Most of my Conan gaming posts have revolved around the original version of D&D, using Chainmail as the basis for the combat and rules systems. There are a lot of people out there, however, for whom AD&D is their preferred edition. The good news is, it's quite possible to apply about 90% of my tweaks to OD&D in an AD&D sense. There are already Hyborian Age tweaks to Conan available in the TSR Conan modules Conan Unchained, Conan Against Darkness, and Red Sonja Unconquered. These cover such things as Fear Factor, Heroism and Luck (with "Luck Points" filling a similar role to my own Fate Points), Healing, and an overview of the Hyborian World, including monsters, magic users and the like. These, however, can be difficult to get hold of; instead, my own Age of Conan resources can, by and large, graft right onto AD&D, or for those who do have them, my own tweaks to the game can be applied directly on top of these to expand the presentation. Magic ...

I feel a bit bad for saying this. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I generally don't write negative reviews of product, as I find them unhelpful and only harmful to the product sales. However, this one in particular has been grating on me for quite some time and I need to get it off my chest. Thus, I'm going to say this up front: Do not fail to give this game a look based on what I say here. a LOT of people are enjoying it and by all reports it's doing well. The guys I've spoken to at Modiphius are nice guys and should be supported. I congratulate them on doing well. The following is my opinion only, and I have reason to believe I'm in the minority on it. Okay, so here goes. The more I read the Modiphius Conan RPG, the more I try to get into it...the less I like it. I love Conan more than any other fantasy property except Star Wars, and when this game was announced and I heard the dream team behind it, I was so excited. Then the playtest previews c...

As the title says: rumors of my website's disappearance are greatly exaggerated. I got a couple e-mails and messages lately asking what happened to my D&D resources site.  Oops. I shuffled some things around when I bought the elflair.com domain, and forgot to create a redirect. http://www.grey-elf.com/ now goes to my D&D page.  If you go to http://www.grey-elf.com/dnd/ you will now be redirected to the current proper URL. Sorry for any confusion, folks!  My bad!

Last session we played saw the heroes make it back to King Cneph Coalhair's ringfort with the horn in hand.  As they made their way to his throne room, they were ambushed by Vanir raiders who had infiltrated the fort.  These stole the horn and took off running.  The PCs gave chase, eventually capturing the thief just as he made it over the walls and outside.  They had the horn in hand, only to discover themselves face to face with a small Vanir army who had come to challenge the fort for the horn. Trapped outside, a few of the PCs fought valiantly as King Coalhair's men hacked and slashed their way to the rescue.  In the end, the Vanir were sent running and the horn presented to Coalhair. The next day, however, grave news came to the fort: Rorik Hodderson, one of the Vanir leaders, had captured Irda, a revered holy woman of Ymir who was said to be gifted with prophecy, and was threatening her death if the Aesir did not turn over the horn. Knowing full well t...

So about a month or so ago, I decided to replace my copy of Conan the Buccaneer because the binding on my existing copy was bad. I managed to land a copy on ebay for cheap, and when it arrived I got a bonus: a book called Conan the Champion, by John Maddox Roberts. I figured I had little to lose, so I decided to give it a shot. At first it didn't seem too bad--I wondered why everyone gets so down on the Tor pastiches (the Robert Jordan ones aside--I've read his indestructible, noble and heroic Conan who may as well have a big red "S" on his chest, and gagged along with the rest of you). I mean, Roberts seemed to "get" Conan as a character. His dialogue was in keeping with the Conan I knew, and the story was even passable, though the book's back cover claimed it took place in Brythunia but Roberts seemed to be writing about some odd hackneyed cross between Asgard and Vanaheim.  Still, I was willing to roll with a generic Northern culture not exactly pla...

