Quote from: S'mon;832003For 'real' Conan, there's no Divine magic since there are no 'real' gods. The OGL Conan's magic system looked decent if you remove Defensive Blast from the edition I own (1st).

Actually in "real" Conan there are "real" gods. They just tend to do really nothing mutch at all aside from the occasional vision or whatever.

Quote from: dbm;831996It worked really well in play. We had a campaign that ran for about 6 months and was a blast. Good point included:

For me that was a laundry list of mostly un-impressing things, or even one or two kill points to get into it.

Quote from: Omega;831968Personally TSR's Conan RPG is still the best of the lot Ive seen so far.

Crazy as it may sound. I would not recommend my own Conan parody book as it was done to the comics which were substantially higher in magic tone than the source overall.

What book?  I would love to look into it.

Quote from: Omega;831968I was totally unimpressed with the d20 Conan book. Tits on every other page does not a better game make.

No, and they weren't all that good tits either, however, the mechanics worked pretty well for what it did, I've had more fun than arguments with it, as opposed to the other 3.x stuff.

Quote from: Pete Nash;832046Limiting Magic Point recovery is core RQ6

Dammit, Nash! I was going to get kudos for that:rant:

Actually, the majority of my ideas and inspirations has come from a BRP-incarnation or another, not least RQ6.

I don't think the traditional D&D split between "divine" and "arcane" fits Hyboria.

There are examples of "divine" magic though.

Conan is visited by Epimetrius the Sage in "The Phoenix on the Sword". The sage has been dead for 1500 years and was a follower of Mitra. Epimetrius enchants Conan's sword so he can take on the demon Thoth Amon summons. Basically there is divine intervention.

Also Thoth Amon in only granted the use of magic through the serpent ring of Set. It could be argued the source of his power is divine magic granted by Set.

In the story "The Frost Giants Daughter", Atali is the daughter of Ymir (a god). When Conan finally catches her at the end of the story she asks for her father to save her. She vanishes in a flash of lightning.

I disagree that "divine" magic has no place in Hyboria. I also disagree that EVERY spell caster is evil/corrupt. The majority of the magic users Conan encounters are, but not all of them.

Quote from: Omega;832056For me that was a laundry list of mostly un-impressing things, or even one or two kill points to get into it.

The whole was greater than the sum of its parts for my group. We had great fun.

It encouraged really good roleplaying. A big chunk of that was the campaign rather than the rules, but considering most of the 3.5 games I've played in degenerated into rules trudges that was a big plus. The rules supported the feel of the campaign really well.

It's the only 3.x derivative I would consider playing today.

Quote from: dbm;832064It's the only 3.x derivative I would consider playing today.

It's the only one I'd run.

And I've played Pathfinder ONLY when a certain local DM does.  I refuse to play that game without him.

But Mongoose Conan, I'd be there with bells on.

Eh, it's far from certain there are "no gods" in Hyboria.  Phoenix on the Sword and Black Colossus give evidence to Mitra, Hour of the Dragon deals with Asura, and of course what is Set actually?

Whether or not there are "gods" as opposed to daemons, spirits, alien intelligences, whatever is a different question from whether or not they grant any power to priests in a manner different from sorcerers.  Here's where RQ6 gets it right, because Divine Magic is powerful, but Sorcery or even Mysticism could be the method of instruction for a "religion" with a god/demon/entity that does or does not exist.

As Pete said, all the S&S tropes of spellpower through sacrifice, dreams of the lotus, recovery at places of power are all options in RQ6.  The magic system is very Toolkit-ish.

Right now my "RQ6 Conan Magic Profile" looks like this:

• Sorcery - the primary means of magic for PCs, with Invocation sources usually based on tomes and scrolls.
• Animism - will be there for Picts, Nordheimr, etc... unsure yet how powerful it will be for things like discorporation.
• Mysticism - Probably NPC only and only from "The East", a Totemic type of warrior would be animist I'm thinking.
• Theism - Probably not.  Something akin to a Theist miracle may be possible, but it would be just that, a miracle, a special happening, not something you could recreate.
• Folk Magic - For the most part folded into Sorcery.  The least of the spells may still exist as Folk Magic, if so, each on will be its own skill.
  
• Summoning - Still deciding to what degree I want to bring in CoC spells, early Stormbringer summoning, MRQII Elric summoning, Magic World, etc...

For me, figuring out a magic system usually begins with the cosmology, once that's in place, all forms of magic tend to flow down logically once you get the building blocks of reality sorted out.  With Conan, it's difficult, because it's easy to get a very Conanish feeling game up and running without any PC magic at all, and there are some very important decision points to make.
1. Mitra vs. Set - Good/Evil dualism?  This question is really part of the broader question...
2. Lovecraft - Is the Lovecraftian "Mythos" (of course Howard would only have been exposed to LC himself, all the later Mythos creation was after Howard was dead) the sole "truth" of the universe, or are there "non-Mythos" (as we would call them) sources of magic.
For example, a purely Lovecraftian look at Hyboria could easily use the Deus Ex Nyarlathotep trope and have Mitra, Set, Asura all be cults set up by that entity for inscrutable purposes.

The high-level stuff you could certainly argue doesn't matter because the players will never know one way or another and while structure can help focus it also by definition limits.  I like to try and come up with as much "Truth" for myself as possible, even if I'm the only one who will ever know it.  

