Conan Test Run Results

[John Kim]

OK, so I ran the Conan RPG one-shot at KublaCon a few weeks ago and thought I would report on it.  I had an earlier thread about it where I discussed some of my intentions.  (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10829 )  So as I arranged it, the key plot device that I am basing my game around is a gladiatorial fight against a bunch of monsters. But this fight is overseen by the Turanian empress. And the ultimate fate of the heroes will be determined by her whim. So even if they defeat the monsters, they may just be sent against even more impossible odds the next day. But by looking cool and sexy to her (or other nobles of her court), she may free them. So here the protagonists are going through a fight, but they must act with an eye towards what will look attractive to the empress.  In principle, this should force the players to deconstruct in their minds a little the nature of the stories.

Certainly gender and archetypes of masculinity were absolutely central to this event.  I spent a while on setting up the six PCs as a part of the design.  I have their descriptions and stats up on my http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/brawnythews/">Brawny Thews pages.  Now, the descriptions might seem a little flowery (my wife likened it to gay porn).  However, for comparison with my characters, here's a sample of Robert E. Howard's Conan writing. This bit is from "The Tower of the Elephant", first published in Weird Tales - March 1933.

He saw a tall, strongly made youth standing beside him. This person was as much out of place in that den as a gray wolf among mangy rats of the gutters. His cheap tunic could not conceal the hard, rangy lines of his powerful frame, the broad heavy shoulders, the massive chest, lean waist, and heavy arms. His skin was brown from outland suns, his eyes blue and smoldering; a shock of tousled black hair crowned his broad forehead. From his girdle hung a sword in a worn leather scabbard.

Compare with the various descriptions from my game:
(Cruaidh) Physically, he is a massive bull of a figure, with tree-like arms and brown curly hair in a thin fringe over the massive muscles of his chest. He has a short brown beard, which stands in contrast to his shaven head.
(Daor) Physically, he is rippling with muscles strung sleekly over a powerful frame, like the horses he breaks. His skin is deeply browned from outland suns, his eyes blue and brightly flashing, his face clean-shaven; while a shock of tousled black hair crowns his broad forehead.
(Eithriall) Physically, he is tall and broad and dark. A mat of thick black curly hair runs up his torso to cover the lean but powerful frame. His black hair is cropped short, ranging over a dark scarred face, with a trimmed mustache and eyes which pierce their prey with feral intensity.
(Cumal) Physically, he is sleekly built with broad shoulders, powerful arms, and thin waist. He moves with the quickness of a panther, and his brown skin gleams with the sun of the wastelands that colored it. He is clean-shaven, while a wave of deep brown hair crests his head, and his blue eyes smoulder beneath.
(Eanbotha) Physically, he is swift and powerful, moving like a watchful tiger. His sinewy arms move his sword in graceful but deadly curves. His long dark hair is generally tied back, while his deep brown eyes reflect the weight he bears.
(Canbotha) Physically, he is sleekly muscled and powerful, moving like a wolf -- with a silent casual walk that can burst into sudden savagery. His long dark hair falls loosely over his brawny shoulders, and his deep brown eyes alternately twinkle with laughter and flash with fire.

Not a great work of art, but at least an attempt. The tricky part is that I'm trying to solidly differentiate each of these from each other.  I think I did pretty well in that part.  

So the first half of the event was relatively linear narrative.  The historical setting was important, to establish the nature of Cimmeria compared to the invading Turanians.  I went with an old Theatrix trick for this one.  All of the PCs were going to be captured, so I planned to be up front with this and asked each player to describe how their own PC was captured in the battle.  

This would followed by an exploratory/discussion phase as they were brought to the capital city of Aghrapur and the arena.  I then had three dialogue scenes: an introduction by a Cimmerian slave girl who gives them information, then the meeting with the empress, then a report on the results by the slave girl.  This would then be followed by the gladiatorial combat.  

I chose as my monsters displacer beasts, because I thought they were symbolically a very rich choice.  The shifting, unnatural, cat-like pack of beasts were the antithesis of the straightforward barbarians.  The fight against them symbolized the struggle of archetypal men to fit into a world where the warrior is no longer ruler.  As a device for this, I had some colored cardboard disks which I flipped.  The players would roll to-hit for all attacks, but for each hit, I would ceremonially flip the disk to see whether the hit actually landed and did damage or not.  Anyway, after a good climactic fight, the idea was that based on the events of the fight, the empress would pick one of the barbarians as her favorite.  I didn't script anything past here, but presumably if he played his cards reasonably the empress would free him and his companions.  

