Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of

by Ben Graybeaton, Nathan Dowdell, Jay Little

Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of takes you into the world of Conan the Barbarian, where heroes raise blood-spattered swords against dire sorcery, exotic lands beckon to the daring, danger and treasure lurks in forgotten ruins, and where loathsome creatures haunt the spaces beneath the earth… as well as in the throne-rooms of mighty kingdoms!

Seek your fortune in forbidden tombs or upon blood-soaked battlefields. Cast dark and terrible spells of unimaginable power, at the price of your soul. Sail upon untamed seas to lands where no human in living memory has walked. Fight for the fate of civilization — or barbarism — on a savage frontier.

Create your own legend in this decadent and violent world!
Complete 2d20 game system, including combat, skills, talents, sorcery, and equipment suitable for adventuring in the age before history.
An extensive gazetteer covering the whole of Conan’s world: featuring fair Aquilonia, gloomy Cimmeria, magic-haunted Stygia, all the way to the far-off steaming jungles of Khitai.
Extensive guidelines for running scenarios and campaigns in the Hyborian Age, allowing gamemasters to create suitably Howardian adventures.
Fearsome foes, ranging from bandits to sorcerers, apes to giant serpents, Children of Set to frost giants, forest devils, and characters of renown such as Conan or his most deadly foe, Thoth-Amon.
Art [by] a team of iconic Conan artists, including Tim Truman, Simon Bisley, Esteban Sanjulian, Maroto, Mark Schultz, Tomás Giorello, and more.
Developed in close consultation with award-winning Conan scholars, this is the most authentic depiction of Conan and his world ever published for games.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Games, Gaming, Sword and Sorcery, Fiction

432 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 217

Reviews

[Ty Arthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got some Amazon gift cards for my birthday awhile back and decide to grab some of the pricier RPGs on my wishlist, including Modiphius' take on the Conan universe. Let me just say: wow! Production values are killer here, with the paper clearly meant to evoke the old comics and a built-in cloth bookmark.

Its clear the authors worked hard to dive into the Conan mythos, avoiding the pastiche and sticking to Howard's vision, while at the same time toning down or sidestepping the overtly racist stuff that was par for the course in the '30s but wouldn't be well received in fiction today.

The world overview sections are done really well, presented by a disgraced professor from Miskatonic who believes the Hyborian Age tales are all true, with each section written by a character from that country and time frame and presented as historical evidence.

This is my first foray into the 2d20 system, and overall I'm liking it. I know some reviewers felt the system was shoe horned into the setting, but I've got nothing to compare it to and haven't played the previous Modiphius games, so I don't have that baggage hanging up my experience. The doom mechanic offers a great give and take, providing more interplay between DM and players.

While it seems pretty complicated at first, the core mechanic is actually really simple once you've got the basics down. That leads to what is one of my few criticisms -- the layout of the rules isn't as clear or helpful as it could be. I was left scratching my head about a lot of the rules for the first 100 pages or so. It would have been a lot easier for the new players if they started with an explanation of the core mechanic, and then jumped into character creation.

Speaking of, character creation is incredibly focused on storytelling and crafting a unique character, instead of just numbers, reminding me a bit of how The One Ring weaved its setting into the mechanics.

My only other real complaint is that individual words tend to get repeated a lot in the descriptions and it wouldn't have hurt for the authors to hit the thesaurus and use some synonyms now and again, but other than that and the potential confusion as you figure out the rules if you haven't played 2d20 before, this is a 5 star RPG presentation all the way.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars...
-The Nemedian Chronicles

You know how the rest of that quote goes.

I didn't know much about Conan the Cimmerian until I read the Del Rey collection published a decade and a half ago, but once I read them I understood how Howard's character inspired so much devotion over the years. When a kickstarter came up for a new Conan RPG that promised to be the most comprehensive, faithful adaptation yet, I gave them a bunch of money and then...didn't read the book until now.

It's good, but not as triumphant as I was hoping.

Setting
Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of takes place in the Hyborian Age, a time period before the last ice age where civilization was more advanced than the later stone age that followed and where the civilizations broadly followed the outlines of later ages, allowing for familiar tropes without being shackled to real history. The book even provides a list of correspondances, with Aquilonia being medieval France, Stygia being dynastic Egypt, Cimmeria being Gaelic Ireland, the Pictish Wilderness being a combination of Scotland colonial North America (Beyond the Black River was a Western) and so on, that make it easy for the GM to come up with decriptions and behaviors for the locals as the PCs wander around, trampling the jeweled thrones of the earth.

