Stephen Michael Sechi and his partner at Bard Games didn’t get along, so Sechi cashed in his shares and left. He immediately started work on a new game. Three months later, his former partner sold Bard Games back to Sechi, allowing him to publish that new game: Talislanta.

Talislanta is weird. Like Skyrealms of Jorune weird. If you have ever looked through Dragon Magazines from the 80s, you probably know Talislanta from its ads declaring “No Elves!” That is a true statement. There’s no room for them with all the other races Sechi dreamed up.

Like Jorune, Talislanta owes a lot to its artist, P.D. Breeding, who accomplishes a large amount of world building through his illustrations – just look at that dude on the cover (a heavily tattooed Thrall warrior and not at all an orc, I promise). Inspired largely by the writing of Jack Vance, the world is rich in magic, thanks to the ancient race of sorcerers called the Archaens, whose powers mirror our own scientific achievements, creating things like space ships and even something that sounds a lot like virtual reality. Their experiments created many strange races and eventually led to the Great Disaster, which changed the face of the continent. The result is a land of many regions, each unique in character. Some might call this tonal inconsistency, and that is true to a degree, but it is so wild a world that you quickly forgive its silly bits. How can you be upset with a game that offers 84 types of characters to play from the start?

The system is a noteworthy simplification of the Arcanum, using a D20 and skill points to resolve conflicts on an Action Table that determines degrees of success and failure. It was repackaged as a generic, multi-genre system in 2005 as The Omni System. I’ve not played it, but it feels a bit like a mix of OD&D and RuneQuest, which is fine if underwhelming: the real star of the show is the setting.