Musings on a Dragonlance X Talislanta Magic System Crossover Nobody Asked For

Notice: What follows is a collection of ideas and guidelines rather than a fully realized homebrew system. It probably would have been faster and easier for me to just do that instead, but I just had to go and take a bird's eye view of the whole thing.

Dragonlance's Fifth Age, AKA the Age of Mortals, was a bit of a fanbase-breaker back when it was first introduced in the '90s. It was meant to usher in a new phase of the universe after the trilogy that was supposed to permanently cap the series off forever with no new additions instead got condensed into a single book (Dragons of Summer Flame) and hastily shoved out there. The backlash to the continuation and the direction of that continuation hit, and when they tried to roll those changes back to something closer to the status quo in order to appease the displeased part of the base, they ended up angering the other side of it. It was kind of messy.

One of the biggest changes to the universe (other than the gods "leaving") was the introduction of ambient magic in the forms of Wild/Primal Sorcery and its spiritual counterpart Mysticism, the latent magics of the planet itself that had been dormant ever since the days of the Greygem came and went. With the gods gone, it was allowed to resurface in the world and become usable by mortals who put their hearts and minds to it, without needing to rely upon faith in fickle gods or the practice of High Sorcery (which is just a different form of devotion to the moon gods at the end of the day). Why primal sorcery didn't return during the gods' long but voluntary absence after they dropped a meteor on Krynn, I'm not sure, but the end result is that a fundamentally different source of magic was introduced to the setting.

To put it simply, primal sorcery and mysticism act like arcane and divine magic in the loosest sense. Sorcery manipulates the physical forces and matter of the world and is divided up into disciplines that reflect that, like aeromancy and transmutation. Mysticism relies upon faith in oneself and sympathetically affects most things that are alive or possess some similar sort of essence, like through healing or necromancy.

Sorcery and mysticism effects don't behave like similar spells in normal systems of magic, though. There are no "spells" per se at all, save one's trademark effects and personal favorites. Each magic user spontaneously and creatively uses their magic in any way they can for the situation at hand, producing effects that are more narratively bounded than mechanically. It's kind of like how in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure everybody has one weird Stand ability that they use as creatively as possible in whatever situation they find themselves in, rather than just escalating in power level or picking up new tricks as the series goes along, like most shōnens do. On top of it all, when two or more sorcerers or mystics get together, they can freely blend and meld their magics together in order to make something new and even more powerful.

This is all pretty much anathema to a Vancian magic system based on spell slots, so despite my soft spot for it, the D&D 3E Age of Mortals campaign setting pretty uniformly fails to depict its ambient magic. The primal sorcerer was just a regular sorcerer, while the mystic was a stripped-down favored soul. Not bad classes by themselves, but big letdowns for the source material.

SAGA Magic

It wasn't always like that, though. Primal sorcery actually did get a lot of play in the Dragonlance: Fifth Age game for the SAGA System back in the day.

In contrast to the later d20 implementation, its lore and mechanics were integrated well and fleshed out, and coupled with the diceless card deck rules you played SAGA with, it was one of the more original magic systems ever printed by TSR. You come up with spells on the fly and determine how expensive they are to cast using an additive spell point system for stronger effects. Casting an instant healing spell for the maximum amount is going to be a lot more costly than casting a weak one that takes a half-hour, for example. There are sample spells provided in the books, but those are just to illustrate spell construction and provide players with models that they can then tweak to their specific needs.

But this was still the SAGA System, which means that all of 8 people ever played it, and the rest of the books in production got axed after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR out. So unless you want to painstakingly recreate a mechanic from a dead game that relies upon a peripheral card deck, ambient magic is just another one of those Dragonlance things you can't really do in-game that you can do in-story.

... Say, you know what else has a robust, freeform magic system where spell effects are determined by intent?

Talislanta Magic

Why hello there, new old friend!

I already went into it in my Talislanta retrospective of sorts, but depending on the edition you're looking at, magic works like this: there are a little more than a dozen magical disciplines called orders like shamanism, witchcraft, cartomancy, etc. Each order of magic is divided up into different "modes" that represent types of magical spells like attack, defend, heal, illusion, transform, etc. Each order has access to a few but usually not all modes, in keeping with the flavor of that order. Elemental magic, for example, doesn't have the heal mode because it's kind of difficult to treat wounds with a rock or a gust of air.

Magicians learn each order and mode combination individually, so they tend to have a limited repertoire that they must use creatively. Mechanically this is represented by the custom spell system where you can build your own effect by adding increasing difficulty modifiers to the spellcasting roll in exchange for better range, duration, numerical values, secondary effects, etc.

Aside from the mingling of two or more casters' abilities which is absent here, this is a pretty good approximation of how Dragonlance's ambient magic works. Wild sorcery and mysticism are already divided up into neat little schools and spheres respectively, so all one would need to do is assign a list of modes to each to start porting the system over to the d20 ruleset of one's choice. You could even use the 3E Gold Rush port of Talislanta for a few more ideas on how to implement it- just whatever you do, do not follow its example and tie spellcasting to a skill roll like in that edition. That way lies brokenness.

What follows are a few of my ideas on how to implement this mashup.

My Take on Schools/Spheres

The school and sphere lists can remain unchanged from SAGA, unless you feel that some of them are too narrow and would be best combined. Likewise, Modes from Talislanta can stay the same. They are as follows:

Wild Sorcery Schools: Aeromancy, Cryomancy, Divination, Electromancy, Enchantment, Geomancy, Hydromancy, Pyromancy, Spectramancy, Summoning, Transmutation.

Mysticism Spheres: Animism, Alteration, Channeling, Healing, Meditation, Necromancy, Sensitivity, Spiritualism.

Magic Modes: Alter, Attack, Conjure, Defend, Heal, Illusion, Influence, Move, Reveal, Summon, Transform, Ward.

Next, match the most appropriate Modes with each School and Sphere according to their flavor text blurbs. Some are more obvious fits than others.

