Recent content by Faraer

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...

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...

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...

I don't see the purpose at this point of perpetuating the Turanian placement in print. No criticism, I just knew you'd want to see the passages. It's a conceivable project for the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

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. It's thought that some readers are put off by what looks like scholarly apparatus. I think it's a shame: source notes would have been really...

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...

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...

Eyes front.

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