Conan VS standard D&D game

[Belkregos]

By the way, a friend of mine has been talking up the Midnight setting quite a bit. I may have to check it out, but I'm sold on the Conan OGL Rules for my campaign rules-of-choice,.

I’ve only seen the books in the store (midnight) is it any good? would it be difficult to adapt some midnight adventures to Conan? or is it too setting specific?
anything in the midnight setting a good Cimmerian DM could raid

I think the feel of Midnight is too different from Conan. I really got a Lord of the Rings fantasy feel as opposed to a Howard Sword and Sorcery feel. A gifted DM could probably transfer the adventures over and maintain the Hyborian feel, but it would be a lot more work then I would want to do.

i guess you are right, the "low magic setting" line in the description is what attracted me but i've read a few reviews after my posting and i'm thinking the whole overpowering demon thing might be hard to write out

its always good to explore new sources though :lol:
thanks

 

[Sutek]

* Massive Damage = 20+ points of damage over the DR of the target's armor - forces FORT save (failure = dead; pass = left for dead/dying)

Are you sure a passed save is left for dead/dying? I thought a passed save (assuming they still have HP) and they could keep up the fight?

Nope. When you pass the save, you are considered LFD instead of being dead. The examples of healing progression after that gives the example of going up to -9 and so on, so you'd effectively be "not dead but at -10 hp" until you stabilize and/or start healing....hopefully.

 

[Trodax]

* Massive Damage = 20+ points of damage over the DR of the target's armor - forces FORT save (failure = dead; pass = left for dead/dying)

Are you sure a passed save is left for dead/dying? I thought a passed save (assuming they still have HP) and they could keep up the fight?

Nope. When you pass the save, you are considered LFD instead of being dead.

No, no, no. If you pass the save, nothing happens (well, you still lose the hp as normal of course). If you fail the save, you are immediately reduced to -10 hp and are dead. In this case you may spend a Fate point to instead be "left for dead".

This is on page 163 of the AE.

 

[DHRDawg]

By the way, a friend of mine has been talking up the Midnight setting quite a bit. I may have to check it out, but I'm sold on the Conan OGL Rules for my campaign rules-of-choice,.

I’ve only seen the books in the store (midnight) is it any good? would it be difficult to adapt some midnight adventures to Conan? or is it too setting specific?
anything in the midnight setting a good Cimmerian DM could raid

Midnight is a good setting. Basically it'd like Lord of the Rings but if Sauron has won the day. There was a great war of the gods ages ago and one god..Izrador the god of evil and all that's bad :O fell to the earth, in doing so the heavens were closed off to the world. No more gods for the lands except for...yeah you guessed it the bad one.

So Izrador has now awakened, and has sent hordes of orcs to destroy the elves, his priests; Legates (the only priests in the game) have taken control of the human lands, the dwarves are all but over-run by orcs. The land is bleak of hope.

The players must manage in a world where it's illegal by punishment of death, to carry weapons, deal in magics, be an elf, and a dwarf.

There are casters in the world called Channelers, who use a spell point system. They are no where near as powerful as "regular" D&D wizards, but cast some of the same spells. The real powerful spells require feats that you can't get until you are higher up in levels.

The combat system for the Conan game sounds like it would mesh very well the bleak and grim world of Midight. As a matter of fact from the sounds of it, I would've loved to have the Conan combat rules at the beginning of my Midnight campaign.

The adventures, they only have two published thus far one in print one in pdf, is sorta a adventure from one side of the world to the other. It's very setting specific. It deals with elven nation heavily.

But from the sounds of it, Conan OGL has got me hooked! I might hang up my Midnight books for the time being and have to get the Conan books. Granted not just for the cool Combat system but the world setting is something I've been wanting to run for a while now.

 

[Sutek]

Ah...duh. It's the FP expenditure that puts you LFD after failure of the Massive save.

 

[Raven Blackwell]

I think the feel of Midnight is too different from Conan. I really got a Lord of the Rings fantasy feel as opposed to a Howard Sword and Sorcery feel.

Of course you did. Take a good look at supplement that is called City of Shadow [I think]- a lot of that architecture is nearly identical to Minas Tirith, but now in the hands of the minions of Shadow. Midnight is more or less Middle Earth if Sauron won the War of the Ring.

Raven

 

[Seeker]

I think the difference between Conan and Standard D+D is:

D+D is a very good set of rules for GENERAL fantasy Role Playing not necessarily tuned for a particular world.

The Conan Rules are the D+D rules optimised for a sword and Sorcery type setting.

IMHO Mongoose did a very good job with Conan.

When D+D first came out, I liked the rules but wanted a good S+S world.

I found to be Dragons Lords of Melnibome to be a good world. The setting suggested particular customisations of the D+D rules eg classes like Viking type Sea Raiders.

I then went back to the rules and bought supplements from Mongoose and Alderac to customise my D+D rules but it still didn't feel INTEGRATED.

Now rather than build up my campaign using D+D components, I can buy Conan stuff based on D+D rules, with a great world and supplements CUSTOMISED and INTEGRATED with the setting.

