It seems that a disagreement between gaming company Mongoose Publishing and the Conan license holders has led to the company parting ways with the Conan property:

A disagreement between ourselves and the licence holders has resulted in Conan being suspended in limbo. It is a tricky position – we cannot produce more material for the game (sales of further OGL Conan supplements will simply not justify the work required), and we have been forbidden to move the sword-swinging barbarian to a new games system.

As I said in a previous post, I’m not much of an active gamer, at least not to the degree of my fellow shield-bearers Brian Murphy and Deuce Richardson. I’ve never hosted or played a game of Mongoose’s Conan RPG, simply because I haven’t made the leap to actively seek out people for the simple purpose of The Game. Still, I find something immensely appealing about the roll of the die, the active imagination of mighty deeds and foul deviltry, and the arcane esoterica of the Dungeon Master. I currently own more than a few of the supplements Mongoose published, many by their resident loreman Vincent Darlage, since the art and scholarship was well worth reading in itself, though there are a few problems.

What problems, you ask? Well, I really think the “Spider-Thing of Poitain” (pictured above) should have remained in whatever hideous Bruce Jones comic or Leonard Carpenter pastiche it was spawned from. Same for a number of other creatures more befitting a Saturday morning cartoon: Hydragons, Brylukas, Frost-Worms, Giant Mantids, and the legendary Eiglophian Warden Sheep. I also disagree with the categorization of certain “elementals”: the dragon of “The Scarlet Citadel” as a birdlike “wind elemental,” the knight-barbecuing conflagration of “Black Colossus” as a salamanderesque “Fire Elemental,” the Demons of the Earth in the latter as “Earth Elementals” and so forth. It’s a rather glib generalization, and while they have a basis in classical mythology, its modern iterations are rather too Dungeons & Dragons for my liking. The classes are simple and effective, without resorting to the bizarre vagaries of Age of Conan’s Bear Shamans and Heralds of Xotli, but they lack a little flair as a result.

For although I have my share of problems with Mongoose’s interpretation of the Hyborian Age, it’s far and away one of the best “extended universes” out there, RPG or otherwise. It’s only in comparison to other properties that I can appreciate how closely it stuck to Howard, and how the source book was clear and concise in which elements were Howard, pastiche-derived, comic-derived, or inventions of Mongoose’s writers. Best of all, it had entire chapters and pages talking up Howard himself, and how it’s worth hunting down every one of his Conan tales, as well as his other fantasies and horrors, not just for inspiration, but because they’re great reads.

Let’s compare it to, for example, the Age of Conan board game. The game has four major countries to control: Aquilonia, Hyperborea, Turan, and Stygia. The latter two are represented fairly well. Aquilonia’s armies, however, are represented by a Romanesque soldier, complete with gladius, scutum, lorica segmentata and galea–a panoply unlike anything Howard ever described an Aquilonian wearing. Hyperborea’s armies are represented by the half naked, helmeted ogres of Dark Horse’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” arc. Conan has some “Conan cards” which include jewels and weapons the man used, stole, or otherwise came in contact with. Those expecting any trinkets or baubles from Howard–The Heart of Ahriman, the mark of Epimitreus, the Crown of Aquilonia, Khemsa’s Girdle, even an Akbitanan King’s Sword–will be disappointed, if not surprised, to see the Cobra Crown, the Heart of Tammuz, and the Sword of Atlantis: all pastiche creations.

Most irritating of all are the “adventure” cards, which detail what adventure Conan happens to be on, typically one for each region. While the narrative of a typical game takes place prior to the three King stories, the game still snubs Howard masterpieces “Red Nails” and “Beyond the Black River” in favor of pastiches like “Black Tears,” “Legions of the Dead” and “The Lair of the Ice Worm.” The single most annoying decision is the choice to usurp “The Black Stranger” for “The Treasure of Tranicos.” Sure, the other stories often have their limp Farnsworth/De Camp names (“The Slithering Shadow,” “Jewels of Gwahlur,” “The Hand of Nergal”), but “Tranicos” is so loaded with unpleasant history that it’s utterly anathema to me why they’d include it in favour of “The Black Stranger.”

