OD&D, By Crom!

[doc]

The original Gods, Demigods & Heroes book had rules for Conan and the Hyborian age. It had key characters, monsters, gods, items, etc. Has anybody ever used the GDH info for an OD&D Conan game?

C'mon, I just KNOW that somebody out there had to have once tested a high level character against Conan the Cimmerian!

Doc

[Finarvyn]

Oh, yes. Conan has always been one of my favorite settings and I ran a Hyborian campaign back in "the day" with my high school friends. We used Gods, Demigods & Heroes but also supplemented with the TSR Conan RPG and Lin Carter's Royal Armies of the Hyborian Age for source material.

What I like best about Conan is the gritty feel. It's all humans and magic is dark and sinister. Sadly, those aspects of the genre are exactly what my current group does NOT like. They like to play non-humans, high magic, and a lighter feel game.

[doc]

See, that's the kind of fantasy that I like as well, but players tend to get nervous if divested of their spell lists, arcane armor, and elves. i DID run a Conan campaign for a year and a half using the Arduin rules, though.

What about the Melnibonean stuff from GDH? Has anybody ever used them? Right now the characters in my OD&D game are trapped on Barsoom, but at some point in the future I will be bringing them to the Young Kingdoms. I've already thrown Cthulian plots and beasties at them to tremendous effect (actually having characters bragging about just SURVIVING those encounters).

And for many years before I got onto the WWW, I was using the map from Royal Armies of the Hyborian Age to run low-fantasy adventures. Ahh, memories

Doc

[greentongue]

Yes, "Royal Armies of the Hyborian Age" is a handy thing to have a copy of.
=

[calithena]

I've gotten more mileage out of the Conan section of GDH in play than almost anything else. The monsters, magic items, and traps there just rock. It's up there with the page or two of Greyhawk on Tricks & Traps and the best stuff in Arduin for just pure rockin' content.

[Deleted]

The campaigns I run are firmly dark, dirty & gritty Sword & Sorcery to the extreme, but I haven't actually run one in the Hyborian Age (although I'd love too). I suppose I could spring for a PDF of GDH online; I'm sure it couldn't cost that much (to bad it's not free: I think I lucked out when I found the 3LBB, scanned beautifully for free a couple of months ago on a website I can no longer find...).

[korgoth]

calithena said:

I've gotten more mileage out of the Conan section of GDH in play than almost anything else. The monsters, magic items, and traps there just rock.

I never realized that GDH had things besides, well, gods, demigods and heroes. I've never seen the book itself.

So it also has monsters and such stuff? Very interesting.

[dwayanu]

I would like to get "Royal Armies" on my shelf. I treasure my Starmount guide to the Hyborian Age, even though I've never seen the the map it was meant to accompany.

[calithena]

Yes, it has lots of good monsters and (if sometimes up-powered) magic items. There's actually more focus on this in GDH than in any subsequent 'gods' book, which is a shame IMO; what's the point of adding a rich mythology to your game if you can't kill it and take its stuff?

[oldgeezer]

I ran "Hyborean Age" D&D from 1973-1976.










(Known in other places as Gronan of Simmerya)