Unironically the older rpg main book is full of lore. If u want more specific stuff then there are books focusing on individual countries like Stygia(Serpent of the South) and religion.
Conan the Cimmerian. It’s best to read the stories in the order that Howard wrote them since they’re self contained and jump around a lot chronologically. The best in this book are ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, ‘Beyond the Black River’ and ‘Rouges in the House’. However the best regarded Conan story is ‘Red Nails’ and was written later.
Seconding this series. It's three books total and contains all of Howard's Conan stuff. It's worth reading on its own (there's a reason Conan is so pervasive in pop culture) but it also establishes everything essential about the setting.
Obviously. But I need something for reference.
The Modiphius 2d20 game (Conan - Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of) has a pretty solid setting chapter. It's 60 pages and organized by region. The book's no longer in print but you can find it in the PDF share thread (and you don't even need to feel guilty about pirating it).
This dude has great lore content however if you are not into podcast like videos (more free talk than a specific script) it may be hard to grasp
https://youtube.com/@GrimDarkHalfOff
Also like said 2d20 it's really good specially the specific books: Mercenary is about wars at the Hyborian Age and the middle east regions, Wanderer is about the far east, Pirate well take a guess, Barbarian about north regions, Horrors is a full bestiary and it expands a lot on the Lovecraftian side of Hyboria and so on
The Marvel timeline is also kinda good so
Grim Dark is too much of a Lovecraft fan for my tastes, he will plaster over Conan lore in favour tofLovecraft like what he did with Ishtar in his gods series replacing her with Shub-Nigguroth. A lot of what he pulls from isn’t even Conan lore.
that channel is trash >calls the world "conan" when it's the hyborian age >uses shit not written by howard as a source >uses vidyaslop like conan exiles as a source
3 months ago
Anonymous
>uses vidyaslop like conan exiles as a source
I mean I've played enough of Exiles to figure out that its at least semicanon
There's nothing north of the Vilayet Sea in any map or the og lore REH created so kinda makes sense that they use said region as something like the Wall in ASOIAF >calls the world "conan" when it's the hyborian age
I get that cuz that's how the mainstream calls it even here (heck they did it a few days ago on another thread about "quintessential media for fantasy")
But yeah regarding your second point and
Grim Dark is too much of a Lovecraft fan for my tastes, he will plaster over Conan lore in favour tofLovecraft like what he did with Ishtar in his gods series replacing her with Shub-Nigguroth. A lot of what he pulls from isn’t even Conan lore.
I understand why people dont like that even I struggle to see his stuff when he adds lovecraftian stuff (which I get it, REH and Lovecraft were pen pals but still) and even confuses me at times because he's not specific about what was og REH lore and what isnt (most of the time, he does it rarely)
3 months ago
Anonymous
>I mean I've played enough of Exiles to figure out that its at least semicanon
It isn't canon at all
Only what howard wrote is canon >I get that cuz that's how the mainstream calls it even here (heck they did it a few days ago on another thread about "quintessential media for fantasy")
It's what morons call it
The world is called the Hyborian age
You don't call middle earth "frodo" or "aragorn", you don't call the world of star wars "luke skywalker"
It's the hyoborian age. Not Hyboria, not "conan" but the hyborian age, as howard outlined
3 months ago
Anonymous
Calm down, you spaz.
The comic books.
You have a lot to read kid.
Comics are cringe.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I don't mind the lovecraftian stuff. The main stories in Howard's books that tie in with Lovecraft lore are Xuthal of the Dusk in which Conan is lost in the desert and comes across an ancient palace made of a mysterious green material that has extremely complex alchemical technology in it that can manifest things into physical reality from the thoughts and dreams of the people who know how to work it, populated by a dwindling race of people addicted to black lotus who live in a catatonic dream like state and worship a horrific entity called Thog the Ancient who eats them, and The A Devil in Iron in which Conan is living as a Cossack raider and is lured to ancient ruins on an island by a Turanian governor for an ambush, but the ancient Demon Khosatral Khel awakens and supernaturally restores the ruins to their original state as the ancient city of Dagonia. Khosatral Khel is supposed to be some kind of offspring of the same Dagon that Lovecraft used
Just go to the australian gutenberg website (less copyright israeliteing there for some reason).
https://gutenberg.net.au/
And read the REH Conan section in whatever order you please. They're episodic and non-chronological as published anyway.
