Negative Racial attributes

[Sutek]

LotR discussions frequently have an eruption of someone complaining about Tokien's depiction of dark skin equalling evil, and white skin equalling good.

Yeah...I used to frequent there too. In Tolkien's case, he was writing everything from a symbolic perspective in that dark equals evil and light equals good. He even included the sympathetic bit here and there stating that dark skinned or not, these were still men and just as much so as any man west of Modor. That was a theme too.

In this case, it's even less of a big deal because it's just a single value. Don't like it - change it. It doesn't mean it's "racist" or "prejudicial" even regarding the time and place in which REH wrote the stories.

 

[S'mon]

Personally in my homebrew sword & sorcery world I don't use human racial attribute mods for PCs, for one thing they do weird things to Point Buy; a +2/-2 can be worth another 6 points if you use the +2 to boost an already-good stat.
I kept the racial stat mods for my OGL Conan game, I agree that in principle racial differentiaon fits the setting well, but it does mean that the system strongly favours min-maxing with all Cimmerians being STR 20 barbarians at first level. I kinda think the 1e approach of using race(& sex) based minimum & maximum scores is possibly a better way to do it, eg Cimmerians minimum STR 6 max INT 16; that lets you play a smart Cimmerian without making a deliberately sub-optimal build, the racial mods effectively cap Cimmerian INT at _12_ if you want a system-optimal PC.
Likewise if you wanted you could say that the 3-18 range was the standard for human male characters and cap female characters at eg maximum STR 16 minimum CON 6 minimum WIS 6 minimum CHA 6, or whatever you think reasonable - a problem with this approach is that maximum caps affect PCs far more than minimums do, so they can seem unfairly discriminatory. I know when I (and other players, male & female) make female Fighter-type PCs, I keep their STR at first level to 16, though, even though that might not be totally min-maxy they're still perfectly viable and it keeps them within my/our comfort zone of suspension-of-disbelief. I have enough trouble with the idea of STR-20 human male Cimmerians, STR-20 human female Cimmerians even worse IMO.

 

[S'mon]

(I prefer my female Fighter PCS to physically resemble Red Sonja or Xena types, rather than Ukrainian weightlifters, in my mind' eye. And GMs running realistic-type campaigns get kinda snooty when your 90-lb female elf PC has STR 18...)

 

[The King]

I kept the racial stat mods for my OGL Conan game, I agree that in principle racial differentiaon fits the setting well, but it does mean that the system strongly favours min-maxing with all Cimmerians being STR 20 barbarians at first level. I kinda think the 1e approach of using race(& sex) based minimum & maximum scores is possibly a better way to do it, eg Cimmerians minimum STR 6 max INT 16; that lets you play a smart Cimmerian without making a deliberately sub-optimal build, the racial mods effectively cap Cimmerian INT at _12_ if you want a system-optimal PC.

There was exactly the same problem in the older version of the RPG Stormbringer (by Chaosium) where the Melniboneans were the superhuman race, the guys from Pan Tang weren't bad either and the remaining races (nations) had some + and -. Then another version called Elric was published (with a somewhat modified system) and all human races were egal and nobody could play Melniboneans anymore.
Of course this isn't the D20 system and there is no classes, only skills and professions as an indicator stating which skills you know best.
In any case there are excellent rules for summoning (demons and elemental powers) as the caster determines himself the kind of creature he wants to summon (as well as its powers).

 

[S'mon]

I have Stormbringer - cool BRP game! Pity the d20 Dragon Lords of Melnibone was apparently rubbish.

 

[The King]

I have Stormbringer - cool BRP game! Pity the d20 Dragon Lords of Melnibone was apparently rubbish.

Not that rubbish. Moreover you can adapt it to the Conan setting (the monsters there do make excellent critters for the Hyborian world.