and Worldview. With only about 3 pages per culture, that means that usually each section gets 1-3 paragraphs of detail. Each culture is remarkably compartmentalized in the book, so it is easy to drop into the middle of the book, read about one culture that you have an interest in, and then exit back out without having many hanging references that require to read many other sections as well.
GMs should view this as a Good Thing. What it means is that you are given a vast world with limitless possibilities and well-defined cultures, but at the same time you are spared the minutiae and laborious detail that other settings focus on and which scares many GMs away because they feel trapped or locked in by the extreme amount of definition For example, I enjoy Forgotten Realms but many GMs refuse to work in that setting because it is too defined. You won’t have this problem in Talislanta. There are no city maps, and in fact when cities are described at all, it is only in one paragraph. There are no named NPCs mentioned anywhere, so you don’t have established personalities like Elminster or Drizzt that your players will expect to find.
Talislanta’s setting is a very large and varied framework, but it is still just a framework. There is ample opportunity for the GM to insert his own settlements, enterprises, and intrigues without feeling they are violating canon or “breaking the setting” at all. It gives you both detail and freedom at the same time, which is quite a trick.
The System
There are eleven attributes in Talislanta: Strength, Dexterity, Perception, Charisma, Constitution, Speed, Will, Intelligence, Combat Rating, Magic Rating, and Hit Points. With the exception of hit points, an average rating is 0, and from there it goes up to +1, +2, etc., or down to –1, -2, etc. Normal humanoids have attributes in the range of –5 to +5. As you might guess, these values translate directly into die roll modifiers. I love this approach. It simply cannot get more intuitive than this, nor easier to read when glancing at a character sheet. There are no conversion tables to turn some abstract value into bonuses or penalties, because the attribute is the bonus or penalty. Your character might have Strength +1 or Intelligence –2. Skills are rated the same way, so they would be listed as Sword +3 or Stealth +5.
Hit points work as you’d expect in most other RPGs: They are a total representing your ability to sustain damage, and if they drop to 0 or less then you are on the verge of death. Where hit points vary from other games is that, except for applying a constitution bonus during character creation, they do not increase. Ever. The hit point value you start with will be the same one you carry with you for your whole adventuring career, barring unusual circumstances like magical enhancement. Rather than relying on an ever-increasing value, your character instead continues to improve in his ability to prevent damage to himself in the first place. This is much more realistic and avoids the “human pincushion” effect of traditional hit point systems where high-level characters can take volley after volley of arrows and never bat an eye.
To make a skill roll, you simply roll 1d20, add the relevant attribute, and then add the relevant skill. Then you compare your result to a single, never-changing and instantly-memorized table defining success or failure.
Did you catch that? This game has fixed target numbers. Again, I love this approach, for two reasons. First, players will always know what they need to roll for a success, and that gives them a level of clarity about their character’s abilities that some systems cannot match. For instance, if they know that they always need to roll an 11 or higher to get a success and their attribute value and skill value add up to +6, then they know exactly what their chance of failure will be (i.e., they only need to roll a 5 on 1d20, barring any situational penalties the GM has imposed on the roll). Second, I find that fixed target numbers make it much easier for me as GM to apply modifiers. It’s true that, given a standard target number of 11, the statements “you have a target number of 13 for this roll” and “you have a –2 to this roll” are mathematically identical. However, the latter makes much more intuitive sense to me. For whatever reason, I’m more comfortable thinking of it in terms of a bonus or penalty rather than coming up with a target number on the fly, out of the air.
So what does this table look like? It looks like this:
0 or less: Mishap
1-5: Failure
6-10: Partial Success
11-19: Full Success
20+: Critical Success
What do those different levels of success mean? It’s up to the GM. Talislanta places emphasis on having the player state his intention before making the roll, and the GM interprets the result based on that intention. In combat, the intention might be as simple as “kill/injure the opponent.” In that case, a partial success would typically do half damage, while a critical success would do full damage plus a critical wound. If the intention was to use your acrobatics roll to vault over a balcony railing and land on the enemy’s back, then the GM would determine what happens at each level. A mishap might have you tripping over the railing, plummeting to the ground for some amount of damage, while a critical success might have you executing the maneuver so well that you manage to not only land on your target, but knock him into two of his henchmen as well, bringing all three to the ground. It’s situational. Oh, and note that a mishap is impossible without some penalty to the roll.