Conan the Cimmerian. It’s best to read the stories in the order that Howard wrote them since they’re self contained and jump around a lot chronologically. The best in this book are ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, ‘Beyond the Black River’ and ‘Rouges in the House’. However the best regarded Conan story is ‘Red Nails’ and was written later.
The three Del Rey Conan books collect all the original stories in order of their writing, plus various unpublished fragments.
Pretty sure there's a Hyboria website out there that has a thorough gazetteer. But I don't give anything but pastiche honors to anyone except REH who wrote about Conan.
Original Conan Stories by Howard.
If you need some type of game, then TSR's Conan, which comes with a collection of lore
https://archive.org/details/tsr07014conanconanrpgboxedset/mode/2up
This book. No game stats. Just alphabetical entries on the world. It does, however, include stuff from pastiche works from authors other than Howard. This is my only criticism.
I mean, just read the stories and his Hyborian Age essay.
It's supposed to be an lost pre-history written by an author who died young so there's a lot of stuff that's unknown that you have to fill in yourself as we're seen with both the D20 and 2D20 RPGs. And I'm sure Howard would be fine with that, he definitely worked in a nod to HP Lovecraft's work with Tower of the Elephant.
The OG hyborian age doesn't really have much lore. Sure, you gotta mind REH's essay for the history, but you don't have detailed chronologies of kings, pantheons, precise maps. Basically you gotta get a feeling for the nations and the wildlands Conan ventured into. Howard was pretty much a wide-brush, just wave this idea into story now type of guy: consider how The Black Stranger was easily reskinned as a piratical story (and how from the start the picts were thinly disguised american indians).
That being said, yep, the 2d20 game is pretty solid as a gazeteer. I do appreciate most of the worldbuilding they do in the other books, if you really need inspo for specific locals, but definitely don't feel constrained by that.
(I'll add this doesn't mean that you gotta diss all the stories by other authors, by any means: the conan extended pseudocanon works fine, it didn't fall into derlethism and the usual bullshit people think is "lovecraftian". But even then, it's not gonna be something a là Tekumel or Middle Earth)
Unironically the older rpg main book is full of lore. If u want more specific stuff then there are books focusing on individual countries like Stygia(Serpent of the South) and religion.
Have you tried the source material?
Obviously. But I need something for reference.
Bravo, anon. It's nice to know some folks in this hobby still read.
There's an essay about the setting called "The Hyborian Age" that should be in there. It's basically a huge lore dump.
Where should i start?
In what order?
Conan the Cimmerian. It’s best to read the stories in the order that Howard wrote them since they’re self contained and jump around a lot chronologically. The best in this book are ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, ‘Beyond the Black River’ and ‘Rouges in the House’. However the best regarded Conan story is ‘Red Nails’ and was written later.
Seconding this series. It's three books total and contains all of Howard's Conan stuff. It's worth reading on its own (there's a reason Conan is so pervasive in pop culture) but it also establishes everything essential about the setting.
The Modiphius 2d20 game (Conan - Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of) has a pretty solid setting chapter. It's 60 pages and organized by region. The book's no longer in print but you can find it in the PDF share thread (and you don't even need to feel guilty about pirating it).
This dude has great lore content however if you are not into podcast like videos (more free talk than a specific script) it may be hard to grasp
https://youtube.com/@GrimDarkHalfOff
Also like said 2d20 it's really good specially the specific books: Mercenary is about wars at the Hyborian Age and the middle east regions, Wanderer is about the far east, Pirate well take a guess, Barbarian about north regions, Horrors is a full bestiary and it expands a lot on the Lovecraftian side of Hyboria and so on
The Marvel timeline is also kinda good so
Depends in what exactly you want to do
Grim Dark is too much of a Lovecraft fan for my tastes, he will plaster over Conan lore in favour tofLovecraft like what he did with Ishtar in his gods series replacing her with Shub-Nigguroth. A lot of what he pulls from isn’t even Conan lore.
