Talislanta

Talislanta is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game created by Stephen Michael Sechi and first published by Bard Games in 1987, set on a continent of the same name on the fictional planet Archaeus, a world where magic has developed to a level comparable to high technology. The game deliberately departs from conventional fantasy tropes such as elves, dwarves and standard character classes, offering instead a character creation system built around dozens of distinct character races and types, defined in early editions by more than eighty combinations of race, nationality, ability scores, skills, equipment and background, and resolving tasks with a twenty-sided die. Talislanta has been republished across seven English-language editions as of 2024, passing through several publishers including Wizards of the Coast for a 1992 third edition and Everything Epic for a 2023 to 2024 sixth edition, alongside translations into French, German and Italian. Reviewers have continued to praise the setting's imaginative, tropes-averse world-building decades after its original release.