Talislanta is an exotic post-apoc fantasy world inspired by the fantasy novels of Jack Vance, and by other sources such as H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dreamlands, Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels, and The Travels of Marco Polo.
The game is set in a strange world of twin suns and seven moons that's overflowing with exotic peoples, places, and creatures. The time is the New Age, a Renaissance-like period 600 years after The Great Disaster, a cataclysm that marked the fall of the space wizards of the Archaen Age.
Talislanta has seas of glass, phytomantic bird-people, tattooed clone warriors, transmutation wizards who use quintessence to change storms into crystals, sindarans with two brains, warring cultists who have taken over entire nations, elemental demons, ice schooners running on glaciers, windships manned by astromancers, beastmen mutants riding two-headed mini-dragons, and a whole lot more stuff that's a combo of every prog-rock album cover you've ever seen.
This quick-start PDF for the 4th edition of the game is a good, short intro.
Aaron Price
Reference lists of various things (from gods to flora/fauna to magical treasures) in Talislanta for new GMs.
Hudson Kelly
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Andrew Wood
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Xavier Nguyen
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Julian Edwards
This map of Celadon is pretty wild.
>The Cobalt Jungles and North-Eastern Coast >Separated from the Hydran Plains by the swiftly running Batrachian Stream, the Cobalt Jungles stretch along much of the north-eastern coast of Celadon before terminating along the edges of the Chimerical River. The flora of this region, including the steely blue iron trees, copper deodar, acid plants, silverthorn, and creeping mantrap, are incredibly perilous for the unprepared. When the metallic branches possessed by much of the vegetation here clash together, great showers and sprays of sparks are sent skyward with every breeze. Given that there is almost constant wind from clashing tropical sea breezes and the dry parched air from the Temesian Mountains, these dangerous displays of pyrotechnics are a constant threat. Metallic creatures, such as iron wasps and silver dragonflies, are common in this area as are the glass terratoids who come here to feed on the metallic and crystal foliage. >The Upper Cobalt Jungle >Of the Cobalt Jungle regions, the Upper jungle is both the larger and more dangerous of the two. Waters heated by fire and flame deep within the ground bubble to the surface, creating pools which breed all manner of disastrous pest and parasite, while metallic trees send up fountains of sparks into the heavens.
Daniel Rivera
>The Glass Jungle >Delicate seeming crystalline and glass plants, such as the crystal dendron, prism plants, and crystalline versions of other trees and shrubs, overrun the Glass Jungle; although the wilderness appears fragile, it has withstood centuries of storms and eruptions from the volcanoes that line the Temesian Mountains. A strange vibrating hum is created when winds blow through the transparent foliage, and at sunrise and sunset, the light here is nearly blinding as it is refracted into thousands upon thousands of rainbows. The plants and trees in the Glass Jungle are crystalline, either made of glass or crystal. Some of them produce 'fruit' in the form of precious gems or crystal orbs (and other shapes) filled with alchemical concoctions similar to various potions.
Oliver Nelson
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Parker Carter
Sounds interesting. I've heard of Talislanta before but never really looked into it. Which edition should I be looking at, rule-wise or from a setting perspective?
Lucas Harris
2e and 4e are the most popular choices. 2e gets described as the most simple to get into and is the choice of the oldbeards (though I personally found it less straight forward than 4e when I looked into it). 4e (aka Big Blue Book) has the freeform magic that is one of the draws of the system. 5e is basically 4e, except with a more involved character creation where you can combine career paths, a bit like in Traveller without the rolling.
Angel Rodriguez
>(though I personally found it less straight forward than 4e when I looked into it).
Really? Could you tell me why? I find 2E to be far and away leagues simpler than 4E. You just pick an archetype and tweak the attributes and skills a little. Meanwhile in 4E you have to construct your own spells, learn all the Modes and Orders, pick weapon skills.
Primary skills, secondary skills, tertiary skills, list of individual spells to learn. It just reads less uniform, I feel there are more stand alone things to remember. Modes are just magic skills for what you want to do magically and the orders are the way/tool you use. And in 4e you pick the archetype too, so that's not really different.
Samuel Walker
3e user here. It cleans up 2e's mechanics to their best form, but it loses the feel in the process.
So use 3e's core rulebook, and all the fluff from 2e.
Adrian Murphy
Yeah, I find all the rule mechanics after 2e lose that Vancian feel. The Modes are just too meta-gamey and rules-focused.
And the 3E book is possibly the ugliest RPG I have ever encountered. The layout, font sizes, artwork, everything is quite hideous.
Valid point, those are somewhat tricky to explain. They're just a mechanism to prevent people being powerful in both combat and magic though. And there are only 6 skills that have this primary/secondary/tertiary distinction, the rest are the same (mostly) as other editions.
Still far too many skills in all editions for my tastes.
Jonathan Smith
There's some pretty good music for Talislanta recorded by the author and others, available for free as well:
If the new book is cool and sells well, we may see a new edition in a few years, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The original creator said he's tired of new editions rehashing the same old stuff (and then going bankrupt very quickly).
I have no Idea, but it is only very recently down.
Ryan Cooper
It's a small site, might have hit the bandwidth limit for this month (or day), since I've been advertising it all over the place.
Oops.
Thomas Morales
Whoopsie. I just wanted to suggest the new place to download the game for the Da Archive, because they link they have is for scribbld, and requires an account to download.
Ian Cruz
I'll ease the pain with what will fit Veeky Forums
Mason Cruz
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Hunter Martin
I wouldn't post the unedited, low-quality books, they are not good representations for the game.
Wait until the site is back up and post the large official books PDFs to a Mega somewhere.