Overall, I think the plot linearity actually melded into the theme.  The point here is that the Cimmerians are empowered not by their fighting skills per se, but rather by their sexual desirability (of which martial prowess is certainly a part).  So it is in many senses disempowering, while at the same time hopefully empowering as well via their social influence.  I've gone on rather at length here, so I think I'll save the after-action report for another post.

[Judd]

Wow, that is a deep fuckin' fight.  I know the Monster Manual lists Challenge Ratings but do they list metaphor about society ratings?

I like how it was set up, with the players having to impress their prowess upon the empress.  Huh.

Did it cut down on players rolling a 20 sider after saying, "I swing at the displacer beast," in order to show off.  That is a neat way to change the meaning of combat.  

I look forward to reading about more.

[Mike Holmes]

Now, the descriptions might seem a little flowery (my wife likened it to gay porn). However, for comparison with my characters, here's a sample of Robert E. Howard's Conan writing.

Heh, there've been many that have said that REH Conan sounds like gay porn. Of course appreciation of the human form is going to sound the same for gay or straight people, so that's a bit hard to swallow. In any case, I wouldn't worry about it.

You're not worried, are you? Just kidding. ;-)

The descriptions sound fine to me. Maybe not great art, but they don't have to be. I'm sure it worked out in play, right?

I think altering the "arena" (if you'll pardon the pun) from the arena to the social realities beyond is really a cool idea. See Kayfabe for similar. Looking forward to the results.

Mike

[John Kim]

OK, so notes on how this actually ran.  

I had five players out of six slots: Andrew (who I had played with in some Buffy games earlier), Brad (who had heard about the event from my post on the Mongoose Conan RPG forums), Gen (a gaming friend of mine), and a married couple Joanna and Don (who were new to me and primarily D&D3 players).  

There was some system discussion along with picking out characters.  It took a little while to get started, mostly because this was a 9AM event.  Andrew took Cumal (the romantic patriot, which didn't seem to click for him), Gen took Eithriall (the dark scary guy), Brad took Canbotha (the rebellious younger twin),  Don took Cruaidh (the older leader), Joanna took Daor (the wild young one with a way with animals).  This left the responsible older twin Eanbotha as an NPC, which unfortunately sidelined the sibling rivalry somewhat.  I should mention here that I spent some time on the miniatures for this -- most were selected from my friend Jim's painted minis, but two he painted for this, and I bought the displacer beasts (actually look-alike "Phase Cats" from Reaper) and gave them a simple tri-color painting.  They looked great and were I hope appreciated.  

The description of the beginning took longer than I thought, but that was because people had questions and seemed interested in the background.  For example, when I described how the Turanians had conquered Aquilonia, we talked briefly about how this relates to Conan and what he would have thought of that (having been King of Aquilonia).  The exception here was Andrew who I think was put off by this, unfortunately.  

We got to the capture and I outlined what their cell was like.  We mapped it out and they naturally had some questions about their possibilities for escape.  I maybe could have streamlined this a little, but I thought it was important to establish.  Then the slave girl Maev came to their cell and gave them her warnings.  Canbotha immediately started flirting with her which she naturally picked up on.  (I should note here about the purpose of Maev.  She is essentially an expository device to expose the subtext about interactions with the empress -- i.e. to prep the characters on what she will be like, and then later to report on the effect they had.  More importantly, you have to have scantily-clad slave girls. :-)  

Then came the meeting with the empress which I thought went swimmingly.  I went through how they were prepared: chained and then forcibly washed and dressed in fancy silk loincloths and slippers.  Then Joanna had a stroke of genius as she said that Daor refused to be exhibited that way, and he tore off his silk garments.  This of course infuriated the guard captain, and the other PCs eventually joined suite and also tore off their silks, except for Canbotha who naturally rebelled and said he wanted to look pretty for the empress.  

As a side note, the two women players were much more comfortable with the male sexuality than the men were.  This is perhaps unsurprising in retrospect, but it wasn't obvious to me at the time.  I had sort of expected the players to be all male.

So the empress walked in to find a row of stark naked barbarians defiantly staring back at her.  She got a little short of breath and clutched at her companion for support.  We role-played through the conversation, which is difficult to condense into a short summary.  Cruaidh talked the most, and they negotiated over what the Cimmerians' prospects were.  She bravely walked right up to within their reach after a bit.  And naturally, every so often in the conversation her eyes would stray downward lasciviously.  Cruaidh agreed to give a glorious battle for her at the promise of being released afterward.  The last bit was she talked to some of the others, and Eithriall dangerously talked back to her, and when she asked "How would you live?" he grabbed her head and promptly kissed her before quickly letting go.  She walked out after that with dignity but her eyes had widened with fear and surprise when it happened.  