• Aeromancy: Can manipulate air to create anything from a breeze to a gale. Example spells include conjuring concealing fog, clouds of choking vapor, bubbles of air for underwater travel, or flying through the air. Very powerful aeromancers can even influence the weather.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Cryomancy: Considered by some to be a hybrid of aeromancy and hydromancy. Can manifest great cold and conjure large quantities of ice. Examples include creating walls of ice, freezing rivers solid, and freezing enemies in place with frostbite.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Divination: One of the most common schools of sorcery on Krynn, used to gain information about the world. Examples include detecting traps, seeing magical auras on objects, and divining the past or a potential future. Cannot be used to read the minds of others, because only mysticism directly affects living matter.
• Modes: Reveal (inanimate)
• Electromancy: The rather basic domain of good old fashioned lightning bolts, with a few extra ideas thrown in to make it less of a one-trick pony. Examples include producing static electricity to sting and annoy people, or using electricity to generate an aura of light for visibility.
• Modes: Attack, Illusion (light)
• Enchantment: A deceptively simple-sounding school that lets you do a wide range of beneficial things to objects. Examples include giving enhancement bonuses to weapons and armor, or enchanting a crystal on the end of one's staff to shed light, etc. Permanent enchantments are not possible with normal sorcery.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate, but you also gotta bend the rules a bunch for this one)
• Geomancy: Manipulation of the earth and everything that can be found within it. Examples include conjuring stone walls, creating quicksand, or controlling gems, crystals, and even alloys that have been worked by mortal hands like steel.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Hydromancy: Power over water, although presumably not the water that makes up over 60% of most humanoid bodies by weight. Examples include pulling up drinkable water in a desert, creating favorable currents during a sea voyage, and otherwise manipulating water in its liquid state; ice and steam are more the purview of cryomancers and aeromancers, respectively.
• Modes: Attack, Defend, Move (chosen element)
• Pyromancy: Flame, dear flame. It's unclear if this controls only the chemical reaction of fire, or other forms of heat transfer as well. Examples include heating homes, damaging enemies, scaring away beasts, and creating elaborate fireworks shows.
• Modes: Attack, Move, Illusion (light)
• Spectramancy: The magic of light and how it can be perceived. Examples include making a basic light to see with as in electromancy and pyromancy, extinguishing light sources, changing the color of lights, as well as the more interesting implication of creating illusions of light and shadow. Tucked away in this school is the implied subschool of umbramancy, if you ask me.
• Modes: Illusion (light & shadow)
• Summoning: The art of folding space like a Dune navigator, used in such a way that it appears the sorcerer is teleporting people or objects from place to place or creating them from thin air. Can be combined with other schools to summon monsters from other planes, such as a summoner/pyromancer pulling fire elementals from the elemental plane of fire.
• Modes: Conjure (just pretend you're teleporting items from elsewhere), Move, Summon
• Transmutation: Alchemy in the classical sense of transmuting one form of matter into another. Examples include turning one type of metal into another (a la the classic lead to gold trick), or more radically turning one form of matter into a completely different state if the sorcerer has access to multiple schools. A transmuter/geomancer/aeromancer can turn that stone wall into a puff of fog, for example.
• Modes: Transform (inanimate)
• Animism: The sphere concerned with living things in the natural world. Examples include communicating with plants and animals, although not natural creatures with "magical powers"- the kinds of things later editions of D&D would term magical beasts, probably. It also doesn't affect creatures with a Reason score of 2 or more in SAGA, which I think you could map to the 3 or more Intelligence threshold for sapience in D&D.
• Modes: Influence (unintelligent creatures), Reveal (unintelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Alteration: Shapeshifting, plain and simple. Examples include transforming oneself into an animal or monster like a wyvern, or disguising oneself as a different person. Particularly powerful alterers (alterationists?) can shapechange other people, whether willing or as a baleful polymorph kind of effect, and they can even assume the exact appearance of a specific individual.
• Modes: Transform (animate)
• Channeling: An incredibly specific sphere of personal physical ability score buffs. Examples include making oneself very strong, or as nimble as a cat, even beyond one's normal limits (if those rules are in use). Cannot be used to affect another person's physical abilities.
• Modes: Alter (physical)
• Healing: Another very simple sphere focused on curative arts. Examples include healing wounds and curing disease, though there is no mention of reattaching limbs or raising the dead because like in Talislanta, some things are explicitly beyond the abilities of ambient magic. Somewhat uniquely, the only sphere to have a mishap mechanic whereby the caster loses extra spell points or even suffer damage if a damage-healing spell goes awry. This doesn't affect curing diseases, poisons, etc. however.
• Modes: Heal (can't reverse)
• Meditation: The mental counterpart to channeling's physical buffs, allowing one to increase one's mental abilities. Notably, improving one's casting stat does not grant bonus spell points, similar to how temporary spellcasting stat increases don't affect bonus spells per day in 3E and later editions of D&D.
• Modes: Alter (mental)
• Mentalism: Telepathy by another name, and the "intelligent creature" counterpart to animism's connection to plants and animals. Examples include projecting one's thoughts into another person's mind, reading another's thoughts or memories, changing or erasing memories, inducing hallucinations, or controlling another's mind outright if the mentalist is extremely powerful (and unscrupulous).
• Modes: Influence (intelligent creatures), Reveal (intelligent creatures; thoughts, memories)
• Necromancy: The opposite to healing. Examples include wounding or outright killing enemies, draining their life, or reanimating corpses to become temporary undead. Mostly forbidden on Krynn, although ironically it's less capital-e Evil than most forms of necromancy in D&D because there's no involvement with evil deities or torturing a being's soul.
• Modes: Attack, Heal (only to reverse into Harm), Summon (corporeal undead)
• Sensitivity: Like the divination school of sorcery, but again focused on living things. Examples include sensing magical auras around creatures, determining if someone is under the influence of magic, reading their nature and demeanor, and feeling echoes of emotions well after the fact. Can't read thoughts like in mentalism, however.
• Modes: Reveal (emotions, character)
• Spiritualism: The spiritual counterpart to necromancy's physical death and decay, appropriately enough. Examples include communing with the dead, or calling spirits back from the dead to create temporary incorporeal undead like ghosts. Less scorned than necromancy, but arguably has the potential to be more harmful because of how it influences souls?
• Modes: Influence (spirits), Reveal, Summon (incorporeal undead)

Unlike in Talislanta where each discipline/mode combination has to be learned separately, here I've decided an ambient caster learns all spell modes when they acquire a school or sphere. They are not limited in the breadth of their magical ability, only the power of it. I think this is a fair change because unlike the disciplines of Talislanta, you just don't have that many modes per school here.

As I alluded to earlier, you can even mash a few of the more niche schools or spheres together if they feel too slight for someone to have to specialize in. For example, combine Channeling and Meditation into a single self-buffing 'Empowerment' sphere, or Animism and Mentalism into one 'Telepathy'. Likewise, maybe Electromancy could be folded into greater Aeromancy, or alternatively Pyromancy, since what is lightning but really fast sky fire?

From here you "only" have to figure out how the rest of spellcasting works, in the sense of how spell cost and spell difficulty are calculated. Just use Talislantan values if you're basing the system on that, or tweak them to be better suited to the math of your preferred D&D system. Caster level checks are a good starting point for that, if they exist. And speaking of spell cost...

