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Monolith actually did get the original Conan into retail but from all accounts it was disastrous. Their games contain a LOT of minis for the price, so with all the middle man cuts, from what I heard Conan was losing money on every retail sale. Which is why they've gone only KS or direct to consumer.
 
Monolith actually did get the original Conan into retail but from all accounts it was disastrous. Their games contain a LOT of minis for the price, so with all the middle man cuts, from what I heard Conan was losing money on every retail sale. Which is why they've gone only KS or direct to consumer.
The retailer near me had the Black Dragons at 50% off and I foolishly passed just because I didn't own the base game at the time....
 
The basics of the system for me for the heroes side is that it is all about balancing and pacing your actions.

You have so much energy, you use energy for your actions, and you can use energy for rerolls, and you regain energy each turn. You can blow a ton of energy all in one turn, but if you do, you won't be able to do much in your next turn. Also your energy is used for defensive actions. So blow through too much and you might be in trouble on the villain turn.

You can also skip a turn to restore more energy, taking a quick breather. You will usually need to do this occasionally, because you will generally need to do more each turn than you can do with just the energy you get from a standard refresh.

Basically, it makes you stop and think about what you are going to do, and how much you do, because you can't go all out every turn.

And then the villain side of the board is also interesting, but in a different way. Each type of figure you have has a tile, they are all in a row called the river. The further to the right a tile is, the more expensive it is to use (you also have energy). When you activate the tile you get to activate all the enemies of that type on the board., then you take that tile and put it at the far right of the river, and scoot all the other tiles left to make room for it.

So you will generally rotate which enemies you are using, but if you REALLY need to use an enemy again, you can pay for it with increased energy.

Your energy is also used for rerolls/defensive actions.

I really like the system overall.

(EDIT: Also, I've only played the Batman one, so there might be some things that are a bit different about the Conan one that I don't know).
 
The Conan version is slightly simpler in that it doesn’t have the Thought action and the scenarios are usually more straightforward. Oh and the Conan rulebook is a lot more user friendly. But otherwise it is essentially the same game.

The system is fast paced and cinematic. Rather than having lots of equipment and abilities, the core of the game is from the management of energy gems. These are used to do actions and also to track damage.

For the heroes, you spend each energy gem to roll one dice of a colour specified by your hero for that action. For example, Conan rolls more powerful red dice for melee where Shevatas rolls orange dice. You can spend gems for anyway you want. So 3 gems can be 3 1d hits or 1 3d hit.

You recover a number of gems per round or can rest a round (miss a go) to get more back. Timing these rests is crucial. You can have amazing cinematic turns but you need to time them just right.

I also like how the heroes don’t have turns. They can spend gems in any order as between themselves as they want. Conan can kick in a door, let Shevatas roll in and throw knives to clear his way, and then Conan can charge in with a big swing.

The overlord side is different in terms of energy management. Each NPC or NPC group is placed on a river. You spend gems to activate up to 2 of these each turn. The one of the start of the river costs 1 gem and they get more expensive down the river. When you activate an NPC or group, it slides to the back of the river and everything else slides forward and becomes 1 gem cheaper.

As with the heroes, overlords can have amazing turns as they can activate any 2 NPCs they want, including powerful NPCs and monsters. However, you need to time it right as activating an NPC too often makes it more expensive.

The above results in players focussing more on the board and the action than most other dice chucking games of this type, which tend to over utilise text heavy abilities for special effects.
 
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I love Conan but it doesn’t seem very REH to me. It must not be my type of game. Sort of like that Exiles video game that i didn’t think fit the source material very well either. I appreciate the responses though.
 
Each to their own. I am not sure what didn’t feel REH to you. The narrative of the scenarios is somewhat mixed in that they use characters and situations in ways inconsistent with canon. Mostly that’s to extend the cast beyond Conan and the stories already told.

The cast though is a great reflection of how they appear in REH work and the range of characters and locations is fabulous.

From an action perspective, I find the gameplay feels the most REH in terms of how it is both cinematic and gritty. I love how turns flow in a dynamic fashion unlike most turn based skirmish games, and the face paced varied action often reminds me of REH’s excellent descriptions.
 
I’ve very particular about any media that tries to emulate that source material. For example, I give the Modiphius game a lot of crap for how it handles REH. It’s a joke around here that’s been memed to death but I never liked it. I find a lot of times the supernatural elements are pushed way too much and that goes for everything, comics, games, etc.
 