Quote from: dbm;832064The whole was greater than the sum of its parts for my group. We had great fun.

It encouraged really good roleplaying. A big chunk of that was the campaign rather than the rules, but considering most of the 3.5 games I've played in degenerated into rules trudges that was a big plus. The rules supported the feel of the campaign really well.

It's the only 3.x derivative I would consider playing today.

I moved away from Mongoose Conan mainly because of the Class system.  They did a great job of taking all the classes and putting them together in different ways making them culturally relevant as well as really removing the need for multi-classing.  The real problem was, as always for me and mine, the formula of "Level X means a hard cap of Y Skill points and Z Feat points".  A classed system of any kind means Primary Function, and a level system means What Kind of Things you Fight.  Once you fill in Skill Points and Feats to make sure that for any given Level X you can fulfill your Primary Function, that leaves very little for learning Old Stygian or whatever.  

As one of my players once put it "I can be a great warrior who men will follow, but have no ability to lead them, or I can be a great leader of men who can't actually stand in the battle line."

Perhaps if I had gone the route of coming up with a system of alternate experience or a way of learning skills/feats I would have stayed with it, but I heard about this new version of MRQ done by Loz and Pete...the rest was history as they say.

There's also Blood Magic for Legend, not sure what Pete thinks about the editing of the published version. It could well suit a Conan campaign, also has a fair bit on summoning and demons.

It's actually fairly simple to "explain away" Mitra by imagining Epimetreus as a sorcerer reaching through time to oppose the forces of darkness, and Ymir as a frost giant god-king rather than a literal god.

This is my own headcanon, anyways. You can work "gods" in the conventional and/or D&Desque sense into the Hyborian Age mythos, I just feel explaining them away is both less work and fitting with the Howardian ethos.

Quote from: Bilharzia;832070There's also Blood Magic for Legend, not sure what Pete thinks about the editing of the published version. It could well suit a Conan campaign, also has a fair bit on summoning and demons.

The demon summoning subsystem is nearly verbatim that from Mongoose Elric, IIRC. The bits on blood sacrifice are of obvious interest. I don't recall whether it includes the POW-pawning cult rules, which I feel would be the best way to handle eldricht pacts in a Conanesque milieu.

Quote from: The Butcher;832078The demon summoning subsystem is nearly verbatim that from Mongoose Elric, IIRC. The bits on blood sacrifice are of obvious interest. I don't recall whether it includes the POW-pawning cult rules, which I feel would be the best way to handle eldricht pacts in a Conanesque milieu.

I didn't realise that, interesting, and I suppose the RQ Mongoose Elric system is out of print now. I don't think there are any cult rules in Blood Magic.

Quote from: The Butcher;832077It's actually fairly simple to "explain away" Mitra by imagining Epimetreus as a sorcerer reaching through time to oppose the forces of darkness, and Ymir as a frost giant god-king rather than a literal god.

This is my own headcanon, anyways. You can work "gods" in the conventional and/or D&Desque sense into the Hyborian Age mythos, I just feel explaining them away is both less work and fitting with the Howardian ethos.

Yeah, the actual "literal god" thing I don't think is important, I mean what is your definition of a "literal god".  Does Ymir have power though, well, something does, because Frost-Giant King's Daughter ended with that gossamer shift in Conan's hands, and a group of Aesir to witness it.  Now you can explain that away by claiming it was a sorceress using her powers of illusion for everything, but Conan did grab her cloth, or you can explain away the Mitra statue in Black Colossus by claiming it was Epimetreus speaking through the statue, but at some point the explanations defy Occam's Razor.

If Epimetreus is just a powerful sorcerer, in essence just a different thinking/non-insane Xaltotun or Thoth-Amon, did he manufacture or harness an entire religion simply to fight Set? If there is no real Mitra, is there a real Set?  Sometimes the simplest answer is that yes, Ymir, Mitra, Set and Asura are real.  What they are, however, is always going to be conjectural from a canonical standpoint because Howard doesn't tell us.

Also, if Epimetreus is just another sorcerer, then how does he escape the insanity and corruption that almost every other sorcerer shows.  The only people who seem to have some magical aspect and not evil/insane/corrupted are those that have a religious aspect to them: Epimetreus, Hadrathus, Zelata, Kalanthes.  It starts to beg the question of possibly a different form of sorcery or power source.

Ymir a Frost Giant of incredible power, possibly some "elder race" going back to the Thurian Age or before, sure I can see it, with the Aesir and Vanir we know and love (Woden, Freya, etc) be warlords and shamans from the post-Hyborian Age the stories of which were kept alive through legend.

Quote from: The Butcher;832077It's actually fairly simple to "explain away" Mitra by imagining Epimetreus as a sorcerer reaching through time to oppose the forces of darkness, and Ymir as a frost giant god-king rather than a literal god.

This is my own headcanon, anyways. You can work "gods" in the conventional and/or D&Desque sense into the Hyborian Age mythos, I just feel explaining them away is both less work and fitting with the Howardian ethos.

The Xoth "Spider God's Bride" approach is that there are no real deities, all gods are some kind of monstrous creature or entity - extraterrestrial, demonic, undead, prehistoric. They can be worshipped and theres some benefit both ways, and people may think of them as gods but the truth is they are 'just' a powerful creature.