My Take on Spell Power

One snag in this hackjob is that SAGA uses a spell point system, Talislanta lets you spam until you roll a bad mishap, D&D at large uses Vancian spell slots, and the Dragonlance books themselves do something completely different with regards to how much magic their casters can fire off in an arbitrary period of time. The first three are pretty self-explanatory, but the fourth might need some elaboration.

Keeping in mind that things and characters in Dragonlance are highly dependent upon the specific writer, what is often the case in the novels is that there is a physical component to spellcasters running low on magic juice. From clerics sweating and panting from the fervor of their prayers, to Raistlin up and keeling over like Elric before he got his clammy hands on Stormbringer, magic is a physically as well as metaphysically demanding practice in much of Dragonlance. From what I've read of the 5th Age (mostly Jean Rabe's goblin trilogy), that is true of primal sorcery and mysticism too.

That leads me to recommend a really weird thing as food for thought on the subject: this 3E rules variant of a rules variant that replaces spell slots with spell points, and then adds a spellcasting fatigue system on top of that.

Using the Vitalizing system, any caster who falls below 1/2 of their maximum spell points becomes Fatigued, and any who falls below 1/4th becomes Exhausted until they can rest to recover spell points as one would spell slots. But the reverse is also true; if a caster becomes Fatigued while at full spell points, they immediately drop to 1/2 until the Fatigued condition is removed. Likewise, someone who gets hit by Exhaustion plummets all the way down to 1/4th spell points until it's lifted.

You can probably add something similar to the spell point system found in the Player's Option: Spells & Magic supplement without too much fuss, if an AD&D version of the Age of the Mortals that never was is your goal.

If you go down some kind of spell points route (which I recommend for variable strength spells), this might be a cool thing to implement both for setting fidelity and to work (probably in vain) toward balancing casters somewhat. And speaking of casters as a discrete type of player character...

My Take on Classes

Talislanta and SAGA are classless, so in theory anybody can eventually pick up some magic if they have the ability for it. And I personally like that kind of system; it makes certain flexible characters in the stories far easier to realize than through most multiclassing (or gods forbid, dual classing) systems. Of course, classless is not a perfect fit if you're wanting to play an otherwise ordinary edition of D&D with more ambient magic-friendly rules plugged into it.

One way to go about this is to build full, homebrewed sorcerer and mystic classes. Which sounds a lot worse than it might be. Depending on the edition of D&D you're trying to use, that might be somewhat easy, or very convoluted.

Simplest might be to take the standard wizard and cleric chasses from AD&D or 3E, remove their default spellcasting, familiars, and/or domains and undead turning, and replace them with scaling school or sphere access as they level. Each might begin with 1 school/sphere plus extra for high casting stats, which would also influence bonus spell points. These would be Intelligence for sorcerers and Wisdom for mystics. I briefly considered Charisma for sorcerers like their 3E counterparts since there is some aspect of intuition or force of will that comes into play from my reading of things, but wild sorcery is also the kind of thing you can apparently teach in a traditional academic setting, if Palin Majere's Academy of Sorcery in Solace is anything to go by.

Additional schools/spheres may be acquired through leveling, perhaps with the aid of someone who already possesses that type of magic. How many schools/spheres should be attainable by max level depends on the kind of game you want to run, and the levels PCs are likely to reach; something tapping out at the midlevel range might best be suited for 3 or 4 schools/spheres max, but climbing up into the epic levels might justify near or total mastery of one's respective field of ambient magic.

... At this point out of a mix of brevity and spite I'm just going to call schools/spheres "scheres".

If you do create ambient spellcaster classes, might I recommend keeping the game limited to the decades when the gods were gone. Not because I like denying people the ability to play as the other classes, but because the added headache of managing all 4 types of spellcaster plus their various subclasses in a single shared setting feels like a little much to inflict on a DM.

If you're playing 3E or later editions, feats are another avenue for rewarding scheres. Maybe high-level knights, rangers, and other classes with partial spellcasting receive a free schere feat when they'd otherwise gain their first caster level. Or maybe it's keyed off of character level with certain other requirements so anybody can dabble in magic if they build toward it, preserving character class but divesting spellcasting from it.

I say 3E or later, but I'll be honest I don't know how to fit any of this into 4E, considering how different so many of its moving parts and powers in particular are. I'd love to see someone try and succeed, though.

Speaking of 4E, it might hold the secret to the other big, finnicky part of ambient magic...

The Question of Group Casting

Like most things, ambient magic is stronger when it's done cooperatively rather than alone. In SAGA this is presented through combined castings in which multiple practitioners of the same type of magic (i.e., no mixed parties of wild sorcerers and mystics) can pool their powers together to make a stronger effect that would normally be out of reach of any one of them. There are also coordinated castings, which are a bit more like a ritual involving non-casters who essentially use Aid Another on the main caster in order to assist them with their spell, which is generally easier and less ambitious than what you'd start a combined casting for.

The latter can be done fairly easily by just giving the caster a small bonus to their spellcasting check depending on the number of assistants, perhaps with a limit that scales with level. A novice sorcerer could only wrangle 1 or 2 ritual assistants at 1st level, but know how to effectively manage perhaps a dozen or more at high levels. Each participant offers them a +1 or some other small bonus to the roll.

The former has more possibilities. Maybe each additional caster involved in a combined casting increases the maximum level spell effect that one of them can cast, or everyone rolls a spellcasting check and the highest result is used, or they can divide an enormous spell point cost up amongst themselves evenly.

Or, you can take a page out of 4E's book and implement a system of elaborate Ritual magic that may or may not require appropriate schere access of all its participants. Unlike magic which is freeform, you might want to keep rituals limited to a specific list so the party can't absolutely rip the campaign in two- unless you want to make sure they have the tools to do just that.

In any of the above cases, I'd say required casting time is automatically longer or even the max time possible, to reflect the amount of time it takes to coordinate with others and set up a group casting/ritual. Unless you want a game in which spellcasters can completely break power scaling and use the rest of the party as nothing more than ambulatory batteries and buff bots, of course. Which, to be fair, is nothing foreign to D&D.

The Question of Armor

An incredibly specific thing I fixated on for about half the time I spent working on this post was the question of whether or not primal sorcerers should be allowed to wear armor. They're technically arcane spellcasters, but they have many differences from the robed wizard orders of the moons, not to mention the magic-users in many other D&D worlds. So it's not unreasonable that they might be able to wear armor, too. And this is true, to some extent, depending on which source you're reading.