The book sticks mostly to the areas and organizations described in Howard's actual stories, so the Hyborian World is best described among the western kingdoms of Aquilonia, Zingara, Zamora, Nemedia, and so on, and going further out makes things more vague. There are familiar elements from the Conan stories in each kingdom, like the Temple of Kallian Publico in Namalia or the Tower of the Elephant in Arenjun, or the Black Circle in Vendhya, and due to the paucity of information in the original stories these are sometimes the elements that seemed the most prominent. There's a lot made of Turan's dreams of Empire as well, which slightly counterbalances the density of information on the West. All in all, it's a good gazetteer that will allow a GM that's less familiar with the Conan stories to run a satisfying game in a variety of locations.

However, there is one major problem with the fidelity to Howard, and that's the racism. The Conan stories have both quaint (to modern ears) racism about Zamoran or Stygian or Hyrkanian traits, the way writers a century ago would talk about "the German race" and its differences from "the French race," and absolutely-not-quaint racism about white people and black people. The writers provide more detail in places, but they still lump everywhere south of Stygia together as "the Black Kingdoms" and talk about the barbarism and savagery of its inhabitants. In Khitai, the people are obsessed with order and status and there are harsh punishments for any violation of social norms. This could have been an opportunity to expand the areas that were brushed over by Howard due to not being white, but instead it softly reinforces the prejudice of the original stories.

There is one other element that tangentially Howardian. The book expands on Howard's friendship with H.P. Lovecraft and the greater circle of Lovecraftian authors, including Deep Ones among the monsters and a cult of Mordiggian in the example adventure. The setting chapter is framed as a lecture by a modern professor based on material from von Junzt's Unaussprechliche Kulte. This absolutely doesn't bother me, since I love the parts of Conan where he murders monsters from the Outer Dark like in The Slithering Shadow, but it's not strictly Howard purist and I can see some people being annoyed by it.

That said, the vast majority of the enemies throughout the book are other humans, with winged apes or giant snakes included as "monstrous" animals.

System
The system is 2d20, Mophidius's house system used in other games like Mutant Chronicles. It's an Attribute + Skill system, with the resolution mechanic being rolling a pool of d20s against a target number decided by the sum of Attribute + Skill and trying to achieve a number of successes equal to a GM-set difficulty. Rolls of 1, or more than 1 on skills that have a Finesse rating of greater than 1, count as two successes, and extra successes become Momentum, which may either be spent to achieve additional effects on a roll, such as learning more information, doing extra damage on an attack, or activating skill-specific effects; or banked into a common pool for other players to draw on. Each skill also has a number of Talents like Pantherish Twist (Acrobatics) or This Will Hurt (Healing) or Iron-Skinned (Resistanec) that either allow additional uses of the skill or provide additional dice on some rolls involving that skill.

The core of the system is Momentum and the GM's corresponding pool of Doom. Unspent or unneeded Momentum can be banked into a pool that all players can draw from, as a way to represent inspiration and cooperation without needing to explicitly make it an action. The GM's pool of Doom acts similarly to Momentum, allowing them to add to rolls or use NPC or monster powers, but it also provides a method of increasing tension. If a player doesn't have enough dice on a roll or rolls a Complication (20), they can pay the GM Doom to add dice or alleviate the Complication. As Doom rises, it increases the feeling of...well, of doom, of a lurking danger that is waiting to fall on the PCs' heads, until a climatic scene comes, the GM spends a bunch of that Doom, and the tension ebbs for a while. I can see what they were going for, and shared Momentum helps to deal with the way the stories worked, where Conan scythed his way through legions of lesser foes. That's easy to do in a story when the writer can control the outcomes, but in an RPG with randomization, some sort of in-game currency to maintain the PCs' luck is necessary to help them survive.

There are also Fortune Points, speaking of, that can be spent to automatically add a die set to 1.

However, there are some aspects of Doom and Momentum that I found very confusion. One example of Momentum is asking for more information, described as asking the GM for more details about the scene, but the examples given are using Observation to discern general details, Healing to diagnose in illness, or Ranged Weapons to identify the make of a bow, and all of those sound like general uses of the skill to me. In addition, Doom can be used to add additional danger to a scene the PCs are in, and some examples are having additional enemies show up during battle or triggering a trap. But shouldn't the quantity of enemies and presence of traps be set when the GM designs the encounter? Are these Doom spends for surprise enemies that the PCs would have no expectation would be there, and the GM should telegraph the presence of existing enemies otherwise? What if the PCs don't bother searching for traps before opening the chest with a trap--does that require the GM to spend Doom to trigger the existing trap? If the GM doesn't spend that Doom, does it throw off the Doom economy? I don't know.

