After years of creating great gaming titles under the name ‘Talisman Studios’, we’ve decided that it’s time our real name… Savage Mojo… became known in its own right. After all, we focus on the Savage Worlds and Mojo Rules! roleplay systems, so it makes sense to use the name we gave the company.

The Talisman Studios name was originally created in 2003 when the company was an art and design studio to the adventure games industry, the brainchild of master artists Jason Engle and Aaron Acevedo. Since then it has expanded, is an Origins Award Winner (for Deadlands Reloaded), and two times Semi-Finalist (for Suzerain and Shaintar). These days Savage Mojo creates more than just roleplaying games, adding the Gamescapes line of gaming accessories, graphical fiction and art prints to our portfolio.

Talisman Studios is celebrating the festive season by previewing a new free feature for Suzerain, our Origins Award Nominee RPG. If you go to our website and click on the vault you’ll find that we’ve launched a beta of our brand new on-line character generator.

Unlike some other companies we could mention, our application is totally free to use and hooks into the master database of character feats. You can look up any feat from any Suzerain setting and then create a character using the ones you want. Save your characters and download them as pre-filled character sheets, ready to print out and take to the gaming table.

Talisman Studios is celebrating the anniversary of Suzerain, our Origins Award Nominee RPG. And we’re celebrating in style, with a couple of great bits of news for roleplay fans everywhere:

Suzerain is now free from our online shop! That’s $0.00 for the Suzerain rule book. The economy’s getting tougher and none of us has much money to play with, but from now on you won’t need any money to play with Suzerain. Enjoy the game at www.suzerain.info by clicking on the ‘Treasure’ tab at the top of the page and browsing through all our free goodies.

Talisman Studios has completed its project to bring all its roleplay books to print. All the main books of the Origins Award nominated Suzerain and Shaintar game lines are available as both PDF and print books via the website at www.talisman-studios.com with immediate effect.

“This is a great day for fans of Suzerain and Shaintar” said Martin Klimeš, Publisher at Talisman Studios, “Giving them the choice of print or PDF. Our next project is to go live with the stunning art prints we showcased at GenCon, including pre-printed map posters from our ever-popular map tiles sets. Watch this space.”

Retailers at the GAMA Trade Show will select finalists this week

The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design (AAGAD) and the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) proudly announce the semi-finalists in all categories for the 34th Origins Awards.

“It was a good year for the Origins awards,” said Phil Lacefield Jr., chairman of the AAGAD. “We had plenty of contenders across the board. The jury members did a great job.”

“The Origins Awards give our industry a chance to reward excellence in all facets of gaming,” said Anthony Gallela, GAMA’s executive director. “The award categories recognize games of all types, as well as fiction, non-fiction, magazines, comics, and more.”

The Suzerain rulebook is a slim fifty pages of very pretty plate artwork and a lot of apparent coffee spillage. Rather than being tied to a particular setting or world this Suzerain seems to be trying to pass itself off as a generic system with specific world books, though there are hints of the New Age mysticism and multiversal aspects in the fiction snippets and illustration explanations throughout the book. The immediate first impression is one of over-engineering for such a small book(let). For your money you get a brief introduction, basic rules, advanced rules, character creation and ‘Feats’ which covers the ground of skills, innate abilities (merits), innate failings (flaws) and special powers such as magic, cybernetics or SCIENCE!

Review by James ‘Grim’ Desborough

Some big news over at the Talisman Studios website this week. They have signed on with Studio 2 Publishing for distribution of these great books. First up will be the Shaintar core book, which uses the Savage Worlds system from Pinnacle Entertainment. The Suzerain core book will be the second product to hit distribution and it sounds like supplements for each line will follow.

Customers will also be able to order directly from the Talisman Studios website as well.

New from Talisman Studios for the Suzerain Role Playing Game. The Best Little Hellhouse in Texas There’s a fortune to be dug up, out on the frontier? as long as you survive! Welcome to a gunslinging adventure set in the supernatural Old World, where tough-as-nails preachers hold back the horrors scuttling into town with the […]

Welcome to the second set of “Contest Edition” Mini-Reviews.

These are just some of the products offered by the sponsors of the Flames Rising Favorite Horror Game Contest. This week we sci-fi adventure mixed with medieval horror, zombies, pirates and more!

If you missed out on the first “Contest Edition” from last week, be sure to check out that mix of great games from other sponsors.

Talisman Studios – the home of Gamescapes, Shaintar and Suzerain.

In this interview Martin Klimes and Aaron Acevedo tell us how the studio came together, give us a peek into their gaming habits and share some of the design ideas that they’ve used to create the Talisman Studios products.

There is a lot of creative energy coming out of Talisman Studios. With products ranging from Suzerain to Shaintar: Immortal Legends you can find amazing art, great writing and a lot of talent. It looks like these games are going to even more interesting from here on out: Talisman Studios Adds Industry Veterans Talisman Studios […]