Dragonlance 3E makes it clear that primal sorcerers are just regular old sorcerers, subject to all the same limitations. That means no armor proficiency to start, and Arcane Spell Failure % for any armor they do wear anyway. The SAGA system, meanwhile, is classless and ties many proficiencies to different ability codes. So as long as your sorcerer draws cards for a high enough Coordination and Physique, they can wear or wield pretty much anything in the game while casting magic (assuming they also got a high enough Intellect of course). Just to make sure that wasn't an oversight and there should be some kind of armor limitation, I trawled through dozens of sample NPCs until I found the Plainsman named Ironhawk, who is not only an accomplished ranger-type clad in leather armor, but also proficient in a school of sorcery (pyromancy) and a sphere of mysticism (animism).

Thank you, weirdly Rambo-looking indigenous dude.

The books, meanwhile...

Well, I haven't really read many of them, as my series on the Stone-Teller trilogy explains. But from a cursory glance over the (admittedly sparse) Dragonlance wiki, it feels to me like most wild sorcerers conform to the unarmored stereotype, but it isn't necessarily enforced in-universe. One big exception is the formerly Takhisian Knights of the Thorn, who often wear the same plate armor as their nonmagical knightly fellows. Ultimately it's up to you whether your game's sorcerers should be wearing more than a tunic or not, but I think they could get by with at least light/leather armor, or at least not suffer any outsized penalties for wearing it if they acquired proficiency through multiclassing or the like.

Mystics, on the other hand, are depicted as being able to wear many kinds of armor like their clerical counterparts across much Dragonlance media, though sometimes it stops at medium armor before they break out the full plate, as in 3E.

At least one question in all of this has a simple answer!

Kharakhan Sage (Archetype for Talislanta 4E)

 

KHARAKHAN SAGE

“Eat something, you’re all skin and bones. Almost short as a Marukan...”

Your people are dying out. Your clan knows it, and they know you know it, but you can’t bring yourself to say it. Trade with the Orgovians is drying up as you empty the ruins of their secrets. The ogriphant herds are thinning. And the Araq have grown more aggressive of late- if such a thing is even possible. You’ve sent some of your clan to work among the smaller peoples for food, but what they bring back still isn’t enough. Others haven’t come back at all. Their fates weigh on you almost as heavily as the children, hungry and weak as they are. You can’t take it anymore. So you won’t. You are Sage of this clan, and that means they look to your wisdom and guidance in hard times. You’ve begun plumbing the secrets of the Drakken runes yourself, ponderously thumbing through ancient knowledge in search of something, anything that can bring your people back from the brink. It suits you, trusting to forgotten magic. You worship a Forgotten God, after all. At least, that’s what the smaller peoples call Kron the Mighty. Forgotten even as you speak his name, dead yet still walking. A slow grinding down into nothing, like the desert wind on rock. Your people will not go the same way. Either you will wrest a life out of these wastes—true life, loud and joyous and bold—or the whole world will know your passing.

Appearance:

10'-15', 1,000-1,200+ lbs. Dusky gray-black skin, once-massive physique turning lean with age, wizened features, graying hair hastily and distractedly tied back.

Attributes:

STR +5, DEX -4, PER +5, CHA +0, CON +6, SPD -2, WIL +6, INT +0, CR +1, HP 40, MR +2

Skills:

Natural Magic: < 3 Modes of choice > +2, Battle Maul +2, Brawling +2, Healer +3, Herb Lore +2, Cook +1, Etiquette +2, Oratory +2, Artificer +3, Salvager +4, Pilot (war wagon) +4, Survival +3, Low Talislan, native dialect, Drakken glyphs, fluent

Special Abilities:

Skin serves as one point of armor; fist inflicts DR 6 + STR; uses giant-sized weapons or uses two-handed weapons of normal size in one hand; detect scent of Men at range of 50 feet.

Equipment:

Loincloth; sandals; cloak; armor of boiled land lizard hide; battle maul; giant-sized tools; pouch with herbs; sack of food; bone, stone, and tooth jewelry; ogriphant steed; giants based in the Wastes may have access to a war wagon; 30 gold lumens in ancient Kharakhan artifacts.

A Boring History Lesson on the Much More Interesting Talislanta, the Game That Won't Die

I started writing about Talislanta a few weeks ago and realized I was cramming way too many things into a single post again, so I've decided to split the wordcount up a bit.

You can read the more gamey bits here once those are finished.

1st Edition

In 1987, after several trips and false starts, a tiny publisher named Bard Games, headed by a weird and eclectic saxophonist named Stephen Michael Sechi, released the first edition of the Talislanta roleplaying game. It distinguished itself from other fantasy worlds of the time with its relative lack of inspiration and/or derivation from Tolkien or European mythology, in favor of a slightly more exotic and more obviously post-apocalyptic feel (not to say that LotR isn't a post-apocalypse story).

It's more influenced by Horror Person Lovecraft's Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath (my favorite thing by Lovecraft ever, partly because the fussy Cheez-It eater hated the story himself) and Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting- though interestingly, this did not extend to pilfering Vance's magic system like certain other games of the time were doing.

To simplify greatly, Talislanta is a game of optimistic post-apocalypse. The world was trashed by the fall of a magical empire 600 years prior in a Great Disaster, leaving the world scarred and full of magical aberration. You pick your character from dozens of archetypes ranging from mage-hunters, to mutants, to lizard people, to hyper-intelligent snails, and have yourself a Weird Fantasy adventure with occasional magitech and airships thrown in.

From its inception Talislanta was played using a skills-based resolution system where every action is decided using a single d20 roll on the Action Table. The Action Table operates on intent, and weighs the outcome against what you wanted to happen with possible mishaps or unforeseen bonuses depending on how bad or well you roll. It was consciously streamlined in a way that most systems making use of the d20 in the '80s were not.

2nd Edition

Between 1988 and 1990 a series of Talislanta books was published that updated the game to second edition piecemeal. These were small rules revisions, additional character backgrounds, some optional systems for edge cases of gameplay like mass combat, etc. These books were then collated into a single gamebook plus a world atlas. As far as new editions go it was a rather mild update, on par with the AD&D 1E to 2E jump.

Bard Games then went out of business.

That would have been the end of the story of Talislanta, if not for the timely arrival of a plucky young TTRPG company that had just recently emerged on the scene and was looking to grow its modest catalogue. The company decided to go out on a limb and buy the license to publish a new edition of Talislanta in collaboration with Sechi in 1992.

That company?

Wizards of the fricking Coast.

3rd Edition

At this point WotC were a brand new company that only had one other game, The Primal Order, to their name. Hell, they hadn't even started Magic: The Gathering yet. What a weird, small world we live in. And what a glimpse into what could have been. Imagine if they had stuck with Talislanta or other weird little games like Everway instead of snapping up D&D and going the way they did.

