Conan application thread

>Howard never had a big interest in expanding on these.
because he loved his mommy

Kek

Answer this man/or lady,if its a lady!

Not in the original Howard stories. The final chornological tale is Hour of the Dragon that ends with Conan marrying Zenobia and returning to his throne. That may have happened in one of the adaptions or continuation series after Howard shot himsself though.

>Question: Wasn't there a "final' Conan story in which Conan traveled to the New World and died there of old age?

No.

Has anyone played the new Conan RPG by Modiphius? I've read the books and it looks quite interesting but have not yet got to run it. Pity the release schedule is so far behind.

I never really understood the appeal of Conan, I've read several of the stories, A witch shall be born, tower of the elephant, scarlet citadel and the hour of the dragon (read the last two right after each other, big mistake, made them feel repetitive and a slog) and yet I find Conan to be the most boring character, I appreciate some aspects to them, such as the side characters but I always find Conan himself to be dull, uninteresting and never truly threatened (Oh look the villain don't kill him and instead imprison him/ leave him to die and he escapes, survives and comes back to slay them).The stories just seem to lose all tension around him as he never seems to be in any real peril and I find myself caring only about the side characters.
Could someone explain to me what makes Conan so beloved? I can appreciate them as good pulp fiction but nothing more, they fail to leave the same impact on me as say The Dying Earth, which I find far more intriguing.

>Pool of the Black One

Is that the one where those giants are dipping the captive pirates into a pool and it turns them into statues?

It's really great. The momentum system is awesome, and character creation feels really thematic and fun.

It's fun to watch Conan slay his way through the savage world he inhabits. That's about it.

>dull, uninteresting and never truly threatened
One of my favorite comic stories involves Conan leading an old man through a swamp full of poisonous snakes that are leaping out of the trees at them. Conan starts boasting that these snakes are tiny and he once fought a giant snake in a temple of Set... and then he shows off by bisecting a snake with his sword and the poison sac explodes and sprays him in the face, so he's blind until near the very end of the story.

It just seemed like a very PC moment.

Conan is full of PC moments

I think we sometimes fail to appreciate just how successful roleplaying games are in their ability to guide players along the same lines of thought as mythical heroes.

I find it fun in the same way that superhero comics are fun. You know there's no real danger, but its just plain fun. Its a romp. Conan being chad as fuck. Scantily clad men and women. The occasional bit of wit.

And then when Conan is back to being poor 2 days after his adventure, we can have a good laugh at him.

>I find it fun in the same way that superhero
>comics are fun

took the words right out of my mouth

>I can appreciate them as good pulp fiction but nothing more

Sometimes that's enough.

Conan being chad 1/2

Conan being chad 2/2

I would like the Lord of the Rings to be rewritten but with Aragorn being replaced by Conan.

>"What about second breakfast?"
>Conan likes this idea.

The People of the Black Circle, for taking place in not!India, being one of the earliest stories featuring a magician as some young dude looking for booty and with genuine human attachments rather than some wizard living isolated somewhere (although it also has that), and because Conan gets to go show off all the best aspects of his character.

Either that or Red Nails, but that would mostly be because we finally met another warrior who Conan respected and who could pull her own weight beside Conan - Valeria of the Red Brotherhood.

For me, it's the writing style more than anything. A general trend in American and English literature since the has been towards somethig called "beige prose" - keeping sentences and word choices simple and straightforward, heavy emphasis on active rather than passive voice, and basically trying to not show off the fact that you have access to a thesaurus.

Robert E. Howard was having NONE of that shit. He was a master of "purple prose", the embracing of the fact that English is one of the most descriptive of language. Anyone else writing would have said that Conan traveled the world. But not Howard. Howard let us know that Conan tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

kek

BEGONE
THOT

Cimmerian blood grants a capacity for smug far beyond the comprehension of civilized men

I imagine he's giving her the finger in that last panel

What style of game did you go for? Campaign or episodic? How are you guys finding the transitory nature of gold and equipment?

It also looks like it's pretty easy to hit Renown 5, but maybe I'm misreading how it plays in practice.

barbaric bump

Damn, that might actually be a fanfic worth reading.

Damn right my dude.

Unsurprising as he's the #1 influence for the worlds oldest TTRPG.

Still fucking fantastic to read, regardless.

