Now that we got the basics out of the way, we can dig into what makes Talislanta: the seemingly endless creative thought that went into the campaign setting.

The Chronicles of Talislanta is a generic sourcebook, part gazetteer, part travelogue, that details the vast and varied lands of the continent of Talislanta, all illustrated by P.D. Breeding’s lovely black and white illustrations.

There’s a spectrum of fantasy settings. On the far left, you have stuff rooted in our world and its stories, like Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. In the middle, you have your tried and true fantasy trope settings like Middle Earth and the Forgotten Realms. As you move right, things get…weirder. You pass Glorantha and Tekumel and Athas and Barsaive and eventually arrive at the edge of the map, where Jorune and Talislanta live.

Talislanta is neither neat nor gestalt. It’s not entirely thought out and the tone is all over the place. What Talislanta is, though, is fresh, even 30 years later. The world jumps off the page like it was shot out of a cannon. It has a cousin, I think, in Rifts, in that it seems like a massive outpouring of creativity without any apparent limits imposed by its creator. Every impulse Sechi had is right there on the page. Of course it doesn’t really makes sense. How could it? If he tried to curate this world, it wouldn’t be half as glorious.