Conanesque flavor?

[gizmo33]

I've had success with mysterious things and notes to characters, where only they see or hear something happening. And I make sure that those things are real often enough to make them wonder.

Cool. Typical DnD encourages the players to analyze things in terms of game stats. It also makes successful adventuring part-and-parcel with perception. Novel authors can heavily manipulate perception to a degree that most DMs cannot. The reader can be denied information to suit the story, whereas denying a player information usually has to follow some game logic, and a non-railroad DM can't always cover all of his tracks.

Again, I'm an agnostic and I think that you can create mystery in the game under certain circumstances. Another thing is that DnD is already very Conan in it's material (IIRC Gygax lists it as one of his influences). To get it to be more "Conan" might be bumping into the limitations of the RPG game as a way of telling a story.

Then again, I could be over-thinking it. Stygian Lotus and pseudo-natural creatures might fit the bill. I've always liked the Serpent Folk and the Grandfather of Assassins ideas/stories myself. If you already have a setting though, I guess adventure ideas is more what you're looking for. As I said, palace intrigue might be a way of getting PCs more intimately familiar with the setting than they normally would be by just exploring/monster bashing (which would be very Conanesque too).

 

[Voadam]

Conan elements:

Beautiful scantily clad women, sometimes in need of rescue.

Decadent civilized foes who can fall to the blade of a true warrior.

Beasts

Foul dark magic

Heroic elemental descriptions of the PCs and their actions. Not long descriptions, but look to some of the source material for samples. Howard does these well.

Swearing by the gods.

 

[Deadguy]

And don't forget that characters should lose their clothes to battles pretty often, and bestride the land in bloodstained loincloths!

 

[gizmo33]

Perhaps introduce a rare silk that's worth 10,000 gp/sq yard so that PCs loincloths can be worth enough so that they don't break the wealth guidelines for PC level.

 

[Pbartender]

The problem I have with "impossibly immense" and similar themes (while a distinct theme in the literature as you point out) is that I don't know what "impossibly immense" would mean to a typical DnD PC who can teleport around places instantly and kill a rhinocerous with one sword swing. In the fantasy game genre, and DnD game in particular, there's already an expectation for a certain magic level. Players seem to be understandibly jaded, and an elf wizard is really as "impossible" as a huge stone block.

It's not the immensity of stone (that just forms the base of the description), but the other details that set the tone... As I said, you describe the stones that make up the temple as, "Impossibly immense, perfectly joined, perfectly smooth." If someone wants specifics as to how big "impossibly immense" is, you say, "It's difficult to tell... You must get very, very close just to find a joint between two stones. The joints are so perfectly fit together, and the surface of the wall is so uniformly smooth that as soon as you focus on one seam in the face of the wall, you lose sight of all the others, your sense of perspective grows dim, and you begin to grow dizzy." If they persist, force them to make Will saves or become sickened.

In the adventure that I originally used these ideas, my players found their way to a "Valley of the Lost" in order to retrieve an artifact. In the middle of the valley were a pair of Aztec/Maya-styled pyramid/ziggurat/temples.

I described the temples themselves as being built out of "immense blocks of vaguely greenish stone, perfectly smooth, and perfectly joined". At the top of the temple was an alter with blood-channels, and a circular well leading down to the lower levels. Three rings of indecipherable runes and sigils circled the well, and a faint, cool breeze constantly blew out of it.

The lower levels were made of the same green stone, except the stones are covered in ancient writing that shifts and changes everytime the PCs try to read it. All the rooms were empty, except the room with the statue and the pool. A great artifact that the players were hunting was in that room, and a Pseudonatural Kraken (tentacles on top of tentacles!), the "God" of the pygmies, lived in the bottomless pool.

The players were really creeped out. They didn't even bother to fight the Kraken (which they could have beaten with only modest difficulty, since it was confined to the pool)... They just snatched the artifact and ran.

 

[ValhallaGH]

Any tips for giving an adventure a Conan feel?

Crazy cults, shiney jewels, girls to rescue and opposition of an otherworldly nature. That's the checklist for a Conan adventure. 65% of Howard's Conan stories have all of those traits and the remainder have most of them.

Conan-feel adventures need to incorporate those elements with the same feel that Howard's stories and the many immitators have managed to keep. Pbartender's post does a great job with suggestions for flavorful descriptions to use to creep out some of the most jaded players.
Just think of how you would describe it if you were playing Cthulhu and you won't be far off.


Now, if you want not only a Conanesque adventure but also Conanesque heroes then you'll want to shift systems slightly. I recommend Iron Heroes, because it's awesome, but the d20 Conan RPG by Mongoose publishing has been touted as being very good. Both systems allow for heroes to run around imitating Conan as they adventure, usually with very little money invested into equipment.

 

[Quartz]

For standard characters, a quick-and-dirty way to get the sword-over-sorcery feel is to say that there's a buried artefact which makes all Evocations only 50% effective or even renders them impossible, while perhaps also boosting Divination and Illusion. No Fireballs!

 

[Emirikol]

Our D&D games over the past 5 or so years have been set in Hyboria (using the 36+ human variation races instead of elves and stuff).

Our Conanesque elements:
* Beautiful women
* Lots of lower-level foes to cleave
* Wizards/sorcerers use incredibly obscure magic
* Lotus
* All monsters must have tentacles (If you're using D&D monsters, you'll lose that feel as soon as someone says "oh, that's just an orc.") and are NOT meant to be defeated..they're meant to be run from..or find another way to kill them other than toe-to-toe
* Characters need weaknesses (AC 25 will kill your game). Work on non-magic methods.
* You need more dire and advanced animals
* The difference between monsters, animals, and humans needs to be STARK
* Players need to know that they need to think twice about attacking wizards..because you as the DM IGNORE EL's when it comes to monsters and wizards.

The COMICS are one of the most excellent sources of adventure for Conan, as are any of the original stories and pastiches. Right now, i'm using the Grim Grey God theme

jh





..

 

[The_Gneech]

*Disallow spellcaster heroes, make NPC spellcasters have to multiclass with a non-spellcasting class (particularly Aristocrat or Expert)

*throw most magic items out the window

*use VP/WP and Class Defense Bonuses instead of straight HP

*halve or chuck most monster DR

*have the characters lose their equipment ... a LOT

-The Gneech

 

[Gentlegamer]

I would definitely use some sort of system to allow for the PCs to be knocked out and captured from time to time. I think WP/VPs would work.