mmadsen: actually, I would envision a conanesque "priest" as a social status, not as a class (just as Conan, the "barbarian" seems more like a fighter/rogue than the D&D berserker). Priests could be fighters, clerics (all of them with inflict, and no turning undead - maybe something else like two domain spells/level?), wizards or just about anything else. Several religions in my campaign have this loose definition of "priest" and it has worked well so far.
Demihumans should be either out or very rare. Indeed, it is obvious to me that the creators of Original D&D didn't really care about them - they are just fighters or mages with a few extra abilities. And, if you look at the famous NPCs of the Greyhawk campaign, you notice that each and every one of them was a human, with not a single nonhuman among the magic-users.
On world and feel: a "proper" Howard-type world would have lots of the following things: wastelands, jungles, decadent wizards, lots of cheesecake (Frazetta is a good example of this - Vallejo is
not ), uncaring gods, serpent-men, giant animals (and not too many dragons), unforgiving deserts, real evil and cruelty for its own sake, slavery as an accepted reality virtually everywhere, etc.
My campaign walks a middle ground between the standard fare and the world outlined above: the central areas would be pretty familiar to someone who hasn't heard about REH before, while the outer reaches are weird and exotic. I have found that REH, Clark Ashton Smith, Vance, Lovecraft and the Arabian Nights make for the best inspiration here - I even have a snow-covered
island called Hyperborea, and Khosala and Kutchemes too.
