So, /tg/ I'm fishing around for ideas and advice, if anyone

bump

Also looking for advice for a first time DM, and maybe anyone who's tried this sort of thing in particular

>>50063885
Barbarians of Lemura

>>50063885
Op, Barbarians of Lemuria is what you need. I prefer mythic edition and to give the game longevity i use 2d8 instead of 2d6. However its a fucking awesome game.

There's a Conan d20 book out there. Most of the classes are stuff like 'barbarian, scout, soldier, marksman' (i.e.no magic users,) but the system does a good job of making them feel and play different.

>>50063989
>>50064121
Looks pretty interesting. I like the idea of having casters, but nothing like the D&D Mage (Who can basically be a Party all on his own after a few levels and is just accompanied by meat shields)


>>50064135
I'd be interested in having more crude forms of magic. Big rituals, pacts with old gods, meticulous runic inscriptions and tattoos, Magic as crude and brutal as an axe, and just as powerful. Magic that costs the life of the caster, his sanity

Things like Shamanism, base alchemy, mysticism. Maybe even points where magic and pre-historic "science" cross. Manipulating certain energies and ingredients to create rain, something unknown, scary, mistrusted even by practitioners.

>>50064187
Casters are split between priests and mages in BoL (and alchemists if you use them). Mages can solve problems but its highly ritualised and slow for the most part. Combat is fast and fun, with room to improvise.

Either BoL or Mythras/RQ6

OP please read the original stories by Robert E Howard before you start. His stories are so much better than any other re edition of Conan it can't really be compared. Most other renditions just take the aesthetic idea and go with "hurr barbarian stronk". Howard's stuff are all masterpieces.

The answer is Barbarians of Lemuria.

>>50066017
It's quite contrary actually.
Howard wasn't a good writer. His stories are mediocore for most part, narration uninspiring, his characters evewd duller (basically one memorable character is the main protagonist, who just happens to be kind of 1930s mary sue equivalent).
He wasn't great worldbuilder, neither. his world is amalgamate of slightly fictionalised ancient/medieval cultures with little author's input, with supernatural elements mostly borrowed from his buddy, Lovecraft.
What made Conan really great is AESTHETICS, nothing more. Not only "barbarian" aesthetics, but also this mix of classical antiquity with orientalism, leather and steel of warriors mixing with marble, gold and silks of fabulously rich cities and empires. I'm not even sure if that's Howard's credit, or if early illustrators just imagined it that way and it got stuck.
But 1982 Conan movie beats all Howard's writings single-handedly and with no real effort. THIS is the real masterpiece, not those mediocore novellas that are important for starting something bigger than they are, but hardly on their own.

>>50066520
>Howard wasn't a good writer

Howard was a fantastic writer. Not so much in terms of plot or characters, you're right, but in terms of writing itself. The man was THE epitome of purple prose, the idea that English is the largest, most descriptive spoken language in the world and you can achieve immense subtleties by taking advantage of that and not shying away from your thesaurus.

Like, "blue", "cerulean", "sapphire", and "azure" are all technically synonymous, but each evoke a different feeling, a slightly different take on the color. Were his stories a canvas, Howard would be the sort who wrote in brilliant watercolors, each color deliberately chosen fro a specific reason and working together to create a whole story that a reader can viscerally *see* in his mind's eye.

What's even more incredible is that he did this at a time where George Orwell and Ernst Hemingway and others were trying their damndest to reduce English to nothing more than boring beige prose - short sentences, simple words, minimal descriptive text. If Howard painted in watercolors, these people were extolling the virtues of black pencil on white paper and nothing more.

There's a time and place for that, perhaps, but that time and place is not when attempting to write adventure stories. Give me purple over beige any day of the week.

File: Weird_Tales_December_1935.jpg (64KB, 400x591px) Image search: [Google]

64KB, 400x591px

>>50066520
>I'm not even sure if that's Howard's credit, or if early illustrators just imagined it that way and it got stuck.

It would have to be Howard's credit. From 1930 to 1935 he made more and more money for writing (in 1935 he made more than $2000, or more than $35,000 in today's money), and in 1936 was set to have made even more had he not committed suicide (depression plus the death of his mother means that he shot himself in his car in the parking lot of his mother's hospital not an hour after she was declared dead). However, his Conan stories only ever got art on the cover of Weird Tales three times, and none of them were very good (pic related). The overwhelming majority of what we consider to be the "classic" Conan art came well after his death in 1936.

So basically, people were reading his Conan stories in ever-larger numbers well before anyone was publishing art for them, which strongly suggests personal ability.

>>50066520
I completely disagree.

>>50066633
You I agree with.

And the themes of Conan. His ideals on civilization and life are central to the idea of sword and sorcery. And most Conan adaptations don't actually understand those ideas. They only go skin deep.

>>50067444
The 1982 Conan doesn't even touch on these ideas more than his dad's mediocre speech about a sword. Most of it is a revenge story where Conan is hardly the revenge seeking type. Maybe if it's not out of his way and he's still in the hot flash of anger. But he's too busy drowning himself in all life has to offer to try spend years on some all consuming cold calculated revenge.