There are also rules for sorcery, which is appropriately sanity-blasting and dangerous. It requires a teacher to learn, costs Resolve at each Upkeep phase, and the spells are broad and powerful, generally being shaped by Momentum spends. It's possible to use the Astral Wanderings spell to see in the dark, for example, or the Venom on the Wind spell to calm a storm.

Resolve is something else I like, which is that there's a system for intimidation. It's possible to force human enemies to flee with insults, or with savage displays of blood and gore, or with calming words reducing their will to fight, and really that's something that every game system should have and many don't. Conan killed a lot of his enemies when he fought them, but not every battle should end with one side entirely slain. I would venture to say that that should be a rarity.


Robert E. Howard's Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of seems like a good fit for the kind of back-and-forth quick action found in Howard's stories--at least, as much as any tabletop RPG can do quick without heavy abstraction--but it's hampered for me bit a couple major problems. If later books flesh out the other parts of the world and make Punt and Kush and Darfar and Khitai and countries outside the West fully-realized with a variety of peoples and cultures, and if they explain how Doom works outside of immediately-codified uses in enemy descriptions, I think it'd go out to five stars. But with those core parts of the game either fuzzy or distasteful to me, four is where it sits.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

My anticipation level for this new Conan RPG was high but my final opinion of the core rulebook is mixed.

As a reference book on all things Conan, the book is excellent. There is a detailed history of Robert E. Howard and his greatest creation with a detailed breakdown of the Hyborian Age, its nations, characters, magic, and monsters. All with excellent art and detailed descriptions! As a source book, I give it *****. I was particularly impressed with how graciously the writers handled some of the more problematic elements from REH's writing, and that is reflected in the art as well.

As an RPG system, however, I am unsold. Modiphius Entertainment has a house 2d20 system that I have mixed feelings about. On the player side, it seems simple. Players "roll under an Attribute plus Skill total on two twenty sided dice. Multiple successes are possible and can be used to create cinematic action." Sounds easy enough but the game also requires players to track Momentum, Doom, and Luck pools, which starts to get a little too fiddly for me. And for a GM, tracking all the player pools plus the NPCs sounds like a gargantuan task, not to mention both players & the GM can rig these pools for "meta-gaming," making the sessions less about immersive sword-and-sorcery storytelling and more about micromanagement of resources. In word, I find 2d20 too crunchy for Conan. It is playable, yes, but a bear to GM. As a gaming system, I give it **1/2

That said, I did enjoy the character creation system quite a bit. Rolling up unique characters who look, read, and feel authentically Hyborian was great fun and your character ends up with a nice weighty backstory to play off. The chargen saves the system somewhat so I am okay bumping that up to *** and splitting the difference on my final rating.

I wanted to love this Conan RPG and as a reference book, I do love it! The art is fantastic throughout and the book is a deep dive into all things Conan. I'm just not sure how much gaming I will actually get out of it.

[Jorge Villarruel · Rating 1 out of 5]

A boring slog! This is exactly why people think RPGs are boring. Conan 2d20 is disheartening! The rules are nor hard, but they are overwritten and hard to find, you need to read several sections until you figure out how some rules work, and most (really, most) text is only flavor text that is only there so they authors receive more money (remember how they pay for the word; more words equal more money). On top of that, the game fails to deliver its promise to capture the world of Conan; this is not Conan at all, the designers might have read Lovecraft and some Conan pastiches when they designed the setting and the rules, but nothing in the game will allow you to emulate The Phoenix on the Sword, for instance.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good atmosphere that I think captured the spirit of Howard's Conan.

But ...
I loathe the rule system and the organization of the book is illogical at best and insane at worst. Makes me long for the organization of 1e AD&D.

[Ryan Beck · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never seen a roleplaying system filled with so much adrenaline. Players can begin with characters with 100% success rates on rolls for a variety of skills at character creation who, nonetheless, still have a difficult time with the challenges the GM throws at them. From this opening, the players can purchase talents (feats in other systems) to improve themselves qualitatively, instead of quantitively. Even the level up system (Carousing) leaves an imprint on the following session, informing you what your character was up to while you were away. All of this combines to fill the system with gigantic mirth at every opportunity.