Regardless, this gave Talislanta another lease on life, and for 2 more years WotC published the third edition of the game. The differences in this edition were more pronounced, shifting the game away from a purely skills-based system to one that combined skills and more traditional character level progression. The timeline also advanced 20 years, with new developments and subplots that found their way into some of the first full-length adventures for the game, also published under WotC.

WotC then dropped Talislanta in 1994 and pivoted to other projects like MtG, which proved to be explosively popular at the previous year's Gen Con.

Anniversary Edition

The license shifted hands again then, to a small Canadian company named Daedalus Entertainment. Daedalus' only other RPG was Feng Shui but their primary focus was on the collectible card game Shadowfist, which shared a universe with Feng Shui. It was kind of a weird urban fantasy Legend of Five Rings situation. It seemed like the trend of a new edition with every new publisher would continue with Daedalus, but development of the next Talislanta languished for years, and eventually the CCG crash of 1997 bankrupted the company with no new Talislanta published.

But 1997 was an auspicious year. It would be Talislanta's 10th anniversary, and Sechi hoped to have a new book out in honor of the date. So he shopped the license around a little more, and eventually found Pharos Press. I'd never heard of them before, and they don't even have a Wikipedia page these days, but they seem most notable for publishing the first edition of Nobilis back in the day. Pharos got to work, but production was plagued by setbacks that delayed publication repeatedly, until finally 1997 came and went with only a mostly-finished new edition extant in the form of a handful of ashcan prints. The licensee was also nasty to work with and "treated Tal fans like sh*t" during that time, reports Sechi.

4th Edition

Sechi pulled the license from Pharos Press after that, and took some of the ashcans with him. When the publisher Shooting Iron took over and in Sechi's words saved the day, they based their version of Talislanta on the unpublished Pharos draft, to the point that the failed 10th Anniversary edition and the successful fourth edition of 2001 are mostly identical. Or at least that's the usual claim that people, including Sechi himself, have made; the ashcan copies are extremely rare, and I don't believe they've ever been scanned and uploaded to the internet, so I haven't been able to take a look for myself.

When people talk about how Talislanta is the game that just won't die, this is what they mean. Every time a deal falls through or a publisher up and evaporates, it springs up in another mutation of itself somewhere else. And this isn't because of some massive fandom clamoring for more. Don't get me wrong, Talislanta has always had very devoted fans. But they've always been more of a cult following due to the game's relative lack of mass appeal compared to the leviathans that came to dominate the industry. Yet they've shown up for the game year after year and helped carry it forward into the new century. Sechi's stubborn determination to manifest his game the way he's envisioned it certainly helps, too.

Talislanta fourth edition (AKA the Big Blue Book) scrapped the character level mechanic of third edition, refined its magic system to be more freeform and versatile, and reined in most of the bits of NPC-centric metaplot that started to become prominent in third edition. You will sometimes see it written online that Talislanta refuses to have a metaplot, but I think it's more accurate to say they tried it early on, found it didn't work super well with the rest of the game, and then dropped the idea. Whatever the reason though, Talislanta took a step back and tried to become more evergreen with its content at a time when years-long adventure paths and character-focused stories with their own continuities and regular installments of new lore were becoming the norm.

Shooting Iron published Talislanta materials until 2005, at which point it relinquished the license after its largest distributor went out of business without paying them. This cut out most of the money the company should have made off of fourth edition. But instead of languishing in development hell for years again, Talislanta quickly and successfully changed hands to Morrigan Press, which then published a slew of fourth edition material. It took 18 years, but the game finally had a peaceful transfer of publisher power!

Talislanta d20

Sechi shifted toward music as a full-time career at this time in his life, and he let Morrigan Press go wild with the license without any direct involvement from him. As a result, Morrigan Press was perhaps the most prolific of all Talislanta publishers. It released about a dozen titles for fourth edition in 2005-2006, as well as an OGL d20 adaptation of the game. They even blurred the lines between the two parallel versions of the game by including dual stats for both games for their monsters in the 4th edition Talislanta Menagerie.

Everybody and their auntie was scrambling to shoehorn their IP into a d20 book in an attempt to ride the wave of almost-mainstream success enjoyed by D&D 3E at the time, no matter how weird the fit was. I call this the 3E Gold Rush, for lack of a better name. It's unsurprising that even Talislanta joined ranks with such names as Iron Kingdoms, Farscape, and World Wrestling Entertainment. If it sold well, it could have buoyed the IP as a whole.

Did anybody actually play this one, or was it only used
as episode fodder by early YouTube gaming channels?

The d20 version tries its best to emulate the other edition within 3.5E without shaking too much up, but even at a glance it's not the same. I might give it a full blog post comparison someday, but for now I'll leave it at a few observations.

Only some of the playable cultures in the base games make the cut in d20, although balance between them is as stylistically wonky as in the source material. There's a "Restricted Classes" rule that some species have that is never explained anywhere in the book. Are they forbidden from playing that class entirely? Can they only not start as one at 1st level? Is it a matter of class level caps? They never state. 

Some of the classes they wrote or retooled are interesting choices, like removing rage from Barbarians and making them more wilderness warriors with a few Ranger abilities. Others raise my eyebrow in suspicion, because I think they were stolen from other third-party d20 books.

Take for example the Scout class' 15th level ability, Heroic Sacrifice, which lets you continue to fight even after being reduced to -10 hit points, not dying until the end of combat. It's unusual, flavorful, rules-wonky, and almost identical to the 15th level Borderer class ability from the Conan the Roleplaying Game, another d20 book first published in 2003.

I recognized such a weirdly specific "your wilderness scout's ability is to die for your friends" class feature immediately from my days when I gave a crap about the Hyborian Age. It's very clearly ripped from it and then slightly tweaked. Heck, even the way the text is formatted in each book cuts some of the words up in identical ways.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not decrying Morrigan Press' writers here. I don't think they did anything especially wrong by copying an ability from another OGL property; that's kind of the reason why we have those licenses to begin with. Some of the Conan stuff was extremely shallow and in the spirit of the 3E cash-in craze too, for fairness' sake. It's just kind of weird and funny to me.

They do an admirable job trying to port freeform magic over without falling back on Vancian magic, which I fully expected them to do for an OGL game. But it's a good job achieving what's ultimately an imperfect fit, and it leaves the d20 skill system begging for even greater abuse than usual; modes of magic are skills in this version of the game, you see, and d20 skills can be... janky.

Also the book suffers from a few editing issues, like the unforgiveable "Gamemaster's Only" chapter heading.

