Age of Conan - Hyborian Bestiary forthcoming

[thegreyelf]

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 the creatures in these summoning tables. It's going to take some time and likely result in a brand new Age of Conan pamphlet when complete.

As of now, it begins with general rules for summoning. Following these rules, each summoning table is listed, along with a paragraph that describes and gives statistics for each creature in the preceding table (thus, you'll get Summoning I, followed by eleven paragraphs of monster descriptions and stats).

Each table works on a 2d6 roll (yes, meaning it'll be skewed to specific median creatures, but that shouldn't make too much of a difference in the end) and includes 11 creatures. There are seven summoning tables, meaning I'll be effectively releasing a Hyborian bestiary of the Outer Dark that contains 70-odd "new" OD&D-usable monsters. "New" is in quotes because these are all adapted from other sources, but they should be relatively new to OD&D. It won't be a full 77 creatures, as some of them are simply treated as OD&D monsters with minor tweaks (People of the Dark, for example, are treated as 3-HD OD&D orcs).

Just wanted to give you all a heads' up as to what's coming down the Pike for Age of Conan.

God, I wish I had the cash to pursue the license and do a full licensed roleplaying game based on my Spellcraft & Swordplay rules....

[Falconer]

Sounds cool!

[thegreyelf]

Worked on it a bit more this weekend. Slow going, but it's coming along.

I need to do another blog about the game...if I can find the time.

[Ghul]

One of the problems one can run into with this is the actual creature names. If you comb through the REH Conan yarns, often you will find that the beast is well described but is given no exact name: some ancient thing that inhabited the lands as man struggled up from apedom. In some cases you might wish to devise your own nomenclature, perhaps pulling a descriptor from the original texts.

[thegreyelf]

Believe me, dude, got that covered. ;-)

[Aplus]

Awesome. Will these guys have Chainmail attack/defense ratings as well? If not, consider this my formal fan request for including them.

[thegreyelf]

Hm. I didn't actually include that. Their Man rating would be equivalent to their hit dice, but as for Armored foot, Heavy foot, etc., I hadn't really considered it--so few creatures in Chainmail actually have those types of ratings. Usually they are scored as "x men" or on the fantasy combat tables...

That being said, using the Chainmail OD&D combat rules included should make it easy enough to extrapolate based on AC and the types of attacks the creatures use...

[Aplus]

Yes, I suppose if they are all weird creatures and not basically humanoid, then the attack and defense ratings wouldn't really make so much sense.