The End Times

carandol

Mongoose
It seems to me, looking at figures for Medieval Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography
that Hyboria is very overpopulated for it's social and technological level. (e.g. according to The Road of Kings supplement, Aquilonia has a population of 25 million!) It's no wonder people are attempting to colonise the Pictish Lands. When Europe reached those levels, pressure was only relieved by the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and numerous famines.

I can imagine that in some countries, the people are living at the limit of the available food supply, and it will only take one poor harvest before mass starvation occurs, leading to peasants' revolts and the like (especially since many of the nobles seem to live in decadence at the expense of their subjects).

It could be that the Hyborian world is on the verge of the end times, and a dark age is about to fall. That would be an interesting, if rather bleak, campaign idea!
 
I think you will find that most of the demographics in the published Conan stuff don't make any sense. It is an aspect of the game you really have to work on yourself if those numbers end up important for you.
 
Yes, they are. Howard's The Hyborian Age, Part II essay says that after Conan's time the Picts and Hyrkanians will swallow up the continent and then a second great catyclism will rock the face of the landscape, transforming Hyboria into the face of Europe and the Black Kingdoms into Africa. Emerging from the Catyclism will be the peoples of early history, which he follows in development up through the early middle ages I believe.

Remember, Howard wrote most of this stuff before/during the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Most people believed the earth was only about 7 thousand years old. Howard's essays show the early thoughts that the world was much older than was previously thought in America, but he uses massive catyclisms to make continental developments happen in the span of a millenia or two instead of hundreds of millions of years.

If you can find a copy, get a hold of a book with The Hyborian Age, Part II and you'll get a kick out of what you read.
 
That essay is printed in the Conan the Roleplaying Game core rulebook, parts I & II (using the Lancer/Ace terminology for how they split it up).
 
Well, I did read that a while ago. I guess it was lurking in my subconscious! But post-holocaust Conan could be fun.

"The King of Aquilonia is dead. As barbarians ravish the lands, and the earth itself rises up in protest, a desperate few fight to save a fragment of civilisation from the coming darkness..."
 
carandol said:
Well, I did read that a while ago. I guess it was lurking in my subconscious! But post-holocaust Conan could be fun.

"The King of Aquilonia is dead. As barbarians ravish the lands, and the earth itself rises up in protest, a desperate few fight to save a fragment of civilisation from the coming darkness..."
Hey, give it another read, it's pretty interesting, and covers several centuries after Conan's time. The AE starts on page 232 (The Hyborian Age) dealing with the old Pre-Cataclysmic continent (of King Kull's time) and then the great cataclysm that re-shapes the continent into what eventually is the Hyboria of this game. The first full paragraph on page 237 begins the part on the downfall of the Hyborian Kingdoms.

Note the similarities between the fall of the Hyborian Kingdoms as the lands fall into chaos and emerge in early Earth history, but also notice how the Picts (especially Gorm) resemble Howard's earlier characters in the Kull stories...
 
The Middle Age is not a good example because it was more a declinie of the civilization compared to the ancient times.
It is said for instance that Darius, King of Persia, had about 1 million men to oppose the army of Alexander the great. While this is certainly an exageration this is far more than what any nobles could muster in the middle age where army were rather small in numbers.

In the middle age all the organizations from the ancient times and improved by the Romans, such as trade routes, health, supply, etc., had disappeared.

Health problem was such a plague that disease could eradicate a lot of people.
 
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