I [Heart] Conan

I followed a link on Google+, which transported me back in time to a bunch of 2009 blog posts about D&D and the picaresque [Grognardia, Playing D&D with Porn Stars]. Do read those for interesting thoughts. In the meantime, I had my recent haul from a second-hand bookshop in my bag, and I was prompted to write this post. Even if just to say that I love Conan. And it isn't [just] the mighty thews.

 

Last week's second-hand bookshop 'score'.

One thing that you don't get from that picture is how slim the books are. Why are fantasy novels so big these days? What? Market forces? "What do we want? Nationalised fantasy novel production. When do we want it? The Hyborian Age!" Actually, only Conan the Conqueror ('The Hour of the Dragon') is actually a novel (and less than 200 pages at that), with the rest of the books being composed of short stories. I love the lurid, Frazetta covers too.

I'm glad that I don't own an omnibus edition of the Conan stories. Gathered together under a 'serious' cover (in hardcover!) there would be the shadow of an overarching narrative cast on these stories. As they are, in little bite-size chunks, you see what a good D&D (or fantasy adventure game of your choice) campaign might look like, when the story is retold after play.

Anyhow, I [heart] Conan.

Conan the Destroyer

Look, it’s really not that bad. Okay, okay, it IS a bad film. It’s no worse than many other early 80s fantasy movies, but that’s about a faint as praise gets. What Conan the Destroyer is, is a good D&D movie, a far better D&D movie than Conan the Barbarian.

Not sure about the armour classes here... maybe Conan is wearing Frazetta Oil.

In Conan the Destroyer we have a party of four PCs – two fighters, a thief, and a magic-user – on a quest, accompanied by two NPCs – a zero-level princess and another fighter. They travel across the wilderness, have a one or two encounters, and raid two ‘dungeons’. One is the home of an evil sorcerer with a set piece ‘trap room’ full of magic mirrors, the second is a lost temple from which they must recover an ancient artefact. The adventure culminates in a battle against a Lovecraftian minor ‘dreaming god’ in the throne room of a palace. If this was one of the X-series of modules it would totally ROCK! Honestly, it would be up there with Night’s Dark Terror. You just need to throw in a few more encounters in the ‘dungeons’, and to add a few more minor adventuresome locations in the wilderness and you have a fine mini-campaign with an old school feel.

Reading fantasy fiction and watching fantasy movies I am often inspired by even the worst. However, I always have to remind myself that a good game of D&D (or any other FRPG) shouldn’t try to be a recreation of a good film, or a good book. The worlds invented for films and books are not good worlds for gaming. They are there to tell one, and that story is one that is determined, written, fixed. Unless you are playing a game in which you know that the PCs are the Fellowship of the Ring, Titan is a far better gaming world than Middle Earth. If you know before you begin that the PCs are the Fellowship, then you know the story that you need to tell, and the dice you need to fudge to help them reach Mount Doom. If the aims and adventures of the PCs are to be determined through play, you need a world quite unrealistically full of adventure, a world that is probably quite unsuited to being the setting for any ‘serious’ fantasy fiction.