Conan Rpg

Rating:
Summary: Conan done right
Review: Finally, someone has done the Hyborian Age justice. Yes, here are typos. Ok, lots of mistakes actually, but nothing critical and the fabulous online support on the Mongoose.com site makes up for it. I'm sure the second printing won't be all chewed up.

Thats the bad... heres the good...

This book captures Howards Hyborian Age and this work drips with flavor. The D20 rule tweaks in this OGL game are excellent. The artwork is amazing! Best of all, this book is PACKED with information.

The $50 price tag is steep, especially considering the amount of mistakes inside the book, but it was worth every penny. I LOVE this book and so far the only supporting book "Scrolls of Skelos" is just as good.

For this, I give it 5 stars!

Rating:
Summary: Conan done right
Review: Finally, someone has done the Hyborian Age justice. Yes, here are typos. Ok, lots of mistakes actually, but nothing critical and the fabulous online support on the Mongoose.com site makes up for it. I'm sure the second printing won't be all chewed up.

Thats the bad... heres the good...

This book captures Howards Hyborian Age and this work drips with flavor. The D20 rule tweaks in this OGL game are excellent. The artwork is amazing! Best of all, this book is PACKED with information.

The $50 price tag is steep, especially considering the amount of mistakes inside the book, but it was worth every penny. I LOVE this book and so far the only supporting book "Scrolls of Skelos" is just as good.

For this, I give it 5 stars!

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing work from Mongoose!
Review: Mongoose sure dropped the ball on this one. Whatever happened to the concept of editing and proof reading guys? This book is filled with typos and errors. Tables don't match given text and text doesn't fit with examples, this list goes on and on. There are also instances where in looks like passages were just cut and pasted from the d20 SDR! On a positive note, the background given on Hyborian world is both rich and extensive but not worth the $50 price tag.

Save your money until the second printing comes out. Hopefully Mongoose will have thier act together by then.

Rating:
Summary: Poor editing and price, but still worth it for Conan fans.
Review: The new Conan RPG from Mongoose publishing is an Open Gaming License (OGL) Roleplaying Game, based off of the D20 core ruleset used by Wizards of the Coast in the Third and Third Revised Editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Conan, of course, is a fictional barbarian hero created by Robert Howard in the 1920s and 1930s.

The good:
- Snippets of text from Conan stories as background information and justification for rules all throughout the book. They really emphasize the flavor and Robert Howard's exciting and action packed writing style.
- The rules do Conan better than I ever thought they could. Even if I didn't like Conan, this is the game I always wanted Dungeons and Dragons - or any fantasy roleplaying, for that matter - to be. I may never play Dungeons and Dragons again. Characters become truly powerful, but not superheroic, as time goes on. Magic and Sorcerors do not dominate the setting, although an evil Sorceror is still a deadly foe. (The magic is not like standard Dungeons and Dragons spellcasting at all.)
- The setting information is thorough and complete, including Robert Howard's thorough essay on the world of Hyboria.
- The book does not require possession of any other Open Gaming License or D20 products for use, although as the game rules are a little complicated it will take someone new to OGL or D20 a while to get started.

The bad:
- The snippets of text to add flavor throughout the book do not list which Conan story is their source. If a particular passage catches your eye and you want to read the rest of that tale, good luck finding out which Conan tale it is.
- The editing is poor. The biggest mistake is the occurence of 'lb.'. I'm guessing someone realized that 'lb.' is the proper abbreviation for pound and did a global replace on 'lb' without thinking it through and realizing that words like elbow and hellbent would become elb.ow and hellb.ent. The OGL feat Whirlwind is listed but never detailed - no problem for someone used to other OGL games, but a nuisance for everyone else. Other minor gaffs abound. There are some questions with the rules for feinting and modifiers to defense by parrying that are unclear.
- Every page has a picture of a scantily clad woman in the border. I have no personal moral objection to such depictions. Still, removing them would probably have saved the publisher and hopefully the buyer a lot of money on pages and ink, and some potential buyers or players will find the pictures offensive.
- It's expensive. I obtained a copy for $30 including shipping and consider it well worth the cost, but I am a big fan of the Howard Conan stories.
- The D20 or OGL ruleset is relatively complicated as far as Roleplaying games go. While I think the tweaks to fit Conan are positively top notch, someone looking for a simpler gaming experience might look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Pay attention to the magic system!
Review: This game could use more substance and less blank space or mediocre art per page. All the same, there are very interesting details in this varation on the 3rd Edition. Some of the classes, such as the Noble, are irreducible to their D&D counterparts. To the magic system I will get in a minute. Armor finally performs as it does in real life, absorbing damage rather than making you harder to hit (which is what Dodge is for). The idea that a character in a clanking plate armor is more elusive but, if hit, must take normal damage could only occur to the feverish minds behind standard Dungeons & Dragons. What is the rationale? If the rare successful blows are the ones that sneak through, for example, the eye slits of a helmet, shouldn't they do much more damage or score a threat, at least? Instead D&D leaves defense to what amounts to mere chance, but keeps the damage standard.

