Acheronians....?

[Standing-Stone]

I just started playing Age of Conan the other day and while I understand it's not excatly the same game.

I'm asking here anyway.

Playing on the island of Tortage there are all these huge stone work ruins that the Pictish savages use for their tribal camping grounds and some catacombs connected with the sewers, wine cellars underneath the harbour village.

The Acheronians, and their city/cities said to have fallen in the age proceeding the rise and fall of Atlantis.

They were burned, they went down in flames. Where the Atlanteans were drowned, when Atlantis was sunk.

The latter, a well known story to myself, the former, not so familer.
Goggling the word Acheron or Acheronian only tells me that this was the name of the famous Greek river of Hades.

I would like to know more of this place, it's people , but according to how it was written into the world of Conan.

There are no obvious referances to this on any of the Conan wiki's and I was wondering if this has any mention in the RPG.

I might even buy the book.

I have sneaking suspicion that this might have been a relatively new peice of pre-Conan history put in the computer MORPG only.

 

[flatscan]

Robert E Howard wrote a little of the Acheronians himself. In fact, Xaltotun, the big bad in The Hour of the Dragon was a mummified Acheronian brought back to life by the Heart of Ahriman. There hasn't been a sourcebook written for them but the purple spires of Acheronian ruins have popped up in adventures from time to time. I ran one where Acheronian descendants had an inbred village in the Nemedian Darkwoods and another recently where a dead Acheronian city was discovered in an inert volcano. I believe both those adventures are from the downloadable Mongoose mag, Signs & Portents.

The barbarians who overthrew Acheron set up new kingdoms," quoted
Orastes. "Where the empire had stretched now rose realms called
Aquilonia, and Nemedia, and Argos, from the tribes that founded them.
The older kingdoms of Ophir, Corinthia and western Koth, which had
been subject to the kings of Acheron, regained their independence with
the fall of the empire."

"And what of the people of Acheron?" demanded Xaltotun. "When I fled
into Stygia, Python was in ruins, and all the great, purple-towered
cities of Acheron fouled with blood and trampled by the sandals of the
barbarians."

"In the hills small groups of folk still boast descent from Acheron,"
answered Orastes. "For the rest, the tide of my barbarian ancestors
rolled over them and wiped them out. They--my ancestors--had suffered
much from the kings of Acheron."

BTW, what server of Age of Conan are you on? I have 2 characters on the Cimmeria server. My main is a Herald of Xotli named Kenamun and I'm leveling a Barbarian alt named Cailt.

 

[ScottOden]

AoC has totally screwed up REH's timeline, as is to be expected. Acheron (and its fall) is a late entry into REH's canon -- he wrote about it *after* he'd written his world-building essay The Hyborian Age. It existed 3000 years before the era of Conan *after* the sinking of Atlantis. As Flatscan said, everything we know about Acheron can be found in REH's only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon.

I don't even want to know what the hell Picts are doing on Tortage . . .


Scott, proud purist

 

[Standing-Stone]

Evenif I 've been enjoying the game, I 'm not altogether sure wehter it's really justice to it's source.

 

[flatscan]

Don't sweat it man. I enjoy the Age of Conan game too despite its flaws. Anytime you have a licensed property, especially one that has been released so many years after the original source you're bound to have discrepancies. Even the excellent product line Mongoose has published has things people can niggle about.

So, what server you on?

 

[kintire]

I don't even want to know what the hell Picts are doing on Tortage . . .

Killing people.

I don't have too much trouble with either of these actually. The Barachan isles are a pretty easy sea canoe run from the southern Pictish Wilderness, and the overplot, such as it is, is about a collision between an ancient god of darkness worshipped in Acheron and a deity that defended Atlantis from that same god. Each is the most powerful culture that followed the respective deities, and define the competing religions. The sages of the contemperory period do seem to be under the impression that both empires existed at the same time and actually competed physically, but the passage of 3,000 years will distort these things.

 

[Supplement Four]

I've dropped out of AoC now for mucho months--sometime in the last half of last year.

Anything new and neat to report? Or, is it the same old game?

I got bored with it.

 

[flatscan]

They've added some new 6 man instances and Thoth-Amon's stronghold will be releasing soon. I received an invitation to Funcom's closed beta for the expansion, Rise of the Godslayer. Unfortunately, my partition for XP on my Macbook Pro is too small to have 2 copies of the Age of Conan game on it. Wish it was just a key I could pass on to another player who could use it, but unfortunately it's set to my user/pass so no dice.

As to getting bored, yeah, I'm getting there too. I don't get home early enough to get in on any of my guild's week night raids and other than raiding and PvP there's not much for an 80 lvl character to do. And PvP is no fun because it's either group ganking or Khesh or dueling toons with MUCH better armor than my guy's got. I've got an alt on Tortage that I use to PvP with but that's getting to be old hat too. New content can't get here quick enough.