Dire Bare
Legend
The "No elves!" in huge font made me not want to bother with the much smaller print.Elf-lover that I am, that line still intrigued me. Though the wonderful P.D. Breeding-Black art in the ads was the main draw. And their ads almost exclusively focused on what they DID have, IME. Even the ones which used that tagline generally did sell you what the game did have.
My recollection is that several races had pointed ears, but only a few of those were elfy. And the usual elf tropes were split among several different species.
I'm not saying Talislanta isn't a good game and/or a good setting. It has survived until the modern day with a relatively recent new edition (printing?), so it's gotta have something going for it. I'm glad the creators put something together that spoke to them and to a larger audience, but . . . . I've never been interested, and it's mostly because of the "no elves!" marketing. I didn't really care for the art either, but that's just my personal taste.
Both today and back in the day . . . there are more games to play than I have time. So when a game whiffs it (to my own perception), I'm ready to move on to something else. I saw those ads in Dragon Magazine back in the 80s and simply thought, "not for me!" and moved on. That's not a judgement on the game itself.
And again, especially when your setting has elves! Sorta. I'm not personally familiar with Talislanta, but from what I recall in conversations on these boards, there is plenty of elfy-ness to go around in Talislanta. Just not concentrated in a single Tolkienesque package like in D&D. Your comments support that impression.