that channel is trash
>calls the world "conan" when it's the hyborian age
>uses shit not written by howard as a source
>uses vidyaslop like conan exiles as a source
>uses vidyaslop like conan exiles as a source
I mean I've played enough of Exiles to figure out that its at least semicanon
There's nothing north of the Vilayet Sea in any map or the og lore REH created so kinda makes sense that they use said region as something like the Wall in ASOIAF
>calls the world "conan" when it's the hyborian age
I get that cuz that's how the mainstream calls it even here (heck they did it a few days ago on another thread about "quintessential media for fantasy")
But yeah regarding your second point and
I understand why people dont like that even I struggle to see his stuff when he adds lovecraftian stuff (which I get it, REH and Lovecraft were pen pals but still) and even confuses me at times because he's not specific about what was og REH lore and what isnt (most of the time, he does it rarely)
>I mean I've played enough of Exiles to figure out that its at least semicanon
It isn't canon at all
Only what howard wrote is canon
>I get that cuz that's how the mainstream calls it even here (heck they did it a few days ago on another thread about "quintessential media for fantasy")
It's what morons call it
The world is called the Hyborian age
You don't call middle earth "frodo" or "aragorn", you don't call the world of star wars "luke skywalker"
It's the hyoborian age. Not Hyboria, not "conan" but the hyborian age, as howard outlined
Calm down, you spaz.
Comics are cringe.
I don't mind the lovecraftian stuff. The main stories in Howard's books that tie in with Lovecraft lore are Xuthal of the Dusk in which Conan is lost in the desert and comes across an ancient palace made of a mysterious green material that has extremely complex alchemical technology in it that can manifest things into physical reality from the thoughts and dreams of the people who know how to work it, populated by a dwindling race of people addicted to black lotus who live in a catatonic dream like state and worship a horrific entity called Thog the Ancient who eats them, and The A Devil in Iron in which Conan is living as a Cossack raider and is lured to ancient ruins on an island by a Turanian governor for an ambush, but the ancient Demon Khosatral Khel awakens and supernaturally restores the ruins to their original state as the ancient city of Dagonia. Khosatral Khel is supposed to be some kind of offspring of the same Dagon that Lovecraft used
The three Del Rey Conan books collect all the original stories in order of their writing, plus various unpublished fragments.
Read the entirety of it, it's actually not a lot. Most editions would already have them arranged in the chronological order.
Just go to the australian gutenberg website (less copyright israeliteing there for some reason).
https://gutenberg.net.au/
And read the REH Conan section in whatever order you please. They're episodic and non-chronological as published anyway.
/thread
/gay
Pretty sure there's a Hyboria website out there that has a thorough gazetteer. But I don't give anything but pastiche honors to anyone except REH who wrote about Conan.
https://hyboria.xoth.net/
I found a bunch of the collected reprints of the b&w Marvel comics from the 1970s for $1 each at a garage sale.
Return to Road of Kings rpg book.
Original Conan Stories by Howard.
If you need some type of game, then TSR's Conan, which comes with a collection of lore
https://archive.org/details/tsr07014conanconanrpgboxedset/mode/2up
>It doesn't have to be an rpg book.
It does if you want it to be relevant to /tg/, else Ganker or Ganker.
Frick off, you wannabe janitor.
> What's the best source for CONAN lore?
My quivering pussy.
>bussi
This book. No game stats. Just alphabetical entries on the world. It does, however, include stuff from pastiche works from authors other than Howard. This is my only criticism.
Addendum: I don't think including stuff from pastiche works, as these can help a GM flesh out the setting for gaming. I just wish they were cited.
What if I wanted to flesh it out in my own way?
I don't mind some crossovers. I wonder who would do better if sent to Oz, Conan or John Carter?
I mean, just read the stories and his Hyborian Age essay.
It's supposed to be an lost pre-history written by an author who died young so there's a lot of stuff that's unknown that you have to fill in yourself as we're seen with both the D20 and 2D20 RPGs. And I'm sure Howard would be fine with that, he definitely worked in a nod to HP Lovecraft's work with Tower of the Elephant.
The comic books.
You have a lot to read kid.
I am.
The OG hyborian age doesn't really have much lore. Sure, you gotta mind REH's essay for the history, but you don't have detailed chronologies of kings, pantheons, precise maps. Basically you gotta get a feeling for the nations and the wildlands Conan ventured into. Howard was pretty much a wide-brush, just wave this idea into story now type of guy: consider how The Black Stranger was easily reskinned as a piratical story (and how from the start the picts were thinly disguised american indians).
That being said, yep, the 2d20 game is pretty solid as a gazeteer. I do appreciate most of the worldbuilding they do in the other books, if you really need inspo for specific locals, but definitely don't feel constrained by that.
(I'll add this doesn't mean that you gotta diss all the stories by other authors, by any means: the conan extended pseudocanon works fine, it didn't fall into derlethism and the usual bullshit people think is "lovecraftian". But even then, it's not gonna be something a là Tekumel or Middle Earth)
I want to have sex so bad bros
grindr is only few clicks away