5th Edition

After dipping their toes in d20 for a bit, Morrigan Press returned to more traditional Talislanta in 2006, but in yet another form; fifth edition. It is largely a continuation of previous Talislanta rules, with some minor alterations like a magic rework, and some big ones like the point-based character building system. The builder brought Talislanta in line with many other skill-based RPGs, but it also took something that was somewhat unique and appealing about Talislanta—character archetypes—and relegated them to a mere optional rule buried toward the back of the book. It wasn't a fanbase breaker, but among the criticisms made about fifth edition, this was among the biggest.

And I slightly agree? I know that sounds weird coming from the guy who abhors impositions like race/class limits or race-as-class. Don't get me wrong, I would 100% enjoy building a character from scratch (and probably will in a New System, New Face post sometime). But the bundles of abilities, gear, and lore that archetypes are were designed in a fun way that help add to the characterization of the world without locking players into a single gameplay path, similar to how Dark Souls starting classes work.

If archetypes were limiting in the long-term the way D&D classes are, or if Talislanta the game was intended to be played with universes other than Talislanta the setting, I'd welcome the change fully. But that isn't the case, so I am left feeling a very slight amount of loss from the change.

Perhaps the changes in fifth edition played a part, or perhaps there was a lot else going on behind the scenes, but the end result is that in 2008 Morrigan Press went out of business, as so many other publishers of Talislanta tend to do. The curse returned, and for almost a decade the game laid dormant.

Talislanta: The Savage Land

But Talislanta isn't only a game. It dabbled in short stories since the '90s, with the release of the Tales of Talislanta anthology. And in 2015 Talislanta returned to narrative storytelling via graphic novel.

In the Tales of the Savage Lands web comic, Sechi and artist Ben Dennett tell the story of the Vandar endling Severus as he tries to survive in the Age of Confusion immediately following the Great Disaster that ended the world. It's a story of loss, struggle for survival, and the sheer smoldering ruin of the world, quite unlike the tone of modern Talislanta. The comic was eventually completed, taken down, and then published for sale with the help of a Kickstarter as The Savage Land - The Graphic Novel in 2017.

Savage Land served as a distant prequel to the modern age of Talislanta, as well as the first car in a new Talislanta hype-train. Also in 2017 Sechi teamed up with Nocturnal Media, headed by Stewart Wieck, one of the founders of White Wolf, of all people. Their mission was to turn the Savage Land setting into a new edition of Talislanta.

They started a Kickstarter campaign with an ambitious goal: a new Talislanta book, x5. First, they would publish the nearly complete Savage Land for normal Talislanta rules. Then, they would port it to D&D 5E, Savage Worlds, Pathfinder RPG 1E, and OpenD6.

The KS launched on March 29, 2017, coinciding with the game's 30th anniversary. It started off good and got better, funding in ~12 hours and steadily blowing through stretch goals day after day before totaling just under $70k (out of an initial goal of $10k) a month later. Things were on the up-and-up, and it looked like the shotgun approach would work.

Of course, this being Talislanta, that couldn't last for long.

First, Stewart Wieck died in June, throwing the continued existence of Nocturnal Media into jeopardy. Then, it became clear that despite funding very successfully, the project had bitten off more than it could chew: the number of orders placed by Talislanta's devoted fans could not justify porting The Savage Land to every system they had planned. Savage Worlds and Pathfinder had to be scrapped, leaving just the Talislanta, 5E, and D6 versions. Somewhat understandably, a wave of refunds quickly followed as people who had wanted those specific books backed out. Then, somebody linked a spambot to the refund survey form and spoiled all of the response data, forcing the whole process to start over again.

This was in addition to a host of other, more minor issues like BackerKit glitches, delays in printing and fulfillment, and all the other stuff you tend to get with big Kickstarter projects.

But in spite of all of the screwups and bad luck, Talislanta: The Savage Land launched in 2019.

... Aaand since I didn't back the KS and I don't happen to have $50USD to burn comparing and contrasting the three different books, I have to keep actual details of this edition to a minimum.

I never said I was a good historian.

But! I do know a few things for certain.

Savage Land expands the scope of gameplay by including an optional campaign mode where each PC is the leader of a tribe struggling to survive in this new dark age. Leading, protecting, and helping your tribes flourish can allow you to eventually forge larger polities that can then exert their will on the continent at large, enforcing the 'order' of empire on the vacuum left behind by the sudden and literal fall of the Archaens.

It can even set the stage for your own custom campaign in modern Talislanta, where the actions of one party and their tribes can fundamentally shape the face of the world for the folks who come along 600 years later.

The Great Disaster has also caused a rash of anti-magician prejudice, which causes the prequel to be a lower-magic setting compared to modern Talislanta. You can still use magic if you so choose, but your character has a higher chance of being killed by an angry mob than you might normally expect.

Going into the 2020s (and all the existential fun those have been so far), I might've expected Talislanta to coast along with this new edition for a few years, publishing a handful more books before reentering dormancy, like it always does. Not so.

6th/Epic/Final Edition

Last year saw a campaign to fund the 6th edition of Talislanta, also known as the Epic Edition for the name of its new publisher, Everything Epic, who also seems to have inherited rights to all of The Savage Lands products after Nocturnal Media shifted to focusing on its outstanding projects in the wake of Wieck's death.

6E/Epic is intended to be a greatest hits album of every edition up to this point, synthesized together into a truly gigantic set of tomes that sets out to complete the game and the world as Sechi always envisioned it. It will consist of a player's guide, menagerie, and world atlas, accompanied by a novel, and a 5E conversion guide, because we're in the midst of our own 5E Gold Rush at the moment.

It's also known as the Final Edition because, well, this is it.

The game will be considered finished after this point, and no further development is planned. In a market where so many recognizable IPs chug along on creative fumes for as long as it's possible and profitable to, I respect the desire for a clean cut and a graceful bowing-out after so long a fight.

I hope they nail it. We'll see, when the books ship sometime this year.

But at the time of writing, the end of Talislanta is not yet written, and this overdone overview can finally peter out.

4/12 Edit: I was remound in the comments below to include a link to the official Talislanta website where ALL of the older editions of the game are available for free, forever, after Sechi released them under the Creative Commons license. Dive into the trove here.

Let's Dig Into: Talislanta 4E

It's time for a less indie but still not quite mainstream RPG that has recently captured my interest: Talislanta. Originally this was going to be part of the "New System, New Face" series until I realized how ill a fit that would be, which we'll get into later. But even without character generation shenanigans, I feel this game is very worthy of going over.

It's gonna get quirky.

