Talislanta d20

[Voadam]

Morrigan Press is having a pdf sale and I picked up their Tal d20 book last night and I'm considering their dual stat menagerie/bestiary book for Tal4/d20

This is the first I've ever gotten of any Talislanta stuff though I remember the no elves dragon magazine ads from the 80s.

I remember hearing people talk about how disappointing it was that the races do not have LA adjustments in the d20 campaign book when it came out but not much else. Morrigan press doesn't seem to be in the review database here so I was wondering if anybody has them and could give me their impressions.

 

[Phaeryx]

I've got this. I also have all of the older Talislanta books. I wouldn't recommend running a Talislanta campaign without some of the older sourcebooks. It's a brilliant setting, but the D20 book is poorly put together. True, Talislanta has never been about racial balance, but the bigger problem with the D20 version is that it entirely ditches the 3.5 magic system for it's own poorly thought out system.

The older editions of Talislanta actually had lists of spells to choose from, making things alot easier. 3rd edition had mechanics for creating new spells as well. The D20 version follows the 4th (Tal) edition in that there is no spell list and spell creation is entirely intuitive/creative. A nice idea, but lazily done. There's no follow-through. You get no example or sample spells. NPC creation is a homework nightmare. It's not worth it.

I'd like to run Tal D20 using 3.5 magic rules but they don't jibe well with the flavor of Talislantan magic, the way it's forms are divided into different orders, which don't conform to the schools of D&D magic. The magical orders in Talislantan magic didn't exist in the first two editions, but it was an innovation that fit in well with the cultures established in the setting, and that's the good stuff.

One solution I had in mind was to use the magic system from Thieves' World, which better conforms to the Talislantan practice of magic but preserves the list of existing spells from D&D. You could go through the existing D&D spell list and arbitrarily divide them into the Talislantan orders, so that only certain cultures, or practitioners of certain orders, would know or have access to the spells associated with them. Thus, a mage who, because of his race or background, had access to spells of the Sorcery order (which would be a broad list containing the most generic spells) could learn Geomancy spells (stuff with the earth descriptor, etc,) by finding a Gnomekin or someone familiar with Geomantic spells to teach him. You would have to do away with the distinction between arcane and divine magic for this to work. And there are alot of spells, so it would be alot of work categorizing them.

The Thieves' World casting system would support a system in which there was no distinction between arcane and divine spells, while maintaining spellcaster classes (the Mage and the Priest) who have distinct focuses for casting spells-- one focuses more on ritual casting, for example-- but they could be made to share a master spell list (if they don't already, I can't remember).

Game mechanics were never the strength of Talislanta, though. The cultures and history of the setting are amazing, and the names of peoples and places are as evocative as the artwork featured in the older books, but the info in the D20 book just scratches the surface. Most of the older setting supplements, like the Cyclopedia series, are still available online through 3rd party sellers on Amazon, etc.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

Most of the older setting supplements, like the Cyclopedia series, are still available online through 3rd party sellers on Amazon, etc.

The only thing I'll comment on, is to note that the Cyclopedia series is considered apocrypha now. The very first one is still "canon" (as that was written by SMS) but after that, it's been tossed. Apparently SMS was unhappy with the rest of the books, as they kept getting further and further from his vision of Talislanta. I seem to recall there was some disatisfaction with some of the WotC stuff (which is 3rd ed), but I'm hazy on that.

Ordinarily, I'm someone that _really_ dislikes issues of canon. The only reason I bring this up, is because later material can/does contradict the cylopedia series. The plan that is kicking around Morrigan is that eventually they'll have product released that covers all the areas that the cyclopedias do, while keeping to the vision that SMS has.

So if things like "canon" or conflicting information is a problem for you, you'll have to decide if you really want to get the cyclopedias or not. From everything I saw, the cyclopedias weren't written badly, they just don't match the Talislanta that SMS wants to present to the fans.

 

[Scurvy_Platypus]

I remember hearing people talk about how disappointing it was that the races do not have LA adjustments in the d20 campaign book when it came out but not much else. Morrigan press doesn't seem to be in the review database here so I was wondering if anybody has them and could give me their impressions.

First, a disclaimer: I came across Talislanta a long time ago. I really liked it and played it for a bit, although I didn't keep up with it. These days I still like it, but think there's other good games and setting out there.

I haven't heard anything positive about Talislanta d20. Of course, I haven't heard very much about Tal d20 at all, but what I have heard hasn't been positive. I _really_ think a lot of the reason is because it's a product that annoyed the core base of Talislanta fans, and the d20 fans hammered on it because of some stumbles it (maybe) made with the rules and being a very different set of assumptions. Much like BESM d20 was reviled, despite being a pretty functional ruleset.

As for the LA or lackthereof in Tal d20, it's a problem that's fixable if you're willing to do a bit of work yourself. Whether you should _have to_ do that work is a bit of a moot point; Talislanta never really worried about balance (especially like most 3.x people seem to be obsessed with), and therefore when they put it into the d20 system, they followed that same philosophy. There have always been races/classes that were better than others, through the entire lifecycle of the Talislanta game.

If you want to add LA to the game, you've got a couple of options. You could work through the stuff using Savage Species, or you can pick up the Grim Tales Creature Creation ($8) and in addition to getting the information for critter creation, you'll get a spreadsheet to handle the calculations for you. It can be found here:
http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=18836&it=1

There are a couple of other free options kicking around, which should be good enough for you. One of them being Soldarin's ECL calculator:
http://soldarin.tripod.com/id5.html

There's a couple of downloads to pickup as well:
http://www.talislanta.com/download.htm

For some reason, I don't see the 2nd Web Enhancement they did for the d20 version, so here's the direct download link: http://www.talislanta.com/files/volume2Web.pdf

I don't know if it matters or not, but as far as getting the Menagerie is concerned, I personally plan on trying to get a copy of the 4th Ed.