Unfortunately, the system is also filled with gigantic melancholy. I have also never found a rulebook that is harder to reference. Many rules have exceptions or explanations which are found in paragraphs in different sections altogether. Breaking Guard is a great example. Breaking guard is an essential tool that temporarily gets rid of shield benefits and reach buffs from things like polearms that are referenced in the action section. However, to find the answer to that question you need to look in the Momentum section, which states it takes 2 Momentum/Doom to trigger guard break. There are a lot of sections like this, which makes looking up a rule during a session nearly impossible as it takes flipping back and forward between 5 different sections to find the rules hidden in paragraphs that seem to have no relation to what you were looking for unless you already read the section and know the connection. Preparing cheat sheets or quick references become a necessity.

The character creation system, on the other hand, is pure gold. Your character has a full history waiting for them. Their homeland, personality, archetype, training, and personal interests all come into play with the way their stats are expressed and provide both qualitative and quantitative information. The book also provides a great random character generator that generates characters that are viable, but not optimal, that fit in the Conan world. By the time your character is ready, you will know exactly how your character fits into the world and what they've been doing until the moment for adventure struck them. This caused me to feel a level of understanding of my character and many unique ideas to work with that just aren't available in most other books.

There is a lot of ambiguity in the text on how to handle certain rules. The DMs should be wary of the perception of anything that might feel unfair to the players, very little of it is, but a lot of it feels like it is. My advice is to side with the most favorable interpretation for the players when possible. Allowing players to use pretty much any skill to gain an advantage against an opponent via the Exploit action, or providing some in-universe context for the doom resource are simple ways to establish this trust, but it could easily feel unfair, leading to less enjoyment.

Yet, Overall I think that Conan provides some of the best flow and mechanics for over-the-top action once you work out the kinds. Feeling like your character is a near-perfect swordsman in the world right out the gate, and knowing that they are only getting stronger from there makes playing in the system feel like hidden gold, ripe for the taking.

[Garrett Henke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit of a disclaimer: I am an epic Robert E. Howard fanboy. I drove all the way from Colorado to Austin, TX just to view Howard’s archived letters and original stories at the University of Texas. Well, that’s not entirely true. Technically I went there to visit friends and family, but the Howard collection was still high on the list.

This Conan RPG is undoubtedly the best game set in the Hyborian Age ever penned. Although there were a few good books during Mongoose Publishing’s (curse their name) run, Conan D20 just wasn’t a good fit with regards to mechanics.

Modiphius made the wise choice of not only focusing on Howard’s works and none of the later pastiches, but also crafting a system that perfectly captures the frenetic energy of the Sword and Sorcery genre. This is an absolutely amazing game and beautiful book fit for the shelf of any gamer or Howard fan.

[Krzysztof · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading through, I have my doubts about this one.

I took one star away for the editing. It's clear part of these books have been completed in a hurry and could've used some more attention. There are missing words in sentences, the same phrase repeating in two places next to each other, the POV suddenly shifting from a character voice to the rules talking without any indication etc.

The second star goes for how the rules are arranged. I've read some comments on this before, but holy crap, this book really does leave the basic mechanics and explanation of the system's core concept until AFTER the whole character creation process section! While it's nothing unusual to have detailed rules be pushed further in the corebook, there's usually at least a basis established right off the bat so that people can roughly follow along what's what. Not here. The layout of the rules just isn't all that great throughout, with many important things either blending with the surrounding text, or stated once and never repeated even when it would make perfect sense to do so.

I'm also not that hot on the system itself. At least from just reading through, it seems unintuitive and doesn't read as something that's particularly fast or easy to grok, especially given all the special abilities a character can have - and don't even get me started on rules for magic. I'm taking it with a grain of salt though, as only a proper test will show how much of this stuff is really necessary to play. My gut tells me that a copy of the Player's Handbook (which I heard has some rules from the beta version of the ruleset, which would be... not ideal) for each player is a necessity if you ever want to use anything but the most basic aspects of the system. I'm also not a huge fan of how the character creation is carried out, and need to see the Castes in action before I make a call whether I just don't like them, or outright want them out of the game.

And finally, the setting. It's the strong point of the book, with plenty of detail in there, though clearly some of it has been saved for expanding in the sourcebooks (Aquilonia and the Dreaming West being such a huge part of the setting, but only getting three pages in the Gazeteer when other, more remote places get like ten!). I found some calls quite surprising - like insisting on Aquilonia being typically medieval instead of more like Ancient Rome, which is what the Mongoose RPG did and it made much more sense to me. I assume that this game having the seal of approval for accuracy in terms of Howardian lore means I just need to adapt.

