Jason Durall
Mongoose
It's late on a Saturday, the wife is out with her parents seeing a film, and my mind is dwelling on things Conan, at the same time I'm idly flipping through world news. I've been writing something, and the phrase "modern Stygia" came up, as opposed to "old Stygia". For some reason, those two words together just made me crack up.
The odd juxtaposition makes me wonder, though, what the Hyborian world would have been like had the supposed cataclysm not reshaped everything and eliminated all but race memories of the ancient Hyborian cultures? What if the Hyborian Age had been allowed to evolve into a world very much like our own? What would that world be like today? What elements of history would there be? Would magic still be present in the world?
For some reason, I imagine actual Westerns set in the Pictish Wilderness, and events similar to World War II occuring in the central Hyborian continent. Translating the turmoil of the Middle East to Shem, Pelishtia, and Stygia, for example, is a natural, though the different cultures in close proximity add new wrinkles to that situation. Oddly enough, Atlantis is still a strange mystery to the modern Hyborian world. For some reason, as well, I imagine Aquilonian G-Men trying to stomp out the lucrative Zamoran lotus trade.
I don't know what to do with these idle thoughts, though it would seem to be a wonderful "other world" setting for modern-age games where you don't want to use our own geopolitical setting as background.
The odd juxtaposition makes me wonder, though, what the Hyborian world would have been like had the supposed cataclysm not reshaped everything and eliminated all but race memories of the ancient Hyborian cultures? What if the Hyborian Age had been allowed to evolve into a world very much like our own? What would that world be like today? What elements of history would there be? Would magic still be present in the world?
For some reason, I imagine actual Westerns set in the Pictish Wilderness, and events similar to World War II occuring in the central Hyborian continent. Translating the turmoil of the Middle East to Shem, Pelishtia, and Stygia, for example, is a natural, though the different cultures in close proximity add new wrinkles to that situation. Oddly enough, Atlantis is still a strange mystery to the modern Hyborian world. For some reason, as well, I imagine Aquilonian G-Men trying to stomp out the lucrative Zamoran lotus trade.
I don't know what to do with these idle thoughts, though it would seem to be a wonderful "other world" setting for modern-age games where you don't want to use our own geopolitical setting as background.
