Let's Read TSR's Conan Role-Playing Game © 1985

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Creatures
Professor Ervin H. Roberts prefaces this section with the statement, "In my Hyborian studies, I have come across references to many creatures now extinct or dismissed as childish myth by the real world. I am convinced of the existence of these creatures and believe them to have been real foes of the inhabitants of Hyboria. The 'scientists' will not accept these views, I know. Facts! That is what they demand and believe in. Little do they understand the intuitive understanding of one's field--the knowledge that what one says is truly real." The section then proceeds with the conceit that the game terms and statistics are in fact the result of Professor Roberts' "system to equate the abilities of these creatures into mathematical formula."
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Conan versus Brylukas

The entries are succinct and give you all the information you need in a small block of statistics and a brief verbal description. I would have liked it better if there were at least a small black-and-white illustration for each entry, perhaps explained as a sketch by the professor of his impression of what the creature would have looked like. I also would have liked it if they made a note as to which story the creature came from so that a referee could easily reference the text before including the creature in an adventure. Handwritten notes in the margins are a nice touch, though. Here are some examples of what the entries look like:
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Next: Gods, Personalities, Cults and Magical Items, Ruins and Lore, and Miscellaneous (mainly poisons).
 
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The section on Gods is rather skimpy, but then again there isn't much material in the stories to draw from. Only a few of the gods of Hyboria get more coverage than "A Shemite god" or "A god worshiped by the Zembabweians." You get 32 entries in only two pages. The most notable entries are Asura, Atali, Crom, Jherbal Sag, and Set as they have the most useful detail. One upside to the scanty information available in the Robert E. Howard stories is you don't need to deal with persnickety players telling you you're wrong and that the priests of Tarim wore saffron--not scarlet, dammit!--robes. Since the section is so brief, here it is in its entirety:
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Next: Personalities (a bare handful of NPCs you might include in your game)
 
Personalities provides brief write-ups for Jelal Khan, Nestor, Taurus of Nemedia, Thoth-Amon, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, and Yara the Priest, should you want to include them in your game. Naturally if you're very familiar with the stories whence these characters came, you may want to fiddle with their stats to make them more in line with your interpretation.
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Valeria of the Red Brotherhood
This section barely takes more than two pages, so here it is in its entirety for your inquiring eyes:
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Valeria in name only. Fun fact: She is never called by her name in the movie.

Next: Cults and Magical Items, Ruins and Lore, and Miscellaneous, and that will wrap this up!
 
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I maintain that you can actually glean lots of useful information from REH stories...you just have to set the names straight (or recognize them, if they haven't been changed). Like Tortuga, or Yama, and so on:smile:.
 
Cults and Magical Items is, as with so much of the setting book, very brief, filling only two pages. Again, most of the information drawn from the Conan stories is sparse as Robert E. Howard wisely left a lot of blanks to fill in later or to let the reader fill in with his or her own imagination. That reminds me of the Star Wars thread, inasmuch as I find the more the filmmakers fill in the blank spots from the original movies, the more constricted and the less interesting the setting becomes. Anyway, I'll just provide the actual content for you to peruse. I do like how they earlier used Blinding Dust as a spell a character might seek out.
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I'm of two minds about the handwritten notes in the margin. On the plus side, they add to the pretense that this is a collection of "unpublished notes and translations of Hyborian documents," but on the other hand I think I would find it annoying to have to refer to them when I'm looking for a piece of information. Most likely I'd write out all the relevant data on a 3x5 card so it's at my fingertips during a gane session.

Ruins and Lore
There's not a lot to say about this section either; it's as sketchy as the earlier paragraphs about various towns and rivers. At least what little is provided is evocative and should inspire you to extrapolate and create a scenario based on the kernel provided.
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Miscellaneous, as the section title indicates, covers items that didn't belong to the earlier categories.
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One good thing about the setting book is the way it is divided into locations, creatures, personalities, and so on. If I want to create a scenario of my own and don't have any real ideas, I can just turn to a section, drop my finger somewhere on the page, and see what it inspires. For instance, maybe my fingertip lands on "Baboon Demon of Set"--now I just need to figure out what evil wizard summons them, where, and why. I would maybe flip to the Gods section and randomly select a god the wizard is serving, but we already have Set. Next I flip to The Lands of Hyboria and discover Pictland will be the location. Since the description of the baboon demons says they're summoned to "hunt down people or items," I turn to Cults and Magical Items and learn that an evil Stygian (since Stygians worship Set) wizard-priest has summoned baboon demons to retrieve a much-desired Book of Skelos that was lost when savage Picts ambushed and slaughtered a caravan by which a the wizard-priest's acolytes were traveling to Zingara to board a ship bound for Stygia. Perhaps our PCs will find themselves aboard that ship when the baboon demons arrive, but there are any number of other ways to embroil them in the scenario: a rival sorcerer could hire them to obtain the same Book of Skelos, an group of Aquilonian merchants might offer a reward for guarding the next caravan on the same route, the PCs might be Barachan pirates who attempt to seize the ship en route to Stygia, and so on.

Well, that's the whole of the game. I wouldn't mind playing it sometime. The rules are pretty simple but I'd likely photocopy some of the charts and make myself a referee screen with some nice John Buscema artwork on the player-facing side, maybe with a map of the Hyborian world as well. Then again, I might instead shrug off the licensed setting and just use it for inspiration for a human-PCs-only game set in Precataclysmic Mu or something along those lines using these rules.

Now I need to decide what to read and post about next! :hehe:
 
I'm coming to this "Let's Read" very late but I just wanted to say a big thank you for it Dumarest!

I own the boxed set from back in the day and chipped in to say "do it!" when ZeFRS was being put together (yep, I'm pretty old!). This thread has got me fired up to run the game against, so thanks again.
 
Dumarest Dumarest We miss you. Stop by and say,
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