I feel that GURPS Conan provided a broader base for adventuring, perhaps because it drew on the pastiches as well as the original stories, which increased the available background material. Yes, the non-Howard stories themselves were stylistically inferior, but they fleshed out whole sections of the Hyborian world for which little or no information was previously available. (When writing serial fiction, it's okay to leave big chunks of the setting undefined, but not so in an RPG.) The GURPS version also presented magic as much more esoteric and rare than the OGL version, IMO, which seemed to be trying for a compromise between its D&D (high-magic) heritage and the subject matter. The GURPS combat rules were too involved, but it would have served OGL Conan to move away from that example, not toward it.