Let's say you wear plate mail and get peppered with arrows. What are the odds even a single one will penetrate it or hit an undefended spot? Pretty low, to say the least! Just about none if you bother to hold your gauntleted hand in front of your face. Yet in D&D a sufficient number of shots will inevitably score a few hits, which is like saying that if you keep firing a machine gun at a tank for a long time, every now and then you'll shoot a crewmate. How ridiculous! On the other hand, the point about playtesting may be right, since horses really shouldn't have damage resistance beyond, let us say, 1 or 2 points. I also think that every successful hit, even if the armor absorbs it completely, should score 1 point of Constitution damage, for even armorclad knights can be battered down.

I was going to speak of the magic system, however, and there I am, carried away; I will only mention interesting combat maneuvers like the Decapitating Blow, which are available to characters regardless of class, and extra fighting options for the fighter classes. There are other, less noticeable but in the long run more important innovations here as well. For example, every week all characters lose - they are assumed to have spent, that is - 50% of their savings over 50 silver pieces. The in-character rationale is that larger-than-life characters, and the Conan RPG abounds in those, spend widely. Conan himself, as we remember, threw coins left and right. The out-of-character reason is that if the characters could simply loot a tomb and wisely retire on the gains, that would be the end of their adventuring. Characters are encouraged to invest in equipment or magical creations instead. Also notice how it is silver pieces and not gold - surely a move in the right direction currency-wise.

Another wonderful element is that healing magic doesn't exist and while there are several ways for characters to elude death, one of which is to override it completely by expending a Fate point, once you are dead, that's the end of it. So much for friendly clerics! I'm giving these examples because they show that the Conan RPG is a well thought-out and sensible game in most respects, with some exceptions like the horse damage resistance.

Onward to magic! What can I say? This is what D&D spellcasting should have been. The spell list is not too long, although you can easily enough drag a spell from a Conan book into this system. The spells are relatively powerful, most require only Verbal and Somatic components and Material ingredients aren't designed to to empty your purse.

All the magics are arranged into Styles (schools). The Hypnotism style, for example, has mesmerizing tricks that are available early on and that would be high-level in D&D. Here it doesn't take years of adventuring before you can be the Socrerer and turn make a guard or several into brainwashed zombies at your beck and call, but neither can you fire off spells at every tun, thus cheapening the effect. Spells cost Power Points, and no wizard has too many of those, even though it is possible to go into the negative at the risk of fatigue. Spell Points are slowly recovered, but Mongoose unabashedly presents a wide gamut of means for regaining them and acquiring a temporary heap of new ones. You can sacrifice people, in game terms, by delivering a coup de gras to a helpless creature or, better yet, by torturing it to death, or you can inhale the narcotic fumes of Black Lotus.

You can also make pacts with eerie entities and demons which, however, will tend to increase your Corruption score, eventually making the sorcerer so obviously inhuman not just in thought but in appearance that he will have to go NPC. To the careful player, however, even this presents unique opportunities: if you manage to avoid crossing the final threshold, you can be a paragon of vice, whereupon you'll get to add your Corruption score to Intimidate checks, even when dealing with demons! Other rules make sure magic remains your obssession, since you begin to lose power if you become distracted with love or worldy pursuits. The wonderfully amoral game practically bedazzles with excellent, sinister ways of running a sorcerer - although if you really want to, you can try to stay "white." There are fairly innocent tricks like prestidigitation or non-magical mesmerism.

Ensorcelled items are rare and very expensive and hard to make, they tend to have specific bonuses rather than confer a wide range of benefits. Created minions acquire Corruption until they turn on you and so on. Still, magic can save an entire adventure, although its main goal, I believe, is to emphasize the lush and exotic nature of the setting. Hyboria is fairly low-magic but deadly and serious; you'll not find any of the cheese from D&D paperbacks in Howard's succint, vivid tales which have been influenced, as any fan will tell you, by H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Horrid things lurk in ancient ruins, vampires stalk their own tombs, cannibals feast on strangers, memories of Acheron still waff of fear, but there is also zest, drink, women and plenty of great steppes, seas and jungle to cross beneath an open sky. Your best friend, as befits Conan fiction, is a good trusty sword or bow.

I must say I wish Mongose did not stick with the "canon" texts by Howard but allowed materials from the "first wave" of pastiche writers, like Sprague de Camp, who added to Hyboria with reason and restraint.

Rating:
Summary: They need to go back to the drawing board
Review: This is an admirable effort in many ways, but simply not up to par. Robert E Howards true conan stories are far better than most people realise, largely because of other inferior writers who wrote for the genre and essentally watered it down. The original Conan of literature is far more nuanced and interesting than the naked muscle dude of popular mythology (he often wore clothes, even armor, for one thing, and frequently relied on guile and cunning to defeat his enemies instead of just brute force.)

Thanks to a liberal sprinkling of quotes from the original ficitonal sources, much of this flavor does make it into the book. The basic structure, fairly far removed from D&D with a new spell system and modified combat system, is pretty good in concept, though it suffers in execution.

Damage reduction for natural armor is a cool idea for D20, but when it means that it is almost impossible to hurt a horse with a hatchet or a short sword, something is wrong. Much of these mechanics should have been more broadly playtested, one wonders if they were at all in some cases. There are some similar difficulties with the essentially innovative spell system as well.

The other big issues are the editing and proofreading, which have been amply discussed in other reviews, as well as the cost, which is way too high.

They need to go back, work out some kinks, rethink a few things, hire a new proofreader and find a lower cost printing solution. Then Conan the RPG II might be worth buying. As for this one, it's worth a look, but I say wait until you can find it discounted.