The Riflemen and the Hares
Notes on Building TALUS
TALUS started as a pun. Porg Borg. Say it out loud once and you can already hear the problem: a doom-metal apocalypse engine pointed at a CGI seabird that exists mostly because the real seabirds on a real island wouldn't leave the set. Mörk Borg wants swingy dice and a body count. It wants the world to end on a die roll, lethally, often, and without much ceremony about it. A puffin wants to survive Tuesday. The two don't fit, and for a while that not-fitting was the whole joke.
Then it stopped being a joke and started being a design problem, which is the more interesting kind to have.
Scale as category, not quantity
Here's the moment the pun ran out of road. Mörk Borg's gods and monsters are bigger than you on the same axis you're on — more HP, harder hits, same kind of fight, just one you'll lose. A lot of "small creature in a big world" games inherit that axis without questioning it: the threat gets more of the same number. Palladium called it mega-damage. Whatever you call it, the door still says PUSH, it's just welded shut a little harder.
TALUS ended up somewhere else. Large Things in TALUS don't have more HP than Small Folk. They have none. Not because they're invincible in a cool, swingy, you'll-probably-die-anyway sense — but because they were never on that axis to begin with. A hawk isn't a monster with better stats. It's weather. You don't roll to defeat a flood; you roll to not be under it when it arrives. The fix wasn't giving the big thing a bigger number. It was admitting the number was always the wrong tool.
Once that clicked, most of the rest of the game fell out of it for free. Small Folk and Large Things stopped being a size measurement and became a functional split — a crow you're bargaining with is Small Folk; the same crow deciding to drive you off is a Large Thing, and the line moves with the situation, not the species. Safety stopped being a body count and started being room to maneuver, restored between scenes, with death gated behind the table's agreement rather than a bad roll. Momentum instead of attrition. Every one of those choices is the same move, made in a different room of the house: don't put the threat on your axis just to make it fightable. Let it be a condition of the world instead.
The line that turned out to be the thesis
A few weeks into building this, at a poetry reading, I opened a book to a random page and found something from Vasily Grossman's wartime notebooks: Soviet anti-tank riflemen, sheltering hares that were fleeing the advance of German tanks, telling them — don't worry, they won't get past us.
I didn't go looking for a design thesis. It found me on a random page, the way the best material for this project kept arriving sideways instead of on purpose — a porg pun that broke, a phone video of pikas mid-scroll, a dog refusing to leave a curb. But once it landed, it didn't leave. Those riflemen are small in front of the Panzers and immense and gentle to the hares, and the line runs both directions — a vow to the animals, and a vow they're making to themselves, possibly one they can't keep. That's the emotional engine under everything in this book. It's what a Far-Caller is doing when they read the weather for the rest of the Talus. It's what a Tender says into the dark when the cold is coming. It's the only sentence I've found that explains why "small and threatened" keeps producing some of the most durable stories anyone tells, instead of just sad ones.
It also clarified, by contrast, where TALUS chooses not to go. Watership Down earns its death — Hazel's warren loses people to snares and dogs and human indifference, consequentially, never at random. Bolting swingy doom-metal dice onto rabbits captures the body count and loses the dread, because random death and doomed death aren't the same animal, and a game that wants the second one has to stop reaching for the mechanics built for the first.
Why this genre, why now
I'll cop to a generational note, briefly, because it explains the appetite more than the influences do. I grew up with The Day After and WarGames and Red Dawn, with Twilight: 2000 and Gamma World and a Scout troop running Recon entirely without irony. That's not a deprivation story — GenX didn't "miss" a war, several people in my orbit will happily tell you Desert Storm has notes — it's something stranger: a generation handed the aftermath to rehearse before any underlying event existed to explain it. The dread arrived first. The games had to hold it without a referent.
Richard Adams survived Arnhem. Tolkien had the Somme. I had Anthony Beevor books and a closet full of post-apocalyptic rulebooks bought with allowance money, and a nervous system that apparently filed all of it under "open when ready." TALUS is what came out when I finally opened that drawer and found something gentler to do with it than another grim setting. Same shelf as Adams and Tolkien, same impulse, lower stakes, kinder animal — but it's the same drawer.
The dial
All of which is a long way around to a practical question that came up on a dog walk: how clever should the Small Folk be allowed to get?
Gamma World had a flowchart for fiddling with old-world artifacts — figure it out, or it blows up in your face. That's good instinct, badly scoped, because it answers a question that doesn't have one universal answer. How smart Small Folk can get isn't a rule TALUS needs to settle. It's a setting a table needs to choose — the same way a Reach already gets three natural features and three Changes picked once, up front, by the people actually at the table.
So: name it, and let it be chosen rather than assumed.
Brushland. The strict end. No fabrication, no befriending the old machines into doing your bidding, nothing that promotes a Small Folk from inhabitant to engineer. Cleverness is Hazel's cleverness — finding the gap that's already there, never making one. This is the setting that keeps the most direct faith with Watership Down, and it's worth choosing on purpose if that's the story your table wants, because the smallness has to stay load-bearing or the whole emotional argument stops working.
Borrowed Fire. The default, and where TALUS has been living the whole time without saying so out loud. Small Folk can use what they find — a door's rhythm, a Mender's blind spot, a Find that buys one good roll — but they're reading a world built by someone else, not rewriting it. Cleverness wins a survivable hour. It doesn't win a contract with the machine. This is the riflemen-and-hares register: read the gap honestly, act in it, and don't pretend you've made peace with the tanks.
Husbandry. The permissive end, where the ceiling rises toward opposable thumbs and a fabricated ally. An old AI can be befriended and taught the Talus's calls. Tools can be built, not just borrowed. This is the Root register, the Albedo: Anthropomorphics register — a perfectly good, perfectly different genre promise, and one TALUS is happy to host for a table that wants it. It's not a lesser table for choosing it. It's a different vow.
Keep the Gamma World instinct alive at the permissive end specifically: fiddling with the Old Works' deeper machinery should still have two outcomes, and one of them should occasionally go off in your hands. That's not a punishment for ambition. It's what keeps Husbandry honest — the cost of reaching past Borrowed Fire's ceiling, paid in the same currency as everything else in this game: a roll, a consequence, a story about the time it almost worked.
Pick one before the first session, the way you'd pick the Reach's three Old Works. Say it out loud. Then go find out what your Small Folk do with it.
TALUS: Tales of the Small Folk is a setting for TiGGR, released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Use it, hack it, share it, tell us what your table chose.