I just finished reading the first three books from Coleman (The Legend of Kern). I had not read the posts here (thank God!) before reading the books. I was a bit surprised at how harsh the reviews were....
After reflecting on the story and reading the threads, I felt the trilogy probably was too long. It could have easily been condensed down to one book. The second book dragged out and basically could have been summarized. Not the best piece of literature but I certainly feel it could give the Dragonlance (non-Hickman/Weiss)-Forgotten Realms stuff a run for their money. I give them credit for tackling a tough topic though. Writing three books about barbarians cannot be an easy task. Anyways...did not want to open up the can of worms on anyone's opinion of the series since there is plenty of that out there.
I wanted to highlight some positives that I have not seen on any of the posts. This forum is about Conan the RPG. With that in mind, I strongly would recommend anyone reading this Trilogy if they ever intended on running a Cimmerian adventure or campaign.
I have not found any material that gives as much background on Cimmeria culture, flora, fauna, or geography as the Kern series. The information on the clans were worth the price of admission. I also thought there were several interesting NPC's worthy of consideration in the game (Kern, Ros-Crana, Old Finn, Lodur, to name a few...).
The advent of the Ymirish have added a new and exciting sub-race to my game along with more detail of the Frost Giants themselves. Love the descriptions of Grimnar! Dire Wolves, Giant Spiders, Sabre Tooth Tigers, Wyverns, and Yeti round out some potential Northern adversaries that I will be expanding on.
Kern reminded me in many ways of Elric. I was surprised no one else picked up on that or I just may be way off base there.
Again, I will probably be mapping many of these Cimmerians out as NPC's (unless someone has already taken the time!).
HLD