Conan the Thief

by Mark Finn, Richard August, Chris Lites

TORCHES FLARED MURKILY ON THE REVELS IN THE MAUL, WHERE THE THIEVES OF THE EAST HELD CARNIVAL BY NIGHT. IN THE MAUL THEY COULD CAROUSE AND ROAR AS THEY LIKED, FOR HONEST PEOPLE SHUNNED THE QUARTERS, AND WATCHMEN, WELL PAID WITH STAINED COINS, DID NOT INTERFERE WITH THEIR SPORT

Genres: Role Playing Games

128 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2018

About the author

Mark Finn is an author, an editor, and a pop culture critic. He is a nationally-recognized authority on Robert E. Howard and has written extensively about the Texas author. His work has appeared in publications for the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, Dark Horse Comics, Boom! Comics, The Cimmerian, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Howard Review, Wildside Press, Centipede Press, The University of Texas press, Greenwood Press, Scarecrow Press, The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies and elsewhere. Finn has presented several papers about Howard to the PCA/ACA National conference, the AWC, and he continues to lecture and perform readings regularly.

Finn also writes comics and novels, as well as articles, essays, reviews, short stories and role playing games for Playboy.com, RevolutionSF.com, Dark Horse Comics, DC/Vertigo Comics, Monkeybrain Books, Sky Warrior Books, F.A.C.T. Publications, Tachyon Press, Modiphius Press, and others. Finn’s fiction can be found in Ray Guns Over Texas, Road Trip, Tails From the Pack, Empty Hearts, Heroika: Dragon Eaters, Barbarian Crowns, Asian Pulp, and Fight Card: The Adventures of Sailor Tom Sharkey, and elsewhere.

He is a managing editor for Skelos Press, and he podcasts for The Gentlemen Nerds. When he is not waxing eloquent about popular culture, he writes comics and fiction, dabbles in magic, and produces and performs community theater. He lives in North Texas atop an old movie theater with far too many books and an affable pit bull named Sonya.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had more hopes for this book than for Conan the Barbarian, because Conan's period of thievery is when stories like The God in the Bowl or the utterly amazing The Tower of the Elephant, both of which are repeatedly referenced here.

To my mind, the best part of Conan the Thief is the set of random heist tables at the end. If the players are thieves, they're going to need to know where the good loot is, who they have to swindle to get it, and who is going to come after them when they get away with the goods. There are tables for Who, What, Where, How, and Why, which explain everything needed to put together a heist. Rolling up one now, I got an impulsive Zamorian court official looking for a forged grimoire held in a palace or mansion, with a Wrinkle of "guarded" and a Hitch of "beasts," who promises a split of the take. So, thinking a bit, the PCs are approached by a minor official in the Zamorian court who asks the PCs to steal a set of financial documents from another noble's residence. Unbeknownst to the PCs, the two parties are allies, and the official wants the documents stolen because he knows they're forged but has no proof, and cannot convince his friend that his friend's seneschal is actually embezzling from him. He warns that the documents are guarded, but doesn't know that while there are human guards, there are also trained hawks watching the manor as well, as the official's friend is a master falconer. If the PCs bring him the documents, he promises to "split the take," which is actually a favor owned to him by his friend, and the friend would be in debt to the PCs as well.

That took me about five minutes and it'd be a great evening's adventure! It'd take a little bit more to completely flesh it out, but those tables give me a great start. I might copy all this into a separate document to use in other sword and sorcery games.

Unfortunately, they also increased my confusion over how Doom and GM planning interact. In the main Conan rulebook, some of the example Doom spends include triggering traps or having reinforcements show up if the PCs are fighting guards, and the heist tables include a number of possible traps and guards to compliment the PCs's adventures. But if the tables indicate that a trap is there and the PCs fail to search for it, does the GM need to spend Doom to trigger it? IF the players fight only part of the guards, does the GM need to spend Doom for the rest to hear the noise of battle and arrive? If the GM doesn't spend Doom, will they have too much Doom to use for explicit Doom spends like monsters abilities? And there are more examples of possible Doom spends, like spending 2 Doom to have the PCs be observed during their heist. Can the GM spend that even if the PCs succeed marvelously on all of their Stealth rolls? Isn't that going to feel cheap, if the PCs ghost the whole thing and the GM slips two Doom across the table and says that actually, they saw you leave so now the guard is after you? I think I have even less understanding of the Doom economy after this book than I did before it.

That said, the rest of the book is quite good. Besides the random heist tables, there's special thief Talents, lists of thief-appropriate gear, and a section of GM advice on how to run games based on around thieves. Some of this is player facing--unlike standard Conan protagonists, who are probably going to be heavily armed and armored, or at least have a couple among their number that are heavily armed and armored that the others can hide behind, thieves will of necessity have little armor and no large weapons. Armor makes noise, it makes the wearer stand out, and it makes sneaking and climbing and wriggling through tight spaces and all the other activities that thieves have to do as part of their craft much more difficult. In addition, if a thief has to fight any guards toe-to-toe, they're already failed the most important part of their mission. Now they either have to murder all the guards, which will bring down the hammer from city authorities, or they get away with someone having seen their face and able to describe them.

Unless they dress like a ninja, of course. That's always an option.

The description of Nemedia, Brythunia, Corinthia, and Zamora is pretty pedestrian--they're mostly kingdoms with weak central authority so that thieves are able to thrive there, though Nemedia has a bit stronger government as befits its rivalry with Aqualonia. The city descriptions are usually explicit about where exactly the merchants of various goods are located in the city, which confused me until I realized that it was so the GM could describe where everything was so that the PCs could make their plans on what to steal and where to run afterwards and the GM would know where in the city to set their heist. The best part was, of course, the spider-god of Yezud, because everything is better with spider-gods.

"It's not so much the dues," the small man said. "It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God's temple."
The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. "I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you."
The small man shrugged. "I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me."
-Fritz Leiber, The Swords of Lankhmar

I didn't find much of interest to me in Conan the Barbarian, but the heist tables alone make Conan the Thief worth it for me.