There was then a fight I glossed over as the guards went to beat up Eithriall and the other Cimmerians joined in when they tried to drag him from the cell.  Mostly it was non-lethal but I had them stab Eithriall for some permanent damage (30hp or so) as they left.  

They then prepared for battle.  Some time during this, Maev returned and managed to get Canbotha to herself for a bit and jumped him.  He asked her about possibilities for escape, but she told him that she could only get him out, not his father and friends.  He at first refused, but he later passed a note to me that he took her up on that and disappeared in the night.  The player intended for Canbotha to try to help them in the arena, but I sort of put him off -- saying that he could help after the fight but not during.  He played the brother Eanbotha in the battle.  

I should mention that Maev told them a detail about the "Stygian hellcats" -- that they were a closely-bonded pride, and whoever kills the first one will immediately be mobbed by all the others who will drop whatever they are doing to attack the killer.  This gave an element of group bonding and sacrifice to the fight as well.  As leader, Cruaidh asked for volunteers and naturally everyone did so everyone else drew straws.  As it turns out, Daor got the short straw.  

So now comes the big battle.  At this point, Andrew said he had to go and that he wasn't interested in d20 combat.  I'll skim over details, but it went sort of how I expected in some respects.  However, it was too long -- in particular because Gen had a 2PM event to go to.  I had hoped to wrap up maybe 15 minutes early from my alloted 5 hours, but at 2PM we could see the end but it probably would have taken to 2:30.  

This was my first time GMing a d20 game, and I hadn't even done a practice combat of this.  So maybe I'm being hard on myself.  It was colorful and interesting while still tactical and mechanically by-the-book.  Cruaidh had a terrible string of luck on the coin flips, which was accepted with amusement -- we pictured him shaking his fists and roaring in frustration.  This was also symbolically interesting as Cruaidh is the older generation, and thus fitting that he should have trouble getting at the cats.  If I do it again I will definitely want to speed it up by reducing the cat's HP but vastly upping their damage.  I would want it over within 10 rounds with fair odds that one of the barbarians will get killed.  

Overall, the combat was not quite what I had hoped, and at first I was pretty disappointed.  Despite everyone being very familiar with the basic system, there was a lot of time spent on basic math.  The perspective of all this being watched by the crowds and the empress didn't come to the surface much.  In retrospect, I might give this scenario another shot with those adjustments.  i.e. Fewer but more decisive die rolls could mean more description on each one.  By contrast, I have run lots of Champions combats which I was very happy with -- so it's not a purely rules-heavy issue.  I'm still skeptical of D20 but I do have to admit that I don't have experience in running it.

Anyhow, I struggled a bit with deciding who the empress would sleep with -- but I leaned towards Daor.  If I had more time, I might have had the empress' companion interrogate/torture Eithriall and possibly fall in love with him, but I couldn't cover it in the time.  

We narrated through the last bit: the empress picked up on Daor, who was disdainful of her -- willing to sleep with her but considered it scratching an itch and compared her unfavorably with a true Cimmerian woman born to the wilds.  She tried her best to win him and for two weeks gave excuses to put off letting them go.  But at last she could see that there was no taming him.  She let them go, but to give Canbotha his due we cooperatively suggested that there was an ambush waiting for them without the empress' knowledge -- but Canbotha rode in with horses to save them all.  All this was hurriedly narrated through over perhaps 10 minutes.  

In general, I think it went pretty well.  Andrew left disappointed.  However, I think everyone else had a lot of fun and it definitely conveyed its themes about barbarism-vs-civilization and male sexuality.  I had designed it with an all-male audience of experienced D20 players in mind.  However, as it turns out I think that the female players were great and had no problem with it being about all muscle-bound men.  I still smirk in delight over them all tearing off their loincloths.

[Henri]

This sounds like a really cool senario.  I've been reading a lot of Robert E. Howard Conan lately, and this definately sounds true to the source material.  I'm glad you didn't wimp out on the male sexuality stuff.  It is too bad about the combat bogging down, but that's what d20 does best, right?  I've heard that complaint so many times!  Sounds to me like giving it another shot with the changes you made would be well worth it, especially considering the effort (and expense) you went to with the minis and all.