A couple of months ago I went through a phase where I was reading a bunch of hacks for the amazing Lasers & Feelings (made by John Harper, who lead the design on Talislanta 4e); games like Mechas & Monsters, Friendship & Fukus, and Tactical Waifu. At the time I was struggling with writing my own Talislanta adaptation that was going nowhere, so Elves or No! was a nice break from that.
I only got into Talislanta last year, so I don’t actually have any history with the old Dragon Magazine ads and the “No Elves” tagline, but it’s such a classic piece of RPG culture that I couldn’t resist using it. I also just liked the idea of a roleplaying game where the sole metric is “how similar is your character to an Elf?”
The first page took me two days to put together, with the only original idea being to split up the Laser Feelings bonus based on whether a character leans more towards “Elves” or “No!” Personally, I sort of see it as the only one that’s strictly necessary to play, particularly for a group that already knows Tal.
The idea to include a separate list detailing the races/archetypes came from Ray Otus’s Sorcerers & Sellswords, which describes its classes and their capabilities in purely descriptive terms. If I were redoing the game, I’d probably write them to be even more open-ended, like in Troika!.
I’ve been trying to draw more, so I figured it might be fun to draw the various peoples of Talislanta. It’s the art for the character types in the 2e Handbook that initially got me hooked on the setting, and I was already trying to pay homage to the layout of that book.
Barely Playtested 
Amazing!
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