Here's a TSR UK advertisement for the 1985 Conan Role-Playing Game. It's a disappointingly understated ad in my opinion, especially given the subject matter. That said, I have a strange affection for the game, which was, objectively speaking, nothing great, but my friends and I had fun with it and that's the true measure of any RPG.
(I feel compelled to point out that the tagline of the advertisement, which is ostensibly an excerpt from the Nemedian Chronicles quoted at the beginning of "The Phoenix on the Sword," is wrong. The adverb "then" does not appear in Howard's original text. Mind you, what follows below is itself a paraphrase, omitting certain words and praises, so perhaps we shouldn't judge this too harshly.)
I'm not gonna lie...this is hands-down my favorite Conan rpg. Even though it's not exactly what I would call complete, it gives the best 'Howardian' Conan feeling imho. Fast, loose, headlong adventure, not bogged down by too many rules!
ReplyDeleteI had fun with it, for whatever that's worth.
DeleteI remember being surprised that TSR decided to create an entirely new game system for their Conan license, almost as if they didn't have a swords & sorcery type rpg they could have used.
ReplyDeleteIt strikes me as failed marketing. Even if they wanted to create a strand alone game, they could have still used D&D/AD&D for the basic rules, and then pointed fans of the game to the full ruleset.
Could it have been a condition of the license? "We'll let you do Conan ... but it has to be a custom-built rules set, not derived from D&D."
DeleteThey made two Conan adventures for D&D
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_Unchained!
So my guess is they didn't sell?
This game suffered from editing issues where it looks it had gone to print ahead of completion (much like GWIII). BUT it was a decent game.
ReplyDeleteThe system behind this game still has some traction in the OSR community, if I have my facts right, and lives on as a a somewhat genericized Sword and Sorcery RPG called ZeFRS (for Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System).
ReplyDeleteI have ZeFRS. It was created by a guy who wanted to do a retro clone of the system and got Zeb Cook's permission. The game is generic but geared towards S&S play than normal D&D playing.
DeleteI always thought this game had potential. With a little more playtest and a few more editing passes this could have been a great game.
ReplyDelete