I now have my Viking type Sea raider (A Sea Wolf from VANAHEIM), rules for Sea battles and an excellent world background all from the same company and game. I don't need to customise any more.

Hope this helps

 

[Altantean DM]

I may have to check it out, but I'm sold on the Conan OGL Rules for my campaign rules-of-choice, even though I'm not using the standard Hyborian setting.

Funny you should say that. I'm writing my own Atlantis game. Well, I'm writing up a campaign primer at any rate. I'll be using the Conan RPG rules as the base. Since it's a psionic setting, I'm using D&D psionics as well, from the Expanded Psionics Handbook.

The campaign has the look of Conan, but the feel of Star Wars.

 

[Diabolus]

Psionics scare me. I have a D&D campaign and relented, allowing Psionics. The Psion could utterly destroy everyone and everything she encountered from level one up and the telepathic pet rock with ectoplasmic legs was just a royal nuisance. I was elated when she was finally pulped.

That said, I hope your Atlantean campaign goes well!

 

[Dave45]

I recently picked up the book Legend of Kern, Volume 1: Blood of Wolves by Loren L. Coleman and got really inspired by the book. quote]

Now a question for you: Is this book worth picking up? From your comments, it seems like you enjoyed it. I've been eyeing this series for a while, but was waiting to hear some reviews first. Have you read the Robert E Howard stories? How does it compare? (Other than not starring Conan, I mean) Does it have the same tone as the REH stories? Is it written for a more mature audience than your usual fantasy novel? Any comments would be appreciated.

 

[VincentDarlage]

Now a question for you: Is this book worth picking up? From your comments, it seems like you enjoyed it. I've been eyeing this series for a while, but was waiting to hear some reviews first. Have you read the Robert E Howard stories? How does it compare? (Other than not starring Conan, I mean) Does it have the same tone as the REH stories? Is it written for a more mature audience than your usual fantasy novel? Any comments would be appreciated.

I rather disliked it. Most of the characters were just names with nothing else distinctive about them. However, the worst thing about the book was the writing. I found the writing style to be jarring. A good portion of the sentences are just sentence fragments. That works fine in dialogue - people do speak in fragments - but it does not work so well in narrative. Here is a sample sentence from page 70: "And its stores."

Just like how Roland Green continually uses and over-uses words such as "wit", "witling," "witless" and other forms of the word "wit," Coleman over-uses the sentence fragment until the story just becomes jarring to read. Open it to almost any page and one or two sentence fragments can be found, or so it seemed to me.

 

[GregLynch]

Just like how Roland Green continually uses and over-uses words such as "wit", "witling," "witless" and other forms of the word "wit,"

I'm glad to know I'm not the only person who was driven to distraction by that. Every single page and 'wit' was in there somewhere. Waiting. Lurking. I came to dread it.

 

[VincentDarlage]

It drove me nuts! I actually counted how many times he used the word "wit" in one of his Conan novels. I think it was a 350 page book (approx.), and he used the word over 380 times!

To this day, I still wince when I see the word in other novels because of his abuse of the word.

Well, the Coleman novels have driven me to distraction with the over-use of sentence fragments. He often just uses a name as an entire sentence, like on page 110: Brig Tall-Wood. That was a sentence for Coleman. On page 13 he uses this as a sentence: Sharp and direct. That is not a sentence!

Shoot, on page 5 he makes an entire paragraph out of two fragments:

And the amber yellow eyes so few would look into. Night eyes.

That was a paragraph! The top of page 6 starts out with a fragment: Wolf eyes.

Anyway, that drove me nuts about the Kern novel - just like "wit" drove me nuts about Green's novels.

 

[Dave45]

Thanks guys. I knew the new books wouldn't compare with REH, but I had high hopes. I appreciate the feedback. I think I'll pass on the "Age of Conan" for now.

 

[Trodax]

I thought Blood of Wolves was a decent read, at least good enough that I'll probably be getting the sequel. It wasn't Howard, for sure, but it had a close enough Hyborian Age-feel for me to accept it (at least there were no healing spells, Drow Elves or benevolent Gods appearing :wink: ).

And I must admit, I didn’t notice those fragmented sentences Vincent mentioned. (I’m not a writer myself, so I may not be as language-observant.) If I reread the book now, though, they would probably bug the hell out of me…

 

[VincentDarlage]

I thought I would go ahead and give the second one a try despite the horrible writing style of the first (too many sentence fragments) but had to stop when the very first paragraph had three sentence fragments attached to it.

His writing style is just too jarring for me to enjoy. I understand how an author might use a fragment for emphasis, but on every page?

(On a side note, whoever drew the map for these books went a bit nuts with the mountains. For example, Howard described the landscape of Khauran very clearly - and it has no mountains. Yet their cartographer drew mountains.)

 

[Altantean DM]

Psionics scare me. I have a D&D campaign and relented, allowing Psionics. The Psion could utterly destroy everyone and everything she encountered from level one up and the telepathic pet rock with ectoplasmic legs was just a royal nuisance. I was elated when she was finally pulped.

That said, I hope your Atlantean campaign goes well!

Thanks. The rules about psionics are simple to understand. First of all, a psion can not manifest above his or her own manifester level. Second of all, certain feats require psionic focus to work. Lastly, make sure your psion player is keeping track of his or her power points.

