Warrior's Companion - February 2009

[Strom]

The 'Goose is listing the supplement Warrior's Companion on the Conan RPG product page for a tentative February 2009. No listing on Amazon yet - I guess more info to come.

[Strom]

New info on the Warrior's Companion:

Mongoose Steele
Greater Spotted Mongoose
Posted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 9:25 pm Post subject:

It is a mostly "crunch" book similar to the Hyboria's Fiercest in the H's-F series. A way for us to expand on some new fighting styles, skill uses for warrior-types, etc.

As I know that many of our Conan fans are "all fluff/no crunch" fans, I am hoping that the people who do like new toys, new rule add-ons, and yes...new elite classes...will enjoy it immensely. It will give several new culture-specific warrior-isms (fighting styles, feats and the like).

It will NOT be a simple reprint/rehash of Hyboria's Fiercest, though.

Cheers all,
Bry

[flatscan]

I have a couple of players that will love a book like this. Looking forward to it.

[Strom]

Interesting choice for a supplement considering the H-F series. New classes has me interested...

[Krushnak]

The comment on skill uses has me interested aswell. I find the zingaran fencing skill to be awesome way to handle something like that instead of just bloating the game with more feats.

[DaveNC]

It's always good to hear news of a new Conan product - Thanks.

[The King]

I am not overly happy about this typical d20 book.

[Hervé]

A kind of 2nd Edition Hyboria's?
Can't say I'm entranced either...

[cbrunish]

I think they stated that it is not a rehash or reprint of the Hyboria's books.

[Strom]

Mongoose has posted the cover for Warrior's Companion:

[lastbesthope]

NICE!!!!

LBH

[B_Steele]

Yeah...I really like it too.

I can't wait to see what the final manuscript (post-edit) looks like either.

-Bry

[Dark Mistress]

Yeah I am looking forward to this one, I like the set of books like this the first time a lot.

The center guy looks like he might be wearing a little lip gloss though.

[Strom]

Checkout the preview:

Warrior's Companion PDF Preview

[seanbickford]

That looks pretty awesome.

mmm... permanent damage...

[Clovenhoof]

Hmmm. I said it before and I will say it again: Permanent Damage rules are totally misplaced in a Conan game. I find it funny that the flowtext says something about putting the grittiness of REH combat into the game. I can't remember a single instance of any character in a REH Conan story being crippled and live. Least of all the hero. When last I looked, Conan didn't have a pegleg and an eyepatch.
In the RPG, the PCs are the heroes. There's absolutely no call to force some kind of permanent damage handicaps on the players. If a player decides he wants his Barbarian to be scarred, he will say so himself. If a player for some off reason wants to play a crippled character, he will do so. For NPCs, these rules are totally moot, as nobody at the gaming table cares about what kind of maimings any mooks that for some reason survive their encounter with the PCs carry from the battlefield.

These rules, like most of what is shown in the preview, depict a gaming style known in German as, roughly translated, "hard sausage", a kind of pedantic simulationism that has very little to do with Sword & Sorcery.

I sure hope this preview is not in fact representative of the whole product. But in that case whoever assembled it did a poor job, as that is pretty much the idea with previews.

I'll rather wait until the product is out and people who buy everything by default have posted in-depth reviews on this board.

[Strom]

Checkout the preview:

Warrior's Companion PDF Preview

I like the Permanent Damage optional rule.

[sbarrie]

Headbutting blade?

[Ichabod]

I didn't see anything that would encourage me either.

Permanent damage is just a screwjob to PCs. And, it requires extra accounting.

Increasing AP? AP! Who cares? Either you are a beater and you AP all of the time or you are a backstabber who can't AP anyway.

Tactics skill? Mon Dieu! As if K: Warfare wasn't enough skill inflation. Can we just stop with new skills and actually address the uselessness of a number of existing ones?

I like the concept of having uses for skills when hitting certain ranks. Reminds me of L5R's specialty system and freebies at certain ranks, btw. I don't know if these uses are all that important except getting PP back from Fighting Meditation, but whatever. Speaking of which, while I'm pro making useless skills useful, Concentration shouldn't even be a skill.

Armor technology smacks of D&Difying the game. That's not in and of itself a problem, but in combination with everything else, it just seems that the book is full of stuff that's only useful to people who think d20 isn't rules heavy enough.

[Trodax]

*Shudder* Yes, I guess this book is definitely not for me.

Hmmm. I said it before and I will say it again: Permanent Damage rules are totally misplaced in a Conan game.

I'm with you 100% here. Battlescars are cool and all, but in my games they will always just be fluff and actually also under the players control (so the player gets to choose whether that wound leaves a nasty scars across his face or not). Having a -2 penalty with your maimed arm or your speed halved because you have a peg leg is decidedly uncool. That's not something that would ever, ever happen to a hero in a Sword & Sorcery tale.

I mean, there's no reason the world can't be grim and gritty without having to impose game effects on the heroes of the story. The streets of Shadizar can certainly be littered with maimed mercenaries, begging to survive their only option left (rules-wise, these could just be considered unfortunate warriors that were knocked below 0 hp in a fight, and were not player characters).