Astonishingly, even the Age of Conan board game is closer than some Conan properties ostensibly based on the stories, as opposed to the film. 2007’s Conan game barely seems to have a handle on basic Hyborian Age geography, is practically nothing but original material save the character Conan himself, and what is from the stories is mishandled, mostly due to laziness in enemy design. Every batch of levels in the game, be it in the Black Kingdoms, Stygia, the Shemite deserts, Argos, or some half-sunken island, has roughly identical enemies. There are five main troop types: short, weak swordsmen; medium-height, tough swordsmen; tall, elite swordsmen; archers; and gigantic, dangerous, “sub-bosses.” This might be fine… if they did not duplicate this setup precisely for every environment, where Barachan pirates, Black Tribesmen, Argossean soldiers, Stygian warriors, Desert Shemites and even color-coded ghosts all have light infantry, heavy infantry, elite infantry, archers, and sub-bosses, who act in practically the same manner with little variation. Suffice to say, it doesn’t quite capture the variety of the Hyborian Age. It’s especially jarring seeing Stygian soldiers, supposedly warrior nobles “bred to battle and the hunt,” being cut down like cattle under the Cimmerian’s blade.  Everything else is completely made up, with no connection to the stories, or indication of any connection to the Hyborian Age save a few references to plagues and far off climes.

There are more, but they’re far too depressing to really explore. I’ll just say that an RPG anything like Conan the Adventurer, the Conan live-action series, or the upcoming film would be a grave disappointment after Mongoose’s turn. It wouldn’t be fair for me to compare Mongoose with Age of Conan since I haven’t played the latter, but for all Joel Bylos’ admirable enthusiasm and knowledge, there are certain things that I just can’t get over with–things he also dislikes, but can’t do anything about, due to the nature of video game development. At least in the Conan RPG, you don’t have to face the dreaded Spider Thing of Poitain if you don’t want to, or even acknowledge its existence: in Age of Conan, you can’t exactly remove all references to Dark Templars, the great shadow of Thoth-Amon looming in the night sky, or other things that you don’t agree with.

So what of the future of Conan in the RPG sphere? With the film in progress, it seems logical that CPI will lend the license to another gaming company. A candidate I would be in favor of is Chaosium: their work with Lovecraft and other Yog-Sothery authors has been highly impressive, and the collections of classic Cthulhoid horror authors are excellent resources for those new fans introduced to the writers through the game. There’s a certain appeal in a major RPG company like Wizards of the Coast, Steve Jackson Games, or Fantasy Flight gaining the license. I even have a morbid curiosity in seeing what Games Workshop would do with a “Hyborian Wars” type game, not least because it would lead to the interesting situation of Conan and The Lord of the Rings under one gaming company’s roof. The hosts of Mordor vs Conan’s Empire, anyone? It would be great fun seeing their takes on Cimmerian, Turanian, Stygian, and Shemite armies (though I’ll probably pass on their Aquilonian and Hyperboreans, which I doubt will be substantially different from the Aquiromians and Uberboreans we’ve been stuck with for ages). Perhaps they could take inspiration from the Conan forum’s resident miniature maestro Primeval:

There’s always the hope that Mongoose will get back in the bidding war, and regain the license. Though part of me is intrigued to see the different results a new home could provide, history has proven that the Hyborian Age is likely to be handled poorly. Most of the best attempts to put the Hyborian Age are in user-created content: the appropriation of historical miniatures for Hyborian Age armies (in the above example from Primeval, he used Wargames Foundry’s Baluchi swordsmen as Zuagir, a fairly good fit), modifications for computer games (such as Amra’s Hyborian mod for society-building strategy epic Civilization IV), or hacks for existing systems (as with Jason Vey’s modification of Dungeons & Dragons to suit a more Hyborian Age milieu). Mongoose had a strong back-and-forth with the community, with many contributions from the fans making their way into publication. Whoever takes up the mantle of the Conan RPG, they have a hard act to follow.