>prose
Howard had that mastery and depth of thought that only someone deeply depressed could. I still remember picking up one of his books expecting the writing to be old and quaint, then visualizing the cave that Conan was in better than anything I had imagined in years.

pretty much

His mother's untimely death was and remains a grievous loss to humanity.

yep

We've got a game going on the weekends right now. Me (Cimmerian) and a Hrykanian Kol Drogo expy are the sword, rest of the damn party is sorcery. Me and the Hyrkanian have already settled who has to kill which sorcerer when they get possessed by some outer dark horror.

Already had a scene where I had to track down the Vhendayan after he got massively traumatized while shapeshifted and ended up thinking he *was* a macaque. After I tracked him to the hole he was hiding in, the Hyrkanian bribed him to come out with sugar cubes and an animal handling check. So then the preist(?) of Mitra had to have a therapy session with a macaque so the Vhendayian could remember he was a human. Good times, good times.

Roll under is something that is hard to abide, but your fluff sounds great.

where should I begin with my complete collection of conan stories?

In order of release of course.

My group is having a blast with it, right from the beginning, which was a ridiculous Conan twist on “you all meet in an inn”.

How did that go?

I've only read The Death Lord of Thanza and really liked it, but immediately afterwards I heard it was among the worst of them. Do I just have poor taste?

They DID all meet at an inn in Khoraja, but they weren’t together and were drinking separately as mercenaries. A local guardsman comes in and without a word looks around and drops a heavy coin pouch filled with gold directly onto the floor of the inn and walks away without a word.
Everyone in the inn is confused at first, but then someone makes a move for it and another stops him. A fight breaks out which ends up involving the entire common room and gets a shitload of folks killed, with the PC’s taking sides with each other out of coincidence or just managing to survive the bloodbath.
After the fight they agree to divide the coin rather then get into a contest that would almost certainly put greater risk to their lives (as they can now see that the five of them are significantly more badass then the rest of the inn combined) and walk out with the coin.

Outside is waiting the Captain of the Guard who dropped the pouch who then asks them if they’d like to make three times the amount they just made “now that he knows who in that pisshole was actually worth hiring”.

Maybe, but once you read the other shit you’ll like it even more so you got a lot of reading to do user.

TARAMIS, Queen of Khauran, awakened from a dream-haunted slumber to a silence that seemed more like the stillness of nighted catacombs than the normal quiet of a sleeping place. She lay staring into the darkness, wondering why the candles in their golden candelabra had gone out. A flecking of stars marked a gold-barred casement that lent no illumination to the interior of the chamber. But as Taramis lay there, she became aware of a spot of radiance glowing in the darkness before her. She watched, puzzled. It grew and its intensity deepened as it expanded, a widening disk of lurid light hovering against the dark velvet hangings of the opposite wall. Taramis caught her breath, starting up to a sitting position. A dark object was visible in that circle of light—a human head.

In a sudden panic the queen opened her lips to cry out for her maids; then she checked herself. The glow was more lurid, the head more vividly limned. It was a woman's head, small, delicately molded, superbly poised, with a high-piled mass of lustrous black hair. The face grew distinct as she stared – and it was the sight of this face which froze the cry in Taramis's throat. The features were her own! She might have been looking into a mirror which subtly altered her reflection, lending it a tigerish gleam of eye, a vindictive curl of lip.

"Ishtar!" gasped Taramis. "I am bewitched!"

Appallingly, the apparition spoke, and its voice was like honeyed venom.

"Bewitched? No, sweet sister! Here is no sorcery."

>destined to be bear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a SMUG brow

Honestly? Just get an omnibus, check the premise and skip through, the read whatever catches your fancy.

>not really threatened

That depends tough. The fucking tyrannosaurus in Red Nails wasn't that peachy even for him. Neither when he got thrown in his own dungeon, or when he got in Narbonilus house.

Also conan IS the platonic ideal of pulp stories.. and as the other user said, the prose is too powerful to make him just another pulp hero. Not really something bizarre, it's what they say about REH in literature classes, seriously: the prose made him.

As a Veeky Forums fellow I'd add the worldbuilding. It's bizarre how much we still do it REH-style after a fucking century. Way, WAY more than JRRT-style: the hyborian age is the ultimate not!India (or not!Rome, not!Egypt....) world.

> it's what they say about REH in literature classes
Care to enlighten this STEM pleb?