Quote from: Brad on December 10, 2024, 10:45:01 PMOkay, I have played Tal a few times (literally 30 years ago at this point) so a question to see if I actually understand the setting...it's like a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by magic, so about as close to what D&D was trying to do as possible, maybe? It always reminded me of a cross between Yor and Krull, but I dunno, I could be totally wrong. Atlantis is obviously the best Conan RPG, though.

The short answer is: Yes

Talislanta history in a nutshell -

Thousands of years ago, a race called the Drakken rules (think of them as Dinosaur-dragon, the OG Dragonblooded). There were humanoids, colloquially known as "Sub-men" that squabbled with the Drakken, but were no match for them. The Drakken were simply too advanced in metallurgy, and they were simply smarter, but they had no magic.

Then this "thing" fell from the sky (let's not fuck around - it's a spaceship). One of the Sub-men tribes discovers the craft, and inside they find the Grand Orb of MacGuffin, from which they learn "magic". Is it magic? Fuck it - it is to them.

This tribe eventually organizes and starts to master their new toy, then they make war on the Drakken - after decades of war manage to beat them.

Time passes (centuries), and that tribe evolves into a civilization called the Archaens, and they leave the rest of their sub-men tribes behind both culturally and physiologically. Eventually they end up making war on the Sub-men too. Their mastery of magic becomes all-encompassing until the point where the centuries of warfare becomes pointless - they use their magic to raise their city-states into the sky itself.

They cede the entirety of the world below them to the Beast Men (as they're called now), who breed out of control, meanwhile they live in the skies getting wtf-debaucherous. They spend centuries warring among themselves, creating servitor-races (many of them PC races). The Archaens become veritable gods, working magic to such a degree that reality itself becomes warped... which necessitates the great apocalypse. Effectively *everything* breaks. Cities get tossed into other dimensions, fall from the sky, explode, get shot into space. Cats living with dogs. etc.

The centuries that pass immediately afterwards are covered in "The Savage Lands" RPG (which I helped write). MANY of the races of the Savage Lands era will go extinct by the time of the modern era of Talislanta.

Modern Talislanta
So modern Talislanta is like the "Renaissance" era that has risen from the ashes of the cataclysm. Many years have forged several major cultures: the descendants of the Archaens have risen into several sub-cultures, the most prominent being the Cymrillians have forged an alliance with several other kingdoms (creatively called The Nine Kingdoms). Other city states and kingdoms, even a couple of empires, have risen as well. Many of them are ruled by some of the servitor races that survived the cataclysm.

Meanwhile - the road to this modern landscape is laden with horrifying wars against the Beastmen, the warping of the chaos storms that *continue* to ravage the world - the flora and fauna itself has mutated, many of the survivors of the Cataclysm are the most dangerous shit roaming the world (see: the Bestiary). The Beastmen tribes have survived. Rifts to other dimensions have let in all kinds of horrible demonic shit. The vaults of the ancients remain all over the place to be discovered and explored.

So you can have very civilized "high-fantasy" or urban gameplay in various locales. You can also have adventure and swashbuckling or S&S adventures with tomb-robbing, jungle-ruin discovery, or the grittiest and dirtiest darkety-dark-dark adventures where you're dealing with ancient necromancers of the Phaedran age (post-Archaen) who sold their souls to the demonlords of the pit.

Talislanta has it all. The question is simply where you want to start. It's got religion, politics and lore galore. But it's also a wide open sandbox for you to carve your own name all over it.

Quote from: fbnaulin on December 11, 2024, 12:01:29 PMNow, that looks like a leviathan of books and material. I have always been curious about Talislanta, it's getting to hard to resist temptation.

Why resist? Five entire editions of it are FREEEEEEE! And they're all 99% backwards compatible.

And the system is still one of the best out there. One single table. Stat+Skill+d20.

Quote from: tenbones on December 11, 2024, 12:12:20 PM

Quote from: fbnaulin on December 11, 2024, 12:01:29 PMNow, that looks like a leviathan of books and material. I have always been curious about Talislanta, it's getting to hard to resist temptation.

Why resist? Five entire editions of it are FREEEEEEE! And they're all 99% backwards compatible.

And the system is still one of the best out there. One single table. Stat+Skill+d20.

If you squint just a little, you'll see that Tweet brought that over to D&D 3.0 and it's been an integral part of how you make a D20 roll for 25 years now. People hate on WotC, but they kept Tal going with 3E and kept the Bard Games Cyclopedias on the market too.

Quote from: tenbones on December 11, 2024, 12:12:20 PMAnd the system is still one of the best out there. One single table. Stat+Skill+d20.

It's almost like the simpler the system, the better game...as long as you have a referee.

This is precisely why *we* as older gamers need to pass on our GMing knowledge in a more structural way to create more GM's that can avoid many of the pitfalls we experienced coming up. The same ones that we see over and over in various GMing threads.

One of those things that GM's need to be doing is running the games they want to run, and selling that to players and earning their trust (or finding players that simply want to play). Talislanta has managed to survive this long on the rare occurrences people have gotten the slightest chance of playing it.

The system is strong, the setting is weird but definitely thematically very familiar. We just need GM's to get out there and run it (and other games).

Looks like Everything Epic may not have been the group for Secchi to partner with.  Reports are coming back of 6e books pages coming unglued already, the dice aren't actually engraved, etc.  The cloth maps are boss, though.