In 1987, after several trips and false starts, a tiny publisher named Bard Games, headed by a weird and eclectic saxophonist named Stephen Michael Sechi, released the first edition of the Talislanta roleplaying game. It would become semi-famous, or at least an enduring cult classic, both for its fresh setting compared to many other TTRPGs on the market in the late '80s, and for its stubborn refusal to die, like so many other titles of that era did.

You can read my unnecessarily long-winded post about the history of the game as an IP in the companion piece over here, when I finally finish it.

Talislanta 4th Edition is the version of the game that I'm most familiar with, and which seems to enjoy the most popularity online at the moment. So that's what I'm going to be focusing on in this post, where I actually look at the gamey bits.

If you want to read along, or if you want to learn about the game without the filter of my yapping, note that digital copies of all of the old editions of Talislanta are available for free forever because Sechi released them under the Creative Commons license.

The World

Talislanta distinguished itself from other fantasy worlds of the time with its relative lack of inspiration/derivation from Tolkien or European mythology, in favor of a slightly more exotic and more obviously post-apocalyptic feel (not to say that LotR isn't a post-apocalypse story).

It's more influenced by Horror Person Lovecraft's Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath (my favorite thing by Lovecraft ever, partly because the fussy Cheez-It eater hated the story himself) and Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting- though interestingly, this did not extend to pilfering Vance's magic system like certain other games of the time were doing.

In the backstory of Talislanta, the eponymous continent (located on the world of Archaeus, orbiting a binary star system somewhere in an unknown galaxy) was dominated for eons by the First Folk. The First Folk were a mysterious and vaguely amphibian/reptilian species that existed long before mammals. Eventually mammalian peoples called the Wild Races (sometimes derisively called "sub-men") evolved and stumbled ass-backwards into an ancient crashed alien spaceship, where they learned magic. One of the Wild Races then used magic to forcibly unite their brethren, overthrow the First Folk, and begin a millennia-spanning golden age as the Archaen Empire.

No, it's not 'Archaean' like I am constantly having to stop myself from typing here.

Like all despotic magocratic empires, the Archaen Empire eventually did something to wreck the planet. Details are vague, but it's believed they did something with just a little bit too much magical energy in their floating sky-cities that sent them hurtling from orbit and nuking large sections of the continent in an event known as The Great Disaster.

Six centuries later, the world is still toast, but things have settled down enough to start moving around again. Sure, much of the land is still mutant-choked wasteland or so magically irradiated that normal weather phenomena include "black lightning" or "icicle rain", and the number of super-powered plants and insects rivals a Dark Sun monster manual, but that can all be managed by a couple of weirdo drifters, no problem! It's an optimistic and enthusiastically adventure-friendly apocalypse.

I am barely scratching the surface here, though. Out of the 500+ pages in the 4th edition rulebook, over 300 of them are dedicated to a traveler's guide to Talislanta told from the perspective of the kooky mage Tamerlin. This is sandwiched between ~100 pages of rules up front and the remaining 80 or so of GM advice, tables, and appendices in back. The world is the heart of the book, as well as the game.

The People

Talislanta advertisements past and present proudly proclaim that the game contains "NO ELVES" (or dwarves, or orcs, or any other standard fantasy species). This tagline is hilarious to me for how narrowly, technically true it is, though Talislanta does deliver a markedly different flavor of fantasy that I find interesting.

Dozens of humanoid and not-so-humanoid species are descended from the Wild Races, Archaen survivors, magical hybrids and experiments, and extraplanar entities that came into existence over the course of the past few ages, and the vast majority of them are playable. Some of them are quite unique, like the giant mollusk philosophers called Snipes, chill anthropomorphic Mogroth sloths, or a person from the Marukan culture that has been generationally cursed to always be poor, depressed dung merchants. I'm pretty sure one of the editions even lets you play an Equs, which is literally just an intelligent lizard-horse.

Other options seem visually unique at first glance, but thematically fit into one or more of the slots normally occupied by more standard fantasy creatures. About a half-dozen are essentially humans with different cultures and different technicolor skin tones like green or purple; the Kang are Blizzard Orcs who look like red reptile people; the Ur are Tolkien Orcs who look like Blizzard Orcs; Thralls are the precursors/inspirations/rip-off victims of later Dark Sun's Mulls except albino and tattooed to hell; and the Ariane are mystical enlightened precursors who look identical to the Drow of other games, and are so excruciatingly elvish that TVTropes just sticks them under that trope heading in the article.

Tropes aren't bad, though. Having some of the familiar around helps accentuate the weirdness of the rest of the world's flavor. It also serves a gameplay function by getting player archetypes and their attendant flavors and concepts out the door and into the player's creative headspace quickly and easily.

Speaking of archetypes...

Archetypes

Talislanta is a classless game. Instead it has archetypes, which are similar to the starting packages and character backgrounds we've seen in games like d100 systems or Soulslike vidyas. Each archetype is a combination of species, abilities, starting skills, possessions, and explicit or implied history such as profession or societal role. They occupy half a page each, and mostly consist of second-person lore snippets and a headshot.

Side note, I love these giant goobers and want to set aside
my hatred of all food long enough to give them snacks.

They're simple, easy to approach, and just picking one constitutes the majority of actual character creation in most editions of Talislanta. You could probably use it in place of a proper character sheet in a pinch. Next, you can raise or lower a few of your attributes and make skill selections allowed by your archetype to personalize your character, before going on to shopping and doing the finishing details. Notably (for me, at least) there are no derived attributes in 4E, unlike previous editions and many other d20 games.

Archetypes are why I can't exactly make a New Face using 4E, because it'd be the shortest post I've ever made. But as soon as I get more familiar with the 5th edition (of Talislanta, not the D&D 5E adaptation of Talislanta, which is a separate game that also exists, I know it's confusing) I'll definitely fiddle around with the point-based character building rules there.

There are over 100 archetypes to choose from in the core book, even excluding the NPC-only options. Speaking of which, I think those are kind of a silly imposition. The game does not care about balance from the outset; different archetypes have wildly varying power levels right out the gate, and the game wears this on its sleeve as another manifestation of its flavorful weirdness. But certain archetypes are singled out as for NPCs only in the book, and the choices feel arbitrary. Some are a little weaker overall or less geared up to start adventuring, while others might be more unusual to see abroad considering their society, but so what? Why withhold this tiny shred of player freedom?

He asked rhetorically while acting like "just ignore the NPC tag" isn't an option.

After picking one, you don't have to conform to your archetype, and your character can grow in any direction you choose. Your Snipe Sage can embark on the path of a savage brawler, or your Kharakhan Giant can try their huge, calloused hand at magic. You can't alter your starting attributes after character creation (not even hit points, in a weirdly TROIKA!-esque design choice), but skills are unlimited. Overcoming your archetype's inherent deficiencies and specializing into something unusual is just a matter of time, and surviving long enough to get XP for your next skill rank.