I love Conan but it doesn’t seem very REH to me. It must not be my type of game. Sort of like that Exiles video game that i didn’t think fit the source material very well either. I appreciate the responses though.
I was right there with you and to say I was highly skeptical of Conan Exiles based on reviews is an understatement. I bought it on deep discount after a friend asked me to give it a chance and, after giving it a try, decided to make a private friends-only server. It turns out the Mrs and I really enjoyed Exiles, clocking in about 200 hours each.

The lore was actually really cool. While everyone else was crafting, hunting for thralls, and building bases I was obsessively exploring the Exiled Lands looking for more snippets of lore. That led me to find out there is a main story discovered on lore stones and journal entries scattered around the map. I won't say anything else other than that the main quest is pretty bitchin' but half the fun was finding it for myself. I was disappointed that no one else playing with me cared about the lore but the gameplay was good enough to keep everyone hooked for a while.

My only complaint is that the game performs poorly on older, weaker PCs. Once GPU prices normalize and we buy the Mrs a new PC we plan to rejoin Exiles.
 
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I’ve very particular about any media that tries to emulate that source material. For example, I give the Modiphius game a lot of crap for how it handles REH. It’s a joke around here that’s been memed to death but I never liked it. I find a lot of times the supernatural elements are pushed way too much and that goes for everything, comics, games, etc.
I don’t set the bar so high but each to their own :smile: The game is a genuine attempt to capture REH’s feeling and IMO a good amount of success. I recognise that you can’t always be 100% accurate when changing an IP to such a different medium, so the intent and care taken by the creator is of value to me too. There is certainly no better Conan game on the market and I am happy to get one that gets this close to the mark.

As for Exiles, I think the changes in lore and tone are notably much bigger than with Monolith’s Conan.
 
Oh, I can agree with the intent. The execution is usually where the problems happen. I thought Vincent Darlage did a really good job writing for Mongoose when they published their RPG, but d20 was not the best fit for Conan.
 
Agree regarding Conan d20.

The thing with lore is that it’s best to just stick with the original source - REH. For a board game, my main concern is that the mechanics, art, and components are good as these are new things that REH didn’t have a hand in. Monolith’s Conan does a good job with all three.
 
Oh, I can agree with the intent. The execution is usually where the problems happen. I thought Vincent Darlage did a really good job writing for Mongoose when they published their RPG, but d20 was not the best fit for Conan.
Yeah I felt the same way. Loved the writing and how they handled the lore. We still played the hell out of it even though I strongly dislike 3x/d20. I ran or participated in 4 campaigns, all of them 6+ months long with frequent sessions. At the time d20 was the main thing people were playing but I would never choose that to run Conan today when there are so many excellent pulpy systems out there.
 
Does anyone have any famiarity with a SciFi game called Hostile? It's Cepheus engine and looks interesting, but I'd like to hear about people's experiences with it
 
I finally picked up a copy of WFRP4E from Cubicle7. Despite having heard a lot of negative things about Advantage and being fiddly, I am liking it so far. After my disappointment with 3E, I waited a while before I jumped in. Still have all the 1E & 2E stuff too.
 
I finally picked up a copy of WFRP4E from Cubicle7. Despite having heard a lot of negative things about Advantage and being fiddly, I am liking it so far. After my disappointment with 3E, I waited a while before I jumped in. Still have all the 1E & 2E stuff too.

I do like it, but I do find it a bit overly fiddly, for a lack of a better term. There are some elements that are used that I feel muddy the clarity of the mechanics. That said, I'd definitely play it, I think it has a lot of potential.
 
I got a boardgame based on Bulgarian mythology and folklore. The art is great and the research is quite decent.

I actually made an "unpacking video" that I might be able to post for you, I actually recorded it in English...after I edit it (but don't expect the editing to be quick, the raw material is around 40 minutes of video:shade:)!
 
I do like it, but I do find it a bit overly fiddly, for a lack of a better term. There are some elements that are used that I feel muddy the clarity of the mechanics. That said, I'd definitely play it, I think it has a lot of potential.
Agreed! I kinda like how they changed up careers and included standards of living and downtime. Although to be fair, the adventurers in my games don’t tend to receive a lot of downtime. It’s a trend in games that I have found to be counter productive to keeping things moving, personally. I usually only use it when I take a break from running one game to try out another, and don’t invest a whole lot of RP time on.
 
