Quote from: CRKrueger;832086The 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.

Pelleas, from Hour of the Dragon, seemed sane enough too, and not religious.

In any case, when I ran my Hyborian Age games, I did not set off to simulate the Hyborian Age in full, hardcore depth; Howard, like Lovecraft, never aimed for consistency and continuity, so to ensure a lifelike game world, choices were made; and unlike the good people who wrote Call of Cthulhu, bless their hearts, and crammed in just about everything... I am a lazy bum, and felt it would be less work to mostly ignore the manifestations of Mitra and other supernatural patrons of not being a complete crazy douchebag. Not having any sorcerous PCs that weren't douchebags helped.

I just wanted cackling sorcerous madmen commanding armies of fanatics and summoning horrors from beyond. Having do-gooder gods of doing good sort of got on the way of the whole mighty-thewed men of action being the only thing standing between this world and eldricht annihilation.

Huh, it does look like the Mongoose Elric is OOP. They had a firesale on the PDF when they switched from RQ to Legend, but it's not available for sale anymore.

The book is still available through the secondary market at a reasonable price. (I doubt Loz would be at liberty to say but maybe it will resurface as an RQ6 module.)

Quote from: The Butcher;832102Pelleas, from Hour of the Dragon, seemed sane enough too, and not religious.

Having do-gooder gods of doing good sort of got on the way of the whole mighty-thewed men of action being the only thing standing between this world and eldricht annihilation.

Well, yeah there's definitely no "do-gooder" gods apparent.  Even if Mitra is a God, even if he's in fact a manifestation of the "Abrahamic Father", he's definitely not an interventionist deity with crusading paladins.  If he is aware of the mighty-thewed men of action standing in the way of Set's domination, he's moving things in mysterious ways if he's involved at all.

Pelias might not be of the corrupted and alien sort that Tsotha-Lanti and Xaltotun are, but since a giant snake runs from him because it can sense his soul, I think it's safe to say he might be a bit strange and his alliance with Conan is one of convenience and revenge.

Quote from: jedimastert;832063I 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.

Yep. People tend to assume incorrectly that common elements are universal truths about Conan. But an RPG IMO needs to accommodate for such possibilities rather than just exclude uncommon elements.

Quote from: Omega;832055Actually in "real" Conan there are "real" gods.

No there aren't. There's zero evidence in REH Conan of actual divine gods with personalities. Obviously magical stuff happens, and there are ghosts and monsters, but none of it needs real gods to explain it.
Offhand I can't recall anything that is clearly a real demon (in the Judeo-Christian sense), as opposed to an alien entity from the Outer Dark, either.

Marvel Conan certainly has real gods (and real demons). Marvel Conan departs a long way from REH Conan.

The Frost Giant Ymir, his sons and daughter, seem to be supernatural entities of some kind. They show no evidence of being gods. You could call them spirits. The story also comes across as a kind of fever-dream by a wounded man.

Quote from: CRKrueger;8320672. 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.  

For myself I would definitely seek to AVOID answering this to myself for a Conan game. The agnosticism, the unknown and unknowable truth of Set, Asura, Mitra et al, is very much part of the Hyborean mythos. Crom on his mountain with 300hp really detracts from that.  

I would restrict explicit Great Old One cults to aberrant sorcerers, degenerate beastmen et al, just as Lovecraft did.

Quote from: CRKrueger;832086Ymir 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.

That's how I would do it re Ymir & co.

I would suggest Epimetreus was a man of genuine religious faith, and that this faith protected him from the corruption that typically befalls sorcerers.

Quote from: Skywalker;832139Yep. People tend to assume incorrectly that common elements are universal truths about Conan. But an RPG IMO needs to accommodate for such possibilities rather than just exclude uncommon elements.

Agreed.  I think what Howard was showing in his stories is that power, whether sorcerous or aristocratic, tends to corrupt - not that the magic itself is corrupting.

From that perspective I don't believe any RPG necessarily needs rules for corruption. Give PCs the ability to collapse a cliff, manifest rolling balls of fire or summon a chthonic entity, and they will soon succumb to the same negative personality traits shown by Hyborian Age sorcerers.

