Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Talislanta is free! What could we play?

I was looking for an old fashioned and simple system recently and stumbled upon Talislanta.
I own the 2nd Edition of thie classic non-EDO fantasy setting, but my books are a few 1000 kilometres away.

So I was happy to be able to download most of the pdfs for the system.

Here you find the free RPG books for Talislanta.

What means "non-EDO"? EDO=Elves,Dwarves,Orcs? Talislanta breaks out of the Lord of the Rings mold and is not influenced by old nothern European myths, but much more by Jack Vance and H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands.

But what adventure should you play in such a huge setting?

I would let the players only chose between archetypes from the Seven Kingdoms and maybe the Wilderlands. That is enough choices. And I would set the adventures as well in this region.

Probably I would start in the near the realm of the Gnomekin, as some of the Seven Kingdoms are a little bit too cute. And for exactly that reason I would create an adventure where someone wants to create a Civil War in this nice union of races. An intrique that should split this bright corner of Talislanta apart.

Some interesting seeds:

  • The Muses don't have a real ruler, but one is assigned randomly every month. What if a player character Muse becomes ruler, or if an "evil" (or blackmailed) Muse takes reign.

  • The bird people (blue and green) seem to be quite split, it is a good point to start a war.

  • The Cymril people seem to quite arrogant. It would also be easy to seed suspicion among the other races.


Now combine this 3 ideas through one villain and let the players run wild and create even more of a mess. Then villain should even empower the PCs to behave like PCs do. What a fun mess.

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