Clovenhoof
Mongoose
Malcadon said:
Actually, I've never liked "kitchen sink" settings. Howard's World has the advantage that it's a honking big landmass, so there's a lot of space to fit in all kinds of cultures and techlevels.
That's already way better than, sorry to keep pecking on this, the world of The Dark Eye, which crams in _everything_ from stone-age rainforest indios over vikings and renaissance empires through to eskimos, all on one tiny continent about the size of Greenland (sic!).
The whole world is a joke, for example even in the biggest desert (Khom) it's impossible to get lost because you can always see at least one of the bordering mountain ranges. Not to mention that tropical and arctic climates lie a mere 1000 miles apart.
Still, in some corners of Howard's world, Stone Age and Late Medieval are located way too close to each other to be plausible. Hyboria and Pictland is certainly the biggest blunder. To pick up a point in this Gorgnordia article, those regions don't just need to be inherently consistent and plausible, but also in regards to the surrounding world.
That was one reason why I switched our campaign setting. My idea was, if the Hyborian Age was our world 20.000 years in the past, my setting will be our world 20.000 years in the future, long after the downfall of our civilization. So I just took real world maps, altered some shorelines and big rivers a bit, reset the landscapes to the potential natural vegetation (you'll find such maps in any good atlas), and then placed the Conan races where they fit best. Picts in the huge woodlands of Western Europe, the Hyborian peoples on the fertile plains of Ukraine, and so on.
I also narrowed down the techlevel range; a few advanced regions are roughly Late Antique / Migration Era, most others somewhere between Bronze and Iron age, and then of course the backwater Stone Age savages like Picts, generally a bit further out of the way.
As a little Extra, I set the population density extremely low -- essentially anything that's a civilized nation in Howard's world is mainly just a single city state in my world, or a few (rival) cities, and those cities lie up to two weeks' travel apart. Small settlements in between exist, but are constantly threatened (and sometimes erased) by marauding hordes and other disagreeable customers.