But before I launch into how to get and spend XP, I should probably touch on how the game is actually played.

The Action Table

I might find the gameplay of Talislanta more compelling than its setting. Across all editions of the game (besides the d20 system offshoots), there is one central mechanic for basically every action and reaction a character can take. Appropriately enough, this is called the Action Table.

The Action Table is a single d20 roll that functions on intent. How well you roll explains how well you succeed at the thing you wanted to do, possibly with unforeseen good or bad consequences. That's right; Talislanta's been dabbling in the "fail forward" philosophy since the 1980s.

What you want to do also determines which skill, attribute, and/or miscellaneous modifier is most appropriate to add to/subtract from the roll. Instead of meeting variable DCs like in other d20 systems, here the situational difficulty of an action is expressed through a Degree of Difficulty modifier that can range from +10 (trivially easy) to -15 ("beyond extreme" as the book calls it).

Once you tally your mods and roll, you compare it to the Action Table and the GM arbitrates the results. Some have clear precedent in the written rules, like how a Partial Success on an attack roll might result in dealing half its damage rating to the target. Others are up to more flexible interpretation, like how a Mishap while leaping between rooftops could consist of wonking your face on the far ledge before falling all the way down.

You can also accept a stacking -5 penalty to take multiple actions per turn until you roll a Mishap, which creates an interesting dynamic where you have to strategize and decide how much you want to press your luck. Because taking multiple turns at once is awesome, but if you fail it could backfire spectacularly and erase some or all of your erstwhile success. 

The complications and windfalls are very dependent upon GM arbitration, but the direction for the action to go in and the rolls themselves are entirely player-facing. This extends to combat, where players roll defenses like Dodge or Parry against enemy actions, and things like weapons and armor are passive modifiers to the Action Table or its results.

What you end up with is a game that shifts player responsibility around and switches up the cadence of the player-GM conversation compared to D&D, without any real radical changes.

It's a sleek system, and I wanna steal it for something someday.

You might notice a similarity between this and the unified system of True20, like what Blue Rose uses. They have quite a bit in common, including the lack of emphasis on any other die size besides d20. Talislanta does use a more robust skill list however, and True20 hangs onto many elements of the basic 3E d20 system that Talislanta is not beholden to (unless of course you're playing the Talislanta d20 or the upcoming Talislanta for D&D 5E versions).

Also unlike the other not-quite-d20 games is how Talislanta handles magic, as I alluded to earlier.

Magic

Magic in Talislanta has seen better days- or worse, depending on how you view the multiple apocalypses that have happened thanks to rampant misuse of the arcane. Magic as it is practiced now is weaker and less understood than in the Archaen days, and as such there are certain things that magic is incapable of doing. You can't control time, blend two orders or modes of magic together at once, revive the dead, or create new life wholesale. These are hard limits that cap the magical shenanigans you can expect in the game, making magicians less game- or world-breaking than your average wizards or CoDZillas. Unless of course the GM decides to start handing out old Archaen magic...

Magic in 4E is essentially an extension of the skill system that uses the exact same Action Table. You learn different "orders" of magic that are best thought of as different ways of conceiving of magic, and styles in which that magic is harnessed; they are the sum of cultural traditions, taboos, and local mythologies. Example orders include elemental magic, shamanism, necromancy, cartomancy, witchcraft, etc.

Orders are mechanically differentiated by the advantages and disadvantages they possess, like cartomancy being very discreet and quiet, but requiring a deck of Zodar cards to function at all. They also have a unique class of enchanted item that can only be made by that order, like special wands or protective medallions tuned to the order's style of magic. Each order also has a list of available modes, and the bonuses and penalties that they give to each.

Modes are 12 forms that magic effects can take: alter, attack, conjure, defend, heal, illusion, influence, move, reveal, summon, transform, and ward. These may resemble schools of magic from other systems, but instead of being lists of specific, thematically related spells, each mode is essentially the guidelines for creating your own custom spells of that type on the fly. Some modes can also be reversed like the OD&D spells of old, such as summon spells being reversible to banish summoned entities. The book gives a few example spells for each order, but they're really only there to get you thinking about how to produce your own magical effects.

Amusingly, in-universe this is not how magic works. Instead, each Talislantan magician is assumed to have memorized hundreds of discrete little spells that they pull from on the fly like the world's most flexible Vancian mage, and players are encouraged to come up with evocative names for each as a way of fleshing out their identity as a magic-user. It's purely a gameplay contrivance that we the players design all of our spells on our own.

I think they should have made freeform magic the case for the lore too; it's just more interesting and fits the world better.

Custom spells operate on intent and require a roll on the Action Table like everything else, with bonuses or penalties depending upon how strong, specific, long-lasting, broad, etc. the desired effect is. For example, say a magician wants to cast an illusion spell. They increase the spell level according to how long a range (in 50' increments) they want for the spell, duration (for every round above 5), and how many features the spell has; extra senses affected, animation, complex elements, etc. More stuff means you roll with a bigger penalty.

Even the biggest modes that have multiple optional spell features are never longer than 1 page each, which means there's little bookkeeping. And since you acquire new modes the same way you do skills—by spending XP and many in-narrative weeks training—you're likely to gain more spells at a very gradual rate that lets you get used to each mode, and find creative uses for them.

Other Skills

The rest of the game's skills cover almost everything else that isn't casting spells or killing folks. They range from climbing, to engineering, to fluency in individual languages (including a universal sign language, which might be the first one I've seen in a fantasy TTRPG), to oddities like fashion sense or playing Trivarian, which is a weird abstract 'game' of skill unique to the two-brained Sindaran species.

But what I like the most is that they devised little nets for some of the gaps between listed skills, since those can never be exhaustive in a game limited only by the creativity of its players and the tolerance for nonsense of its referee. No matter how hard the writers try, there will always be edge cases. To help with that, they came up with Backgrounds.

Backgrounds are your character's choice of, well, background. Nomadic, Rural, Urban, and Wandering characters are each assumed to have basic familiarity with tasks and concepts important to the environments in which they grew up. As such, they each function as fallback skills for broadly applicable categories; if you aren't skilled in anything else appropriate for the situation at hand, you might be able to justify a roll on your Background skill.

And That's It

The game is deceptively simple and easy to pick up despite the weight of the tome it comes in. Other books in the edition flesh out more areas of the game and world, and many of the resources from previous (and even later) editions are mostly compatible with 4E. But you really don't need much to get started with Talislanta.