I’ve already mentioned skills. I won’t bother to go into them in detail, but they are organized into the following categories: Common, Language, Combat, Performing, Scholar, Thieving, Trade, Wilderness, and Magical. I’d roughly estimate there to be about 100 skills between these various categories. They run the gamut that you’d expect in most RPGs, but there are some more unique concepts as well. One that caught my eye was the Shield skill--you can become proficient in the use of a shield separately from any weapon skill you have. This skill gives you a bonus to parry attempts, lets you parry missile attacks, and will even let you parry a blow intended for someone standing next to you. After the skills section is a small section listing special abilities, which are innate gifts such as Sixth Sense or Night Vision.
Magic
In Talislanta it is assumed that in their years of study, mages have amassed knowledge of hundreds or even thousands of spells. Far too many to track on your character sheet in any practical manner. Instead, players simply make up spells as needed, and it is assumed that the character learned that spell at some point previous. Does that make sense? It’s an improvisational system from the player or metagame standpoint, but from thecharacter standpoint, there is no such thing as improvisational magic in the setting. All their spells were learned through study.
Spellcasters have knowledge in one or more of the 12 Modes. These are: Alter, Attack, Conjure, Defend, Heal, Illusion, Influence, Move, Reveal, Summon, Transform, and Ward. They have a rating in each mode just like skills, so you might have Conjure +3 and Ward +5. All spells in the game falls into one of these categories. If you want to throw a fireball, use the Attack mode. Want to bring forth a fiery demon to smite your foes? That’s the Summon mode. Each mode is described in detail, defining what it can and can’t do. For instance, an Attack spell does 1 point of damage per spell level.
Wait a minute. Spell level? What’s that? In Talislanta, you get to decide the level of your spell on the fly, each time you cast it! It essentially represents the power you are putting into the spell. The level of your spell translates directly into a penalty to your casting attempt. So if you want to cast a level 10 fireball, then you have a –10 penalty to your roll. Sound harsh? It is, if you’re a novice mage going for huge spell effects while you’re still wet behind the ears. But as your ability in the various modes increases, your risk lessens. In other words, if you have the Attack mode at +12, then that –10 penalty doesn’t sound so terrible anymore.
There are two ways to cast a spell: from memory, or from a written work such as a spellbook or a scroll. Casting from memory is the method I’ve described already—the player defines a spell on the fly, and in game terms, the mage is simply using one of the huge number of spells he’s learned in his studies. Casting from a written work is the safer and easier method, but it also takes a long time. When you cast by reading a written spell, you get a +5 to your casting roll and you don’t accumulate a spell penalty. On the downside, it takes at least 1 minute per spell level to accomplish. Note that written works can be used over and over—the text doesn’t mysteriously disappear upon being read or anything like that. Casting from memory is fast and flexible, since you don’t need to have a spell documented, but you accumulate spell penalty.
What’s spell penalty? Each time you cast a spell from memory, you get a cumulative –1 to future castings. So your 3rd memory spell of the day will be at –2, your 4th spell will be at –3, and so on. Since spells use the same resolution chart as everything else, this increasing penalty means that you have a higher and higher likelihood of a magical mishap (rolling 0 or less). Magical mishaps are bad. What actually happens is up to the GM’s interpretation based on the caster’s intention, but some suggested examples involve striking yourself or a teammate instead of the intended target, or casting the reverse of your intention (so a healing spell might actually deal damage!). If you manage a critical success during a casting, then you don’t accumulate the normal spell penalty. Also, a full night’s rest will reset your penalty back to zero.
There are 11 different orders of magic in Talislanta, and each one uses the 12 modes in different ways. The 11 orders are: Cartomancy, Cryptomancy, Crystalomancy, Elemental Magic, Invocation, Mysticism, Natural Magic, Necromancy, Shamanism, Witchcraft, and Wizardry. Each order has its own advantages and limitations, which might include modes that are not available to that order. Each order’s spells will have a different special effect as well. For instance, an Elementalist casting an Attack spell might throw a fireball or lightning bolt. A Necromancer casting the same Attack spell, though, might fire a death ray or conjure up a floating skull with gnashing teeth to bite the target. Sometimes these effects are just candy for the imagination, but other times they might actually have an impact on play. It all depends on the situation and how the GM interprets the result of your roll.
While spells normally have a limited duration, you can enchant items with permanent magical power. So you can give your armor extra defense, or cloak your sword in mystical fire, or make a ring to turn the wearer invisible. There are 3 pages detailing how to enchant items. Enchantment is where we come across possibly the only arbitrary rule I’ve seen in the game: characters can carry no more than 7 enchanted items at a time. Any additional items will simply not function. An in-game explanation for this isn’t really given, although the rule is clearly for balance reasons.
