There are quite a few that don't: HeroQuest, Fudge, and various other modern games. The fact that most of them do is a legacy from D&D, something veteran players thus expect but new ones (not enculturated to 'gamer' assumptions) likely wouldn't (unless they were peculiarly naive about how stories wo...

Hervé wrote:The old 1984 Conan RPG from TSR was already using a color table in the mood of MSH's one. The rules are still available as a a free download here:

http://www.midcoast.com/~ricekrwc/zefrs/

Which has not just the original rules but a whole new simulacrum game based on them.

Distinguishing weapon types in RPG rules, which comes out of Chainmail, -- makes some kind of sense with small-scale wargaming -- corresponds to very little fiction, certainly almost no sword and sorcery or heroic fantasy, where no one ever won or lost a fight due to what weapon they were using unle...

Mongoose Steele wrote:I can't comment about the use of 'Hyboria' instead of 'Hyborian Age'. So I won't.

I won't either, as Steve Tompkins has done so more than adequately, except to say that it bemuses me that Conan Properties keeps allowing it.

Atula, no question Dale's and Vincent's maps are the most accurate. Some of their revisions are certain or almost certain, others are more challengeable, but no one else has produced Hyborian Age maps that considered the geography thoroughly enough to be in contention. The map you first posted doesn...

For people who like de Camp's pastiche, then his location of the city might be acceptable to them. To those of us who prefer the unaltered Howard, then it isn't. To each their own. Its a game. I don't see the purpose at this point of perpetuating the Turanian placement in print. Well, that draft is...

They are both acceptable placements, depending on how you prefer the source material. How are they both acceptable? De Camp either made a careless mistake or ignored the story's intent to serve his contrived schema of Conan's travels. Although there was little editing done, 99% of the editing took ...

I think there are remnants of Stone's draft in the filmed screenplay, but it's Milius's film all the way. That sub-Nietzschean philosophy is what he believes in.

If I could, I would resurrect and rejuvenate Oliver Reed and cast him.

Conan the Barbarian doesn't even try to respect Conan or Howard, it just appropriates him for a right-libertarian anti-hippy John Milius film.

It's just one of many definite errors, including the overlarge Aquilonia, several spurious mountain ranges, the locations of Messantia and Zamboula, the course of the Zaporoska, and the entire speculative layout of the South and East, that need to be sorted out before any more pretty new maps are ba...

Yes, they're wrong.

Yes, Turanians do execute foreigners.

Turan is separated from Zamora by the kozak-haunted steppes. The westernmost Turanian outposts at that latitude, such as Fort Ghori, are on the eastern edge of the steppes, on the border shown on any decent Hyborian Age map.

You should take that Wikipedia table of correspondences with a big pinch of salt. Zamora is not a straightforward analogue, even a mixed one. Part of Zamorian culture is the ancient Pre-Cataclysmic Zhemri civilization, which is an evil, alien, nonhistorical strain. The only two certain Zamorian char...

Yogah of Yag wrote:

Faraer wrote:Dark Horse has said it intends to put out Savage Sword of Conan in trade paperbacks...

Sweeet. 8)

Eyes front.

Have them read Bob Howard stories. If they don't want to act like Howard protagonists, they're in the wrong campaign.

King Vilerus was, as far as we know, part of the same Aquilonian dynasty as Namedides and was probably broadly the same kind of king, though I suspect more able. He was responsible for some of the Aquilonian push into Pictland, and may have been the victor of the civil war in which Count Trocero bes...

Prof.Dogg wrote:Not statting out NPCs can be incredibly annoying to players who dislike GM meta-gaming.

What is GM meta-gaming?

One of the pre-human races: the giant-kings (Elder Race), the builders on Dagoth Hill, the winged creatures of "Queen of the Black Coast" and "The Garden of Fear" . . .

By the way, these creatures are ice-giants, not frost giants as the Conan RPG has them. The only so-named frost-giant is Ymir, and perhaps others of "the gods of ice and snow" such as Kurt Busiek's conjectured Buri and Bor.

I think the Hyborian languages are similar enough that Hyborians of different nations can communicate, that merchants bordering the Hyborian lands tend to speak the nearest Hyborian tongue, and that far-travelling merchants and adventurers tend to know several languages. I don't think a common tongu...