[David L Pulver]

As with Chris, the Talent system was what really made me love IN THE LABYRINTH. (I'd already played a short TFT dungeon campaign with just Melee and Wizard the year before). The simple way to personalize characters was one of the real "wow" moments of gaming for me, because the talents like Alertness or Sex Appeal or Bard or Literacy or Two Weapons seemed really expressive of individuality (more so than skills in Traveller or Runequest did.)

The talents work well as is, but after running a game for a while I ended up using the following variant:

Effective IQ for buying talents = (IQ-5) x 2.

The reason for this was that I found that most IQ 7-8 types (your average orc or dumb barbarian) didn't really need that many talents besides a weapon or so. On the other hand, for experienced characters, the value of 1 point increase in DX (especially) or ST was a lot higher than having to gain 2 points of IQ just to pick, say, Axe/Mace when you already knew Sword.

With this variant each gain of IQ let you pick up two 1-point talent, or a 2-point talent, or 2/3 of a 3-point talent. I later extended this to wizard spells as well.