One last interesting item about magic is the counterspell. Any spell can be countered by a spell of the same mode. So if somebody uses the Ward mode to put up a force field protecting them from damage, you can try to counter it with your own Ward spell, assuming you know that mode. If you are of a different order than the caster, then you get a –5 on your counterspell attempt. Your counterspell can either fully negate the original spell, or it can reduce its effectiveness. It depends how well you roll. See, that one success table is used all over the place!
Combat
Attacking in Talislanta is essentially like any other skill roll, where your skill with your current weapon is used as the modifier. Weapons do a fixed amount of damage, so there is no need to make a damage roll. To take an example from the book, a longsword with a damage rating of 8 will do 8 points of damage (plus Strength modifier) if you roll a full success. If you roll a partial success, halve that number—you do 4 points of damage. Critical successes do full damage plus they cause a critical wound. The victim makes a Constitution roll to determine the effect of the critical wound. It can be just a flesh wound, give the target penalties to all future rolls, or it can flat out incapacitate him regardless of his current hit point total.
Armor in Talislanta blocks damage, it doesn’t make you harder to hit. So if I hit you with 8 points of damage, and your armor has a rating of 3, then you end up taking 5 points of damage. Shields are different, though. Shields give your attacker a –2 to their roll, so they actually do make you harder to hit. The downside of a shield is that it gives you a penalty to any Dexterity-based rolls.
There are also rules for grappling, subdual attacks, dodging and parrying, fleeing and advancing, aimed shots, and also a section on performing stunts such as swinging from chandeliers or throwing sand in an opponent’s eyes.
Character Creation Revisited
Ok, so now you’re familiar with Talislanta and it’s time to talk character creation. Well, there isn’t any. Talislanta is purely template-driven. There are over 100 templates in the book, and the player simply chooses one to play. You are allowed to make some minor customization such as raising and lowering a few values and specifying weapon skills and known magical modes, but essentially you play one of the defined archetypes.
I can already hear the outcry. “You mean there are dozens of interesting races, 11 different schools of magic, and a big list of skills, and yet I can’t build my own character by piecing together all these pieces? Hogwash!” I can understand your dismay, and at first I shared it. But now the archetype system as “clicked” with me and I appreciate it and can sing its virtues.
Archetypes enforce the feel of the setting. If you have a system that says, “Orcs are to be feared because they are so strong, and get a +5 to Strength,” but then any of the other races can spend points (or whatever mechanism) to get strength equal to an orc, then orcs loose a lot of their intended uniqueness, don’t you think? Talislanta maintains its racial definitions by simply giving some races values higher than others, or special abilities that other races simply can’t have. Yes, this means that the templates are intentionally not balanced against each other. Yes, this gave me heartburn at first too. But balance begets sameness, and I’m happy with the variety of Talislantan races. When you see a Kang raiding party charging your way, you will properly experience fear because you will know that the Kang are inherently some of the fiercest warriors in the land.
It should be noted that the book does cover creating your own templates, but this is a fairly freeform activity where you basically give the template anything you think sounds appropriate, and then the GM looks it over and gives it his stamp of approval. There is no built-in system for ensuring that new templates are balanced with existing ones.
Although I do understand and appreciate the archetype-based system of character generation, in the end I do think it would be a great benefit to the game if they would distill the inherent abilities of each race into a generic definition and implement a point-buy system where you can create your own unique characters. There is the constant danger that this would produce characters that do not properly match the intended flavor of the setting, but I think giving the players more control using a more familiar, more standardized method would probably open up this game to many gamers who might otherwise turn away.
Conclusion
Talislanta is an incredible game. It has a wide, sweeping setting that has much more variety and flavor than other settings that might dwarf it geographically, while at the same time avoiding the GM stranglehold that most other well-detailed settings suffer from. The rule system is ingeniously simple and is learned so quickly that you will very rarely find yourself having to refer to the book to remember how something is handled. The magic system is easy, intuitive, and wonderfully flexible. Any fantasy role-playing enthusiast should not consider their collection complete without a copy of Talislanta 4th edition on their shelf.
Note that there is a free 50+ page PDF sampler of Talislanta at the official website. This sampler includes: chapter one (The Rules) in its entirety; a description of all the magical modes and the complete details of the Wizardry order including sample spells; the complete setting section detailing the Seven Kingdoms, an excellent portion of Talislanta to start new adventuring parties in; all the Seven Kingdoms character templates from the main book; and finally, a few of the most-used charts from the appendix, such as equipment lists.
Also, the website has a very unique promotional item: a 7-minute multimedia tour of the setting including narration, artwork from various Talislanta publications, and music from some of the soundtrack CDs that have been released in support of the setting. The narrator is clearly not a professional voice actor, but this is a very fun RealMedia presentation!
Both the sampler and the video can be found here.
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