[1] In 1982 Stephan Michael Sechi, Steven Cordovano and Vernie Taylor formed the company Bard Games to produce their own Dungeons & Dragons supplements.

[2]: 172  Sechi pointed to the Dying Earth fantasy novel series by Jack Vance as the primary influence, but there are many other sources of inspiration as well, including H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath, Marco Polo’s Travels, and Sir Richard Burton’s collection of the Arabian Nights.

[1] As game critic Rick Swan stated, "It's as if H. P. Lovecraft had written Alice in Wonderland, with Hans Christian Andersen and William S. Burroughs as technical advisors.

In 1992, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) — at the time a new, small, and relatively unknown company — acquired the license to Talislanta[4] Original designer Stephen Michael Sechi collaborated with Jonathan Tweet to produce the third edition rules that included: WotC's final Talislanta book was the full-length campaign Sub-Men Rising (1994) by Robin Laws.

[4] Shooting Iron also published the supplement Midnight Realm in 2005, a 152-page book detailing the plane of existence known as The Darkness, but then relinquished the license.

Launched in a successful Kickstarter campaign by Nocturnal Media in 2017, Talislanta: The Savage Land was released starting in 2018 to backers and 2019 for the rest of the world.

Including four brand new books: This edition is in development and is tentatively set to release to backers in November 2023 and to the rest of the world in December 2023.

Bambra found the art "visually appealing, and does an excellent job of conveying the atmosphere, places, and peoples of Talislanta.

"[1] In his 1990 book The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games, Rick Swan called the 1st edition "entertainingly written ... a model of clarity and elegance."

Swan concluded by giving the game an excellent rating of 3.5 out of 4, saying, "For the adventurous, Talislanta is a role-playing nirvana.

"[3] Mark A. Santillo reviewed Talislanta Complete Roleplaying Game in White Wolf #33 (Sept./Oct., 1992), rating it a 4 out of 5 and stated that "The overall rating is high because of the tremendous creative effort that went into Talislanta, effort which is evident in the excellent artwork, imaginative archetypes, geographical features and fanciful beasts.

"[7] In his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, RPG historian Stu Horvath called the game "a land of many regions, each unique in character.

Some might call this tonal inconsistency, and that is true, to a degree, but the result is so varied and strange a world that it is easy to forgive its silly bits.