In order to start modding your game, you will need some simple tools:

1. The game (obviously)

2. The images you want to add (preferably ones with transparent backgrounds)

3. A file converter to turn JPG or PNG to the file formats of Talisman (DDS). There are free sites to do this which I used. Both of these sites worked well: https://convertio.co/png-dds/ and https://www.aconvert.com/image/png-to-dds/
You will also need to convert your audio from MP3/WAV to OGG, here is what I used: https://convertio.co/wav-ogg/

Optional: An image editor to help clean up the images you have or found online, I used GIMP because it is free to use and has all the tools I need.

Now that you have your tools, let's move on to modding the game!

First step in modding Talisman: Digital Edition is locating where the path is for your game. If you don't remember where it is you can simply right click on the game in your steam library and choose to browse local files.

Once you've got that up, it is your call as to what you want to change. For the in-game music, you will want to go to the music-72814-x folder where you will see folders: battle, challengebattle, craftbattle, and game. To change the menu music and game music, go into the game folder and change any of the gameplay folders contents to the music you want (gameplay1 is the main menu music, the rest are cycled through while playing Talisman).

To make the changes, you need to have your music in the OGG format (you can convert it to this online for free, see Step 1) and change the name to whatever you want to change.

Ex. If you want to change the main menu music, name your music to gameplay1 then paste it into the gameplay1 folder and choose to replace files. You will be able to see the effects immediately when you boot it up.


For the character portraits and miniatures it is a bit more involved. First, pick which character you wish to replace their portraits and minis with your own (you cannot make additional characters this way to my knowledge). For the base roster you will find them under base-77512-x in the chars folder, others will be in their respective dlc packs. For my first attempt I chose the Assassin from base game. Copy the files for that character (assassin, assassin01, assassin_alpha, assassin01_alpha, assassin02, frame_assassin01, and mini_assassin01) into your pictures folder to view them. The 01 of any character is their miniature, the alpha is the outline and the minis are the character icons during character selection and in game I believe.


Now that you have these files, it's time to get your pictures into similar formats. First you will want to get the sizes matching the files you want to replace, they are as follows:

Full model (assassin) - 1024x1024
Full model silhouette (assassin_alpha) - 512x512
Miniature (assassin01) - 512x512
Miniature silhouette (assassin01_alpha) - 256x256
Miniature outline (assassin02) - 512x512
Character Select Icon (mini_assassin01) - 256x256

After you have the size right, the big step is to make sure your images do not have backgrounds (unless you want a square background to show whenever you play that character). To do this you can remove the background through GIMP or find an image of your character without a background if you don't want to do the work yourself. For the silhouettes make sure to use the same images from your Full models and minis, all you need to do is fill the character white and then make the background black (can use the bucket tool in GIMP or maybe even Paint I guess). If you do not change the silhouette your model and miniature will not show up properly so you need to make sure you do both before this last step.

Finally, like with the audio, you will want to convert your custom images into the right format (DDS). Like mentioned in Step 1 you can do this for free online. After that you can rename these files to whatever you want to replace (with the example, you rename your full model image to assassin, the silhouette to assassin_alpha, etc.). Then you simply need to paste these files into the folder of the character you want to change (base or one of the expansions). If you did it right you should be able to start up a game online or offline to see you work. Congratulations! You now how a custom character in Talisman!!!