How Conan the Barbarian Comes to Life in Three New Games

We’ve been covering Funcom’s Conan Exiles and its ongoing Early Access journey here on GameBanshee for a while now. But this Polygon article has directed our attention towards a couple of other games that offer plenty of roleplaying opportunities for the fans of the muscular barbarian and the ruthless world he lives in.

First is a miniature-based Conan board game, where a party of up to four players competes against the challenges thrown at them by The Overlord, the board game’s stand-in for a Game Master. And if the confines of a board game feel too limiting to you, there’s also Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, a full-fledged tabletop RPG with a focus on narrative and creating adventures Robert E. Howard himself could be proud of.

An excerpt:

If you really want the freedom to explore Howard’s world on your own, you should pick up Modiphius’ Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of tabletop role-playing game, which launched this past January. The core book, currently available as a PDF, is a true labor of love, filled with quotes from Conan stories and explanations of how the mechanics are meant to embody the spirit of Howard’s world.

The gamemastering section repeatedly asks the question “What would Howard do?” when it comes to considering the role of treasure, the nature of heroism and just how to structure an adventure.[…]

The system puts narrative first, encouraging players to work with the gamemaster to come up with the backgrounds and stories that have shaped their characters, though there’s a huge section of tables they can roll on for inspiration. There are a lot of rules that players and particularly the gamemaster will need to get a grasp on. While my group of veteran Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder players figured them out quickly — sometimes enlisting one person to look up how to handle healing or ammo while the game proceeded — it would be easy to feel intimidated by grappling with both an unfamiliar setting and system. Luckily the RPG encourages creative problem solving and cooperation that can keep things dynamic even as you grapple with the learning curve.

Much like in Monolith’s board game, players and the gamemaster have opposing resources in the form of Momentum and Doom that can be used to improve their chances of success on a die roll, to gain information, or to upgrade or impair bad guys. Bad rolls on the players’ parts can reward the gamemaster with Doom or let them introduce a complication to make the character’s life more difficult and interesting. Those resources also mean that players can’t get stuck. If they fail to make a roll to notice something they need to find to move the plot forward, the gamemaster can give them the information anyways — at a price.

Antagonists come in three tiers — minions who are quickly mowed through, toughened creatures that provide a bit of a challenge, and nemesis enemies that can require a mix of ingenuity and luck to defeat. Howard was friends with H.P. Lovecraft and incorporated some of the horror author’s themes into his work. They make a strong appearance here too, with characters as likely to be traumatized from facing an otherworldly horror as they are to be severely wounded by an enemy warrior’s blade.

[…]

All three of these games are actively growing. Conan: Exiles will release its first expansion on Aug. 16, which will take players beyond its current desert domain to a frozen wilderness. That same day it will launch on the Xbox One Game Preview early access program. The Conan board game has also headed north in the Nordheim expansion and further adventures in the works will be set in the lands of Khitai, a stand in for ancient Mongolia where Western travelers are viewed with suspicion and contempt, and Stygia, a version of ancient Egypt where sorcerer priests worship Set and darker powers. Modiphius released an updated version of its core book in June and has published an adventure collection and a guide to running games focused on heists and the criminal underworld. They’ve also promised to release many more books in the series focusing on different types of characters and areas of the world.

The Conan stories predate The Hobbit by five years, but Howard’s tales have been far less present in fantasy gaming than Tolkien’s stories of elves, dwarves, orcs and goblins which form the basis of Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft and so many other titles. Howard’s vision of a savage world inhabited by diverse peoples is 85 years old, but it’s still fresh for many players who are looking for a new setting for their adventures. These games offer the chance to play in versions of Conan’s world but also provide a template for other spins on the genre that are more human but no less action-packed.