Psions are balanced for 4 encounters per a day. I usually rarely have combat in my games, following the advice in BESM d20. So, of course they will dominate and "go nova" when you have less than 4 encounters per day. More than that, and they are just as effective as a commoner.

 

[Jason Durall]

I thought I would go ahead and give the second one a try ...

Is the second one out already? I hadn't seen it in stores yet, though I was similarly disappointed with the first one. I think I was a bit more generous with it than most folks have been, only because compared to most pastiches, I did not feel overly offended the way they make me.

I wrote a mini-review of it for the Conan comics mailing list, following:

_________________________

I read the first of them ('Blood of Wolves') and was not overly impressed, but did not dislike it outright.

The author got a proper Cimmerian feel for some of it, but kept breaking it with elements like the main character himself, who is something of a freak. I found it hard to imagine how a superstitious people like the Cimmerians would put up with an albinoid, cold-blooded outsider like Kern for so long, even with the chieftain's protection.

It rapidly turns into an "outsider finds respect in the eyes of his people" story, with Kern leading his countrymen in a vengeance trail against Vanir raiders led by a strange race of what seem to be half-frost giants, clearly related to the hero. It's better than most of the pastiches, but the less-heroic main character (he begins quite ineffectual and by the end of the book is he a challenging warrior) and the 'ragtag band' element to his pack seem a bit cliched. Additionally, an inordinate amount of time is spent with the tiny details of life in an arctic clime, such as warding off frostbite, lack of food, etc., elements most heroic fantasy fiction glosses over. I actually appreciated the nods to some grounding in realism, but after a while, it became almost tedious.

Some of the supporting cast were good, while others seemed a bit out of place, including a black scholar from Conan's Aquilionian court, freed from captivity by the Vanir. Though a point is made of his oddness to the Cimmerians, it seems to be dropped shortly after his appearance, while I imagine that such a figure would gain considerable attention adventuring in Cimmeria, where the average folk have seen few outsiders. Occasionally, an odd details shows up, like a Cimmerian warrior who specializes in the pike - a strange weapon for one of them. Each time it was mentioned, I kept thinking "Why isn't it just a long spear"?

There were some humorous elements, such as a scene where the characters all comment that their exploits will likely just be attributed to Conan, which, while poking fun at our favorite son of Cimmeria, took me right out of the novel itself.

So, compared to Howard, I'd give it failing marks, but compared to the other pastiches, I'd say it stands up with some of the better ones and is certainly much more Hyborian in feel than many of them.

 

[Bregales]

I rather disliked it. Most of the characters were just names with nothing else distinctive about them. However, the worst thing about the book was the writing. I found the writing style to be jarring. A good portion of the sentences are just sentence fragments. That works fine in dialogue - people do speak in fragments - but it does not work so well in narrative. Here is a sample sentence from page 70: "And its stores."

Just like how Roland Green continually uses and over-uses words such as "wit", "witling," "witless" and other forms of the word "wit," Coleman over-uses the sentence fragment until the story just becomes jarring to read. Open it to almost any page and one or two sentence fragments can be found, or so it seemed to me.

Thanks, I'm definitely staying away from this then. Years ago a friend lent me Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and I nearly broke his heart when I said I hated it. Jordan just used the word just like just 18 times a page just about. :roll: I can't stand poor, lazy writing styles, and with this I lump in Thomas Harris' abysmal Hannibal (loved Red Dradgon & Silence of the Lambs, was sickened by this piece of dirt). :roll:

 

[Bregales]

I responded to Mr. Darlage's post, and didn't mention anything to the heart of this thread. Well, I'll try here: I believe it'd be fair to say that you could potentially run the game with only the Atlantean Edition (AE) rulebook. It has all the basic information both GM and players would need. it has a section near the back of the book describing the lands of the Hyborian World, similar to information on the character races section in the beginning of the book where you make up characters.

Having said that, the book that is really useful to getting into the campaign is the sourcebook The Road of Kings, the world gazetter which goes into more detail the various lands of the Hyborian world. It's very nicely written by said Mr. Darlage, primarily drawing upon the stories & characters by R.E. Howard but also later pastiches as well. Now, as the GM for my group, I've tried to buy every release for this game. Despite formatting errors, occasional oversights, poor proofreading, the actual game itself is wonderful and richly researched and resourced in the subsequent supplements which have and continue to come out. You've already read how combat is more lethal, is grittier and certainly meatier than OGL d20. Sorcery is very different, although IMHO I'd recommend not allowing players to play a scholar, though others will disagree.

Anyway, the idea behind the game is to play it fast and loose without worrying over bookeeping ("Did we get 29 coppers from the goblin or just 26?"), play more for the carpe diem spirit than bogged in a quagmire of a quest which might be found in a Middle Earth type of setting. I'd really recommend the GM start a game en medias res as often as possible, fast & furious play. Keep 'em playing, fighting, looting & loving, rather than solving logic puzzles. & Don't let 'em forget their lives could be severed by any cut at any time. That's my idea behind the Conan game.

Hope this helps. :twisted: