TALISMAN - THE LOST FILES
By Jervis Johnson

Jervis Johnson was the lead developer on Games Workshop’s Talisman game. Here he explains about how he found several previously unreleased Talisman characters.

Talisman remains one of Games Workshop’s most popular games. This is extraordinary when one considers it has been around almost twenty years now!

Talisman was first released in 1983, and went through several different editions before the most recent one. The earlier editions included lots of characters that didn’t make it into the most recent version of the game. There were a number of reasons for this, but primarily it was because the earlier editions used cards to represent the characters, while the current version uses plastic Citadel miniatures.

However, when I started work on the current version of the game I didn’t know exactly which plastic miniatures we were going to put in the game. To be honest, I didn’t know if we were going to use plastic characters at all!

Because of this I simply went through all of the characters we’d invented for the earlier editions of the game, and picked out all of the ones that I felt we should keep for the edition I was working on. I then went through them and filled in any obvious gaps I could see. And then I went about writing up the character sheets for all of these different characters. The end result of all of this work was some forty(!) characters, all of which were used when we play-tested the game, but only just over half of which were ever published.

Fast-forward to a darkened office at Games Workshop Head Office on wind-swept evening. On this fateful night I happened to be looking through some old computer files stored on the GW Design Studio’s main server, and I came across my original computer files with the play-test versions of ALL of the Talisman characters… including the ones that were never published.

As I’ve already mentioned, Talisman is a very popular game which has a large following, and I’ve lost count of the number of emails and letters I’ve received asking for more material for the game. “Hmmmm,” I thought, “I bet Talisman players would get a real blast from it if we finally published these characters…”

The result of this can be found in the rest of this article. Here are four of the lost Talisman characters (in a PDF format and ready for battle), and over the coming months we hope to publish the remaining ones. Have fun with them!

Best regards,