I thought that perhaps some of you might be interested in hearing some of the behind the scenes about how the Talisman Adventures Fantasy Roleplaying Game came into being. How did I end up designing it? What went into the design process? Stuff like that. If the nuts and bolts of game design interest you, then please read on. If not… well, you can wait for my next blog post, but really what are you doing here anyway?
So, how did this all start? I’ll begin with a little history. After my last computer game job, I decided to go back to what I loved most–tabletop roleplaying games. It was where my heart always had been, and I wanted to see if I could make it happen. As most of you probably know, I had been in the industry for a little over five years, back when I wrote for and developed Mind’s Eye Theatre and Changeling: The Dreaming for White Wolf Publishing. At the time I left the industry, roleplaying games appeared to be on the way out. The double whammy of collectible card games and computer games was tearing a huge hole in a previously thriving industry. So, I moved on to other things and eventually worked on computer games such as Fallen Earth and Elder Scrolls Online. I managed to pick up a little freelance work, including working on Changeling 20, fairly quickly, but I figured that if I really wanted to get back into the industry, I needed to meet and talk directly with people. It seemed my best bet for that was to go to GenCon.
In 2017 I packed my bags and drove north to Indianapolis to GenCon 50. The con went remarkably well, and I made many useful contacts and got to see some old friends. Near the end of the con, Mike Tinney mentioned that the folks at Pegasus Spiele were looking to create a roleplaying game based on the board game Talisman the Magical Quest Game. I’ve played a lot of Talisman over the years, and I was intrigued. Mike made introductions, and I met with the owners of Pegasus, and we soon came to an agreement; I would create and develop a new roleplaying game based on the world of Talisman.
The directives to create this game seemed simple at first but turned out to be more complex than I anticipated. First and foremost, the game was to ‘feel’ like the Talisman board game. They also wanted the game to have unique mechanics, especially dice mechanics that could be used for other games. And they wanted it to have a bit of an ‘old school’ feel since it would be based on a board game from the 80s.
If you think there are some conflicting aspects there, I soon came to realize the same—the most difficult to reconcile being a unique system with an ‘old school’ feel. I immediately had a few ideas for making Talisman into a TTRPG, but I wanted to get the core system settled first since everything else would be based on that. It was Brandes Stoddard who initially suggested the idea that the Talisman RPG use a system wherein the players make all of the rolls (similar to PBTA). I admit that I was reticent at first, but on reflection, I realized that this sort of play would handily replicate more of a board game feel. In board games, generally, the players make all of the rolls on their turn, and they are largely responsible for their own fate. With that settled, the next step was the actual dice mechanic. I knew pretty much from the beginning that this game should use d6s. The Talisman board game uses d6s, and it just felt right. The question was what type of d6 system to use. My first thought was something where you rolled more d6 the better your skill, similar to West End’s Star Wars game, but I also remembered how unbalanced it became as the characters increased in power. After a lot of back and forth, consultation, and playing around with dice, I settled on 3d6 because of the fairly predictable bell curve. While Talisman is known for its unpredictability, I wanted to make the core game more stable and inject the wild cards in different ways. The concept for getting a Great Success on doubles or Extraordinary Success on triples came soon after. With the players making all of the rolls, we needed some means of scaling successes. With the doubles rule, we now had two factors contributing to success: do you exceed the target number, and do you get doubles? Without a Great Success, you succeed, but you suffer some penalty. For example, in combat, you do damage to your opponent, but they still do some damage to you. Whew! We now had a core dice system.
I’ve been a fan of meta currency for a long time, and I’ve even inserted it into games that don’t normally have one. I think the James Bond RPG concept of Hero Points was the first time I came across it, and I’ve been in love with it ever since. The Woodland expansion for Talisman already had something very similar in the form of Light Fate and Dark Fate tokens that you could use to affect your rolls and gain other effects. It seemed natural to include these into the game and to use them as our meta currency. At first, I was thinking of using them only to affect die rolls, but they soon became a far more integral part of the game. The Kismet die and Fate points completed the core dice system leaving me free to move on.
Next up was stats, which I knew would be used to modify die rolls. I spent a lot of time mucking around with different ideas but kept coming back to Strength and Craft, which are core stats in the board game. For a time, I considered having these be your only stats, but that seemed a little too simplistic. After all, a troll might have enormous physical might, but they aren’t necessarily nimble. This is how the aspects came into being – each core stat of Strength and Craft breaking down into three sub-categories, or Aspects, as they came to be known. This also felt right because it lent a little ‘old school’ feel. To keep things simple, I decided not to have skills and stats have separate ratings or numbers, but instead, if you are skilled in something, you get to add an aspect, and if you don’t, you just roll 3d6. Yes, you could argue that someone who is naturally dexterous might be better at lock picking even without having been trained, but here simplicity won out over realism.
After some long talks about what we wanted them to be, Brandes and Rabbit Stoddard did much of the heavy lifting on classes and ancestries, and I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out. It was decided from the beginning that we would be sticking to classes from the board game but that we would be breaking out ancestries as their own thing. So, rather than just being an elf, you could now be an elf assassin. I also really like the fact that we could include some races that are very different from much of the standard fantasy fare, such as troll, sprite, leywalker, and even ghouls! Who doesn’t want to play a ghoul! They used the skills on the character cards as a jumping-off point and expanded each of the greatly from there. We also brought the Light Fate points into play in that while each class and ancestry have some special abilities that can be used at will, other, more powerful abilities, require the player to spend a Light Fate.
The game was coming together, and so far, it had a number of aspects that felt very appropriate to Talisman, but it still needed something… something to really give it that Talisman ‘feel’. One of the core aspects of the board game are Followers. Followers give you bonuses and special abilities that help you in your quest for the Crown of Command. I decided to incorporate Followers into the RPG in a similar manner. Rather than being fully fleshed out NPCs who take action of their own (often using up lots of play time), Followers are more in the background. Generally, they can be used in a fight or other situations to give the player character bonuses and grant abilities rather than taking their own actions. Of course, there is nothing preventing Followers from having full personalities and being a part of the story, but the focus isn’t on them it’s on the characters. With this mechanic in place, we had the core of what is now the Talisman Adventures Fantasy Roleplaying Game. There were a lot of other details that still needed ot be fleshed out, playtesting, and so forth. But this gave us the core of a working game. I hope you enjoyed this walk-through of how the Talisman RPG came into being. If you have questions or curiosities about particular aspects of the game and its design, I’d be happy to answer them, either directly or maybe even a different post.
Don’t forget that if you want to see these posts a week or so early and get a behind the scenes look at what I’m currently working on, check out my Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/ianlemke
Talisman Adventures Fantasy RPG on DriveThruRPG.com
Talisman Adventures Fantasy RPG hardcover books (both the regular edition and collectors editions) will be available in December from Pegasus Spiele and you can pre-order now.
Limited Edition
Core Rulebook
Grand Pooka's Grimoire 