OD&D Sup. IV Hyborian Gods

[Falconer]

Help me nail down what stories the Hyborian gods in Sup. IV are from. Some are obvious, or at least prominent in Howard’s writings (CROM, MITRA, and SET are somewhat ubiquitous throughout the Conan stories).

ASURA is from The Hour of the Dragon (a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror).

HANUMAN is from “The Man-Eaters of Zamboula” (a.k.a. “Shadows in Zamboula”).

BLOOD STAINED GOD is from “The Trail of the Blood-Stained God”. Currently published in the Del Rey El Borak collection, this is a Howard story but it’s not a Conan story (although de Camp rewrote it to be one).

The rest seem to be from de Camp/Carter pastiches.

TSATHOGGUS - Obviously this is Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua from the Hyperborea cycle (plus a few Lovecraft mentions). But in what Conan story does he appear?

YEZUD - I think Howard named a spider god somewhere but didn’t name it? Can anyone point me to a reference? Anyway, de Camp wrote a novel called Conan and the Spider God, where the spider god is named Zath and is in a city named Yezud. However, this novel was not published till 1980 (that is, after Sup. IV)! Was it based on a Marvel Comics storyline?

YAMA - From what I can find out, Yama is from the Carter/de Camp story “The City of Skulls” (published in the old Ace/Lancer collection Conan).

[kesher]

TSATHOGGUS - Obviously this is Clark Ashton Smith’s Tsathoggua from the Hyperborea cycle (plus a few Lovecraft mentions). But in what Conan story does he appear?

Isn't he(!) from "The God in the Bowl"?

[thegreyelf]

Thsathoggua (I presume "TSATHOGGUS" is a typo) could very well be the god in "The Servants of Bit-Yakin," though it is never properly named (aside from "Bit-Yakin.") The description of the demon in that story (Toad-faced, tentacled) matches Tsathoggua very closely.

Howard was fond of Tsathoggua--he featured prominently in his Nameless Cults of Von Junzt--but I don't think he was ever named in one of Howard's Conan yarns.

Yezud is the city. Supp. IV is wrong, simply put. The name given to Howard's spider-god by Roy Thomas in Marvel Comics was Omm. Its name before that, as you have surmised, was Zath, given by de Camp and Carter.

[Falconer]

Thanks, guys! It makes sense that Tsathoggus is merely a misspelling of Tsathoggua (one letter off). I will look for (unnamed) references to him in “The God in the Bowl” (yeah, it does seem to be similar to “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros”, no?) and “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”. I came across a reference to the fact that he is used in de Camp & Carter’s Conan the Buccaneer. I’m not curious enough to actually read the book—in this case I know all I need to know from CAS! (Tsathoggua will be used a lot in my campaign!)

As for the spider god, I am pretty sure that the Marvel “Omm” came before the de Camp “Zath”. However, I finally came upon Howard’s original quote regarding this. In “The People of the Black Circle”, Conan mentions “a big black jade bead, such as the temple girls of Yezud wear when they dance before the black stone spider which is their god”. Based on that quote alone, Yezud could be a city or it could be the actual name for the god.

[thegreyelf]

That's a fair point regarding Yezud. As for the comics vs. de Camp namings, I think two factors go into that, regardless of which came first.

1. The comics have always been even more dubious regarding canonicity than de Camp/Carter, who at least (by all reports) made an effort to remain faithful to Howard's intent (the success of this is questionable at best, obviously, but the effort was there), whereas the Comics took the movie path--their Conan was their own character, well-removed from Howard's, as was their Hyborian world. This is why you never saw a comics reference in Mongoose's Conan RPG materials.

2. "Zath" sounds a lot more like a Howardian demon than does "Omm."

As for Conan the Buccaneer, some of de Camp/Carter/Nyberg's work is not bad. Of the original 12 in the Lancer/Ace series, I haven't dug into Buccanneer yet, but Conan the Avenger and Conan of Aquilonia were good. Conan of the Isles is entertaining, but a bit too "weird science," and it ignores completely Howard's own writings about what happened in the later years of Conan's reign.

I rather enjoyed Conan the Liberator as well; I think many people disdained that one because they had formed their own expectations as to how Conan came to strangle Numedides on the stairs to the throne, but I thought de Camp and Carter pretty well were spot on with how it would've come to pass.