GURPS Conan Solo Adventures Impression

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Nebless

I played all 4 over a week and thought I'd give my general impressions.

I did a similar thing, but in a slightly different order that I think is closer to the intended order: Wyrmslayer, Queen, Thunder River, and Blood Moon. It was a little tricky since my barbarian didn't survive Wyrmslayer =(.

- Queen of the Black Coast: Not a lot of fighting, basically a search for treasure adventure

A surprisingly easy adventure for me, playing cautiously and taking obvious precautions. I recovered several million in treasure for minimal casualties and I'm not exactly sure how Conan did so poorly in the original story.

- Beyond Thunder River: I ran this 2 1/2 times and the use of Plot Words made all 3 different. While there are a couple of 'fixed' spots (the stuff you do in the fort and the Pict village), your choices drive the different outcomes. The most fun of the 3 as there's lots to do.

This can be really easy or really hard, and is counter-intuitively easier if you don't take companions to raid the Pict village. I do agree its probably the best of the 4.

- Moon of Blood: This one's a little different than the others as it focuses more on you as an Army commander. While I didn't really like the mass combat rules, they did work.

I adapted this on the fly to the use the 4e Mass Combat rules. Which was fine, but going through 3 or 4 paragraph jumps for every step in the Mass Combat rules instead of just saying "fight out a mass combat battle" was kind of annoying. Predictably, nearly naked Picts armed with short bows did poorly against an armored phalanx backed up by longbowmen.

- Wyrmslayer: A bit of a plod as you search the ice cavern, but OK.

Wyrmslayer is weird. The best path to victory is to show up with an absurdly high Survival (Mountain) skill and just avoid the adventure. If you do decide to camp overnight, the girl inevitably dies, which is a downer. The climatic fight with the Wyrm can either be a mildly interest slugfest, or a series of impossible Will rolls with an accumulating penalty on success and death on failure. I'm not sure what was up with that, but I wasn't interested enough in the ice cavern search to figure out how to get the slugfest combat.

All 4 says that if you're creating your own character it needs to be a 300-400 pt character (a 'high level if you will) like the Conan one they included. I found my character was never really challenged and you could probably get away with a 200 pt character for more of a challenge.

I dislike that if you play Conan, you get a 500+ CP character, but if you make your own, you get 100+ CP less to make your own. But a reasonably made character with Luck, reasonable combat skills, and ST 15+ will rip through the opposition in close combat.

If you get stuck you need to go back through the paragraphs you used (I recommend using a sheet and note down the paragraph number as you do them just for that purpose)

I used a Google sheet spreadsheet, and wrote down each paragraph number and all the branch numbers. It was really helpful for noticing loops ("another empty cavern? okay, jump to 41 and skip the noise") and fixing mistakes.

It would be nice if SJG or someone could do up each combat map on a single sheet (I wasn't able to do it) so you could use miniatures or counters representing the combatants.

I'm very used to gaming online, so I drew all the maps in a virtual tabletop and played them out with tokens. Very convenient.