Its a seductive and slippery slope as Loz and I found in practice with our Elric magic rules (pacts especially)... and in my own Monster Island campaign where newer PCs sought out and threw themselves into the most extreme cults they could find in exchange for any sort of magical power, no matter the dangers involved in casting it.

Quote from: Pete Nash;832155Agreed.  I think what Howard was showing in his stories is that power, whether sorcerous or aristocratic, tends to corrupt - not that the magic itself is corrupting.

Well said. Absolutely agree.

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.

I was always driven to despair what happened behind the scenes to the manuscripts Loz and I wrote whilst working for Mongoose. However I have no opinion about what they did to Blood Magic as I never received a courtesy copy. So I've never seen the final book. All I know for sure is that they cut maybe a third of the material.

Quote from: Pete Nash;832159I was always driven to despair what happened behind the scenes to the manuscripts Loz and I wrote whilst working for Mongoose. However I have no opinion about what they did to Blood Magic as I never received a courtesy copy. So I've never seen the final book. All I know for sure is that they cut maybe a third of the material.

That's pretty ridiculous! I must say I liked Blood Magic, but it makes sense that it was heavily trimmed. It doesn't have the flow that your stuff usually has.

On another point, I think that the magic point economy is an absolutely crucial difference to make Conanesque play work in RQ6. it's right there in the rules but I'm not surprised at the idea being greeted with enthusiasm when mentioned in isolation as it was up thread. If there is NO natural recuperation of magic points, and only that gained from sacrifice, worship, places of power, or artifacts you immediately have sorcerers who have to play a long game, from the shadows. Add to that the chance of Bad Things happening unless you use ritual casting times, and perhaps a mechanic whereby there are penalties also unless the stars are right, or the moon is full, or whatever, and you need arcane and esoteric components, and magic becomes not really an option for use while adventuring and instead the whole focus of am adventure, either to disrupt a blasphemous ritual or to carry one out .... All of which feels like it really fits the source material. Note that I'm not quoting chapter and verse from Howard stories. I fully admit that I don't know them well enough, though I've read plenty. For me, there's a sort of gestalt that includes Clark Ashton Smith and other S&S that probably exists mainly in my mind .... But I think I share that idea of what fits the genre feel with many of you.

Quote from: baragei;832024Take RQ's sorcery (because priests don't cast spells because they channel divine power, they cast spells because they're learned), chuck out MP-regeneration and let wizards gather their juice by pacts,  sacrifices and the stars are right-rituals

I'd actually take a slightly different approach, inspired by the Faith pool used by RQ6's divine magic.  MP regenerate slowly (1/day?  1/week?), but are useless until you use pacts/sacrifices/rituals to convert them into Spell (or whatever) points that can then actually be used magically.

For pacts specifically, I could go one of two ways.  Either the pact allows a small number of MP to convert automatically into usable SP as soon as they're recovered or, more likely, just use the divine magic mechanics for pacts.  Calling on a supernatural entity to use its power on your behalf is calling on a supernatural entity to use its power on your behalf, regardless of whether that entity is a proper "god" or not.

Quote from: The Butcher;832102Pelleas, from Hour of the Dragon, seemed sane enough too, and not religious.

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I'd also toss Yag-Kosha (from Tower of the Elephant). as a non-divine, non-insane, non-evil sorcerer

Quote from: Doom;832218I'd also toss Yag-Kosha (from Tower of the Elephant). as a non-divine, non-insane, non-evil sorcerer

Who was also not human, he was one of those 'Alien' things, in which Magic was 'normal' for.

And the thing with Magic in a Conan setting is not so much that no hero can have it, it's that it's RARE, it's can corrupt (not corrupting, it CAN but if you have the will, it may not.  But some of the things the rituals needed are not very nice things, like people) and it's outright dangerous to anyone near it.

It also has very few outright combat magic, like Fireball in D&D.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;832250Who was also not human, he was one of those 'Alien' things, in which Magic was 'normal' for.

Hadrathus and Zelata also spring to mind, from Hour of the Dragon.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;832250It also has very few outright combat magic, like Fireball in D&D.

But those exist too, such as the exploding balls of flying mist in People of the Black Circle.

IMO magic in Conan is good in combat. Mast sorcerers that Conan faces are difficult to overcome with violence. The real difference is that as a sword stroke in Conan's world can kill pretty handily it makes magic seem less combat effective than its D&D equivalent.