Agreed! I kinda like how they changed up careers and included standards of living and downtime. Although to be fair, the adventurers in my games don’t tend to receive a lot of downtime. It’s a trend in games that I have found to be counter productive to keeping things moving, personally. I usually only use it when I take a break from running one game to try out another, and don’t invest a whole lot of RP time on.
Agreed, I find the whole trend to have these down time activities fascinating but I'm not sure players are embracing it, yet. I've done something similar off and on over the decades but never really gave it a standardized name. Warhammer, Runequest and Savage Worlds to name three all have some sort of down time or in between adventurers mechanics now.

It's fascinating and I think it's a good idea because it gives GMs and players more fuel to think outside the box on what they can do with an rpg. Frequently I find myself kinda gobsmacked at the how some people react to ideas that aren't in the written in an rpgs rules mechanics. It feels like the newer generations of gamers are more narrowly rigid in how they approach and play an rpg.

Where as before or in the early days as long as we explained clearly what the mechanic did and were consistent in how we applied it, the sky was the limit. Didn't mean that we didn't come up with bad ideas or cumbersome ideas, but at least we most of us back then didn't freak out when someone at their game dropped a rule/mechanic/idea that we'd never heard of or that wasn't in the rulebooks. lol.
 
Agreed, I find the whole trend to have these down time activities fascinating but I'm not sure players are embracing it, yet. I've done something similar off and on over the decades but never really gave it a standardized name. Warhammer, Runequest and Savage Worlds to name three all have some sort of down time or in between adventurers mechanics now.

It's fascinating and I think it's a good idea because it gives GMs and players more fuel to think outside the box on what they can do with an rpg. Frequently I find myself kinda gobsmacked at the how some people react to ideas that aren't in the written in an rpgs rules mechanics. It feels like the newer generations of gamers are more narrowly rigid in how they approach and play an rpg.

Where as before or in the early days as long as we explained clearly what the mechanic did and were consistent in how we applied it, the sky was the limit. Didn't mean that we didn't come up with bad ideas or cumbersome ideas, but at least we most of us back then didn't freak out when someone at their game dropped a rule/mechanic/idea that we'd never heard of or that wasn't in the rulebooks. lol.
Just for a tiny clarification... RQ has had downtime character advancement since 1978... There was also the Midkemia Press Cities supplement that had downtime rules.

Glad more games are getting downtime rules.
 
I found an ad on Farcebook Market for the Complete Basic Set of the James Bond 007 Role Playing Game™ for $25 bucks plus shipping. I already own a couple of copies, but this one came with both 10 siders and six siders and the guy said nothing was missing.

It just got here and the package was wrapped in brown craft paper and looked a little crunked on one or two of the corners. I figured as long as the book and dice were okay it was no biggie. After ripping through the paper, I found one of those media envelopes taped up nice and snug. After hacking through that I found more craft paper wrapping around the actual game box. I got that open and low and behold, a practically brand new, undamaged game box! No nicks dents or tears!

I opened it up and everything inside looks brand new! The pages of the rulebook haven't been creased or stained from usage, and the dice look like they're fresh from the factory. This one may go on the shelf as a collector's copy. Really happy with the purchase!
 
Just for a tiny clarification... RQ has had downtime character advancement since 1978... There was also the Midkemia Press Cities supplement that had downtime rules.

Glad more games are getting downtime rules.
While I owned both at the time, I don't recall the downtime activities as explained as "downtime" activities. I thought the old Midkemia Press Cities (I had the black and white version not the later color version that Chaosium released), activities was actually just encounters and such that are a part of normal game play? I could be miss-recalling it as been many decades after all.
 
I was "bidding" on an item from Facebook, when the other bidder messaged me to say he'd give me his copy, gratis, if I let him get the signed one we were bidding on. Done and done! This is a grail-tier item for me. Never thought I'd lay my hands on one, let alone for free. Gristlegrim Dungeon for T&T.

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While I owned both at the time, I don't recall the downtime activities as explained as "downtime" activities. I thought the old Midkemia Press Cities (I had the black and white version not the later color version that Chaosium released), activities was actually just encounters and such that are a part of normal game play? I could be miss-recalling it as been many decades after all.
Look at the "Character Catch Up" section of Cities. Definitely non-adventure play.

RuneQuest has had skill training outside of adventure from 1st edition.
 
:heart: Got a link?
Sure, but you might need Google Translate or something...


Sorry, I don't think an English-language version exists:thumbsup:.
 
I may make a form-fillable sheet for 2E as well, since there doesn't seem to be one available yet.
 
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