A short one this, as it was a blink and you’d miss it game for me. And for a change I’ll focus more on my own experiences playing it rather than the game itself.
Talislanta is kind of the anti-D&D in that it turns its back on the Tolkien-esque fantasy for some all together more alien. Think more along the lines the “Dreamworld” stories of HP Lovecraft. To get this point over it used to advertise itself with the slogan “No Elves”.
This is all well and good, except this was the time our most reliable Gamesmaster decided to get experimental for once in his life…
He decided he’d hide the game from us. No character sheets, no dice rolling, no concept of how the game worked. However he made the one BIG mistake you can make in a no character sheet game – he made our characters into idiots who had no idea of their limits.
Basically we had no idea what our characters considered themselves good at, and so we did very little. Rather than promoting roleplaying it made us all into cowards. It’s one thing to not be able to calculate your chance of doing Task A. It’s quite another to not know whether you’d be any good at Task A whatsoever. The campaign didn’t last long, and I think we were soon back to AD&D or possibly the next game I’ll write about…