One thing that I felt was kind of a missed opportunity, was an attempt to square the circle of Howard-era pulpy prejudice and racial stereotypes. Sure, you probably should accept these shorthands in what's essentially an extremely colonial, very 19th-early 20th century kind of narrative and setting - but to put out a game set in that kind of environment in 2016 and NOT have at least a one-page acknowledgment of how this is Problematic (TM) and might perhaps deserve a re-evaluation during play? Oof.

I'm hoping to play at least a sample adventure this year or in early 2021 to see if I can salvage the fact that I bought all the sourcebooks in print BEFORE reading the corebook... shame on me, I know, but learn from my mistakes I guess ;)

[Benjamin]

Who is this for? This is the... 4th roleplaying game dedicated to Conan (TSR had a D&D-inflected version, GURPS put out a supplement, Mongoose had a d20 version, and now this Modiphius-published version), so people who love Conan would seem to have things covered. Now without really looking at the others, I feel somewhat confident in saying that this version is very focused on people -- like me -- who like Conan: the back notes that this is an official licensee of the Robert E. Howard estate and that the game was developed "in close consultation with award-winning Conan scholars" and is therefore "the most authentic depiction of Conan and his world."

But is it a good game? I'm going to say, yeah, it looks like it, to the point where I bid on an ebay bundle (but felt no loss when being outbid). Like, it has something for the Conan fans -- a little gazetteer of the world and what sort of characters come from the world -- and a game system that seems to reward big action (and reflect the momentum of action in Conan stories).

The intro adventure here nicely highlights the benefits and negatives of following a Howard story structure in an adventure: you've just been left for dead after a big fight in a once-inhabited and now-haunted land. (Something about the original inhabitants turning to dark sorcery before disappearing...). Now, I love a in medias res opening for an RPG; and the "one thing after another" of pulp plotting gives lots of scope for episodic action; and the big finish might be a nice climax. But how do you make any of this mean anything emotional or thematic? In the Conan stories, there is, I think, a throughline of theme: Conan is a fan of the commoner, an emancipator of slaves, a protector of the undefended (if only because that villains are monsters who always target him to). Maybe you could do something like that in a Conan campaign, but there's not really a lot here to emphasize that. So what you get is action devoid of much feeling, I think -- a focus on the surface-level of Howard rather than a deep dive into what makes these stories different.

[Matthew J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lavishly produced, with full color throughout, and lots of nice art, this Conan roleplaying game tries to take things back to the basics. Ignoring all the Conan that came after Robert E. Howard, from the novels to the comics, this uses only what Howard actually wrote about to create its Hyborian world. There's lots of description, and lots to spawn story and character ideas. The rules are much more numbers heavy than I like, but it seems fine if you're used to or don't mind more detailed and dice heavy gaming. Though it frequently alludes to further information in future supplements, this book has enough to run with. While I likely wouldn't use this book as is, it will serve me well as a resource if I ever get around to running a Conan game (a long held dream).

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long been looking for an action-oriented system that captures the feel of rollicking sword-and-sorcery combat in the tabletop form. This system with its constant trade off between advantages for the player and the gamemaster, its simplified but meaningful character generation, and its ability to be spontaneous, hits all the marks for accurate capturing Robert E Howard's setting. Not to mention the setting lore section is also extremely strong. This is an RPG worth investing in, especially, but not only, for Conan fans.

[Nick Satnik · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid book for what seems a solid TTRPG system. Very committed to creating specifically Conan-esc adventures, with a number of interesting systems that enable that feeling: using lower resolution combat (regions instead of a grid) and implementing several resource systems (Momentum and Doom) which the players and GM can use to shape the course of the story.

The book itself is great, organized acceptably, and intersperses many quotes from Howard's works to create that adventurous, chthonic, vibe (which is always balancing on the edge of savagery) which it revels in.

[René · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is great - but not awesome. I have thought the art in the book would be better, a little bit disappointed. As someone has written the rules are number heavy. It’s not your D&D 5th with a light rules system. But I hope that when you get used to the system the game will flow smoothly. I will play it and give it a try. But even if I will not be convinced after that I will read all the other books because I enjoyed reading the rule book. Next is Conan the Thief ;)

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally faithful to Howard. Great art. Interesting system. I need to play it to properly judge the system.

[Chad Hoblitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay I love Conan. This game is perfectly suited to his stories. In fact I just wish there was a generic version of the rules I could use for my worlds. Still I love it and may hack it for my world.

[Charles P · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hardly perfect... but so much fun to play. Nothing does epic like Conan.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seems like a good gaming system and Conan is the best. I need to play it on the table a few times to really get a good understand, but from what ive read it seems great!