So as I mentioned in the blog post I put up yesterday, I've discovered that using standard OD&D summoning tables (per Greyhawk) loses some of the flavor of the Hyborian Age--a lot of the flavor, in fact, when sorcerers find themselves calling forth Elves, dwarves, harpies, and normal warriors or "evil clerics." Sorcerers in a Conan game should call forth creatures of the Outer Dark--demons and degenerates. As such, I've revised the summoning tables (a work in progress, obviously). Unfortunately, posting the revision now would do little good as I've called upon the following sources in addition to OD&D: Bestiary of the Hyborian Age (Mongoose Conan) Secrets of Skelos (Mongoose Conan) Call of Cthulhu d20 (WotC/Chaosium) Deities and Demigods (AD&D first ed. w/Cthulhu Mythos) Monster Manual II (AD&D first ed.) Can't just assume that everyone has these books. As such, I'm working on putting together quick Age of Conan stats for all th...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I haven't posted any session updates for Age of Conan for the past couple sessions--this is party out of laziness, partly due to the fact that I am now professionally ghost-writing blogs for Detroit-area law firms (which leaves precious little time for the writing I'd actually like to be doing), and partly because there's just not a lot to report. Sessions have been short lately, and honestly, the entire first section of Mongoose's Betrayer of Asgard is, well, rather slow. Essentially, the game flashed back to the period when the group stole the drinking horn from the Vanir, which they impressively managed to do without drawing a sword, and then flashed forward again to them being buried under a mountain of snow. They were dug out by giant wolves, which they had to battle while also suffering from exhaustion and frostbite. They then continued on their journey, and decided to take a dangerous road through Snow Devil Pass, rumored to be ha...

So a couple days ago I posted a blog in defense of L. Sprague de Camp's edits, posthumous collaborations, and pastiches where Conan is concerned. I also mentioned in that blog that the other things he did involving the property are by and large arrogant, abhorrent and unforgivable. Some people may not be familiar with the entire story behind de Camp's legacy with the Conan property. Well, look no further. Several years ago, a blogger over at the Robert E. Howard United Press Association website posted a series of articles entitled "The de Camp Controversy." This series of articles presents (if from a somewhat biased standpoint) the entire history of de Camp's involvement with the Conan property. It is informed, enlightening, and it paints a very clear picture of exactly why many Robert E. Howard fans take a dim view of de Camp and his involvement with the property. You can find all articles that deal with de Camp in any way, by going to the site clicking the...

As promised, here's my blog on reconciling different presentations of Hyperborea in the world of Conan. Now, some may wonder what the Hell I'm talking about--what different presentations of Hyperborea? Good question. For the most part, Hyperborea has been portrayed pretty consistently, though almost entirely by pastiche writers. The only writing we see about Hyperborea from Howard himself is in his seminal essay "The Hyborian Age," wherein he writes the following about the kingdom: Hyperborea was the first Hyborian kingdom Hyperboreans were the first to build walls, fortresses, and cities of stone. It is a cold, bleak land and at least in its beginnings was a "rude, barbaric kingdom." In his various pastiche works, L. Sprague de Camp stuck mostly to this characterization, which is rather impressive given that the vast majority of what was written about that kingdom was written by de Camp and Carter. Many later works, including Mongoose's The Roa...

So I have a couple of Conan-related blogs I want to get off my chest, about which I've been thinking for awhile. This first one may cause a bit of a controversy; we'll see. I'd like to defend L. Sprague de Camp for a moment.  I'm sure others have done so before, and probably in a more eloquent and educated fashion than I am about to do, but this has been on my mind and I wanted to lay out at least the beginnings of a case to re-examine his association with Howard's writing, as well as--to a lesser degree and mostly by association--that of his associates Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg. Many articles and postings have been put forth claiming that de Camp, Carter, and Nyberg should never have written their pastiches because they didn't "get" Conan. I would argue that this is a matter of debate. I've seen some very convincing arguments insofar as this is concerned, but most of them come down to the personal opinion of the author writing the article in...

It's been pointed out many times that my own Spellcraft & Swordplay roleplaying game is a sort of "alternate history" experiment, which explores what D&D may have looked like, had the original combat rules remained the core, instead of the "alternate" d20-based combat matrix. In many ways this is true, though I like to think that somewhere along the line S&S took on a life of its own. In any case, it is similar to OD&D if one uses the Chainmail combat systems, no doubt. What this also means is that it's easily convertible for use with my Age of Conan hacks. With the forthcoming DVD release of the new Conan movie starring Jason Momoa in the title role, I thought it might be fun to take a look at what Conan might be like in S&S. These stats aren't 100% S&S core, as I am drawing from my AoC hack to make them happen (for Cimmerian racial abilities), but it's an interesting thought experiment--what if I had the c...