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.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

Steve Jackson sent me a large box of my solo, at the company's expense, because they'd rather do that than just shred them.

Thanks for writing Queen of the Black Coast. I'm sorry it sold poorly, but it was a good adventure and definitely entertaining.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

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.

Conan never struck me as an individual who necessarily takes every precaution. If you know what I mean.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

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.
.

<shrug> It was a story and not an rpg adventure.

This affects Wyrmslayer too. The girl is supposed to die tragically. That's why it's so hard to save her. It's why Conan even has a horse too. Horses aren't terribly useful going down a glacier trail (or in te Frozen North generally).

Again influenced by the original stories I did not care for the two "Pictish" stories and felt the same about the solos based on them.

Wyrmslayer interests me the most. It's the one I think I could adapt into an introductory group adventure to start a Gurps Conan campaign.

[Fred Brackin]

I thought I'd mention that solo adventures might be making something of a comeback. David Pulver has done several for TFT and Gaming Ballistic. I also Kickstarted a couple for 5e mostly on a whim because the price looked good and I was having trouble finding stuff to read.

[Shostak]

The GURPS Conan solos work reasonably well for TFT with only a little tweaking.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

At least as far as the Conan solos went, they didn't sell. At all. Steve Jackson sent me a large box of my solo, at the company's expense, because they'd rather do that than just shred them.

I am sorry to hear that, they are some of the few published adventures (solo or multiplayer) which I have enjoyed! Writing is a tough business.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

<shrug> It was a story and not an rpg adventure.

(nods) That's an ongoing riff of mine when people compare fictional works to RPGs. The former's under the complete narrative control of the author, and has (obviously) a predetermined outcome. With Queen of the Black Coast, Howard was writing a tragedy, and never mind stats or skills or any other consideration: he decided that it'd be an all-but-TPK, and that's the bottom line.

One comment about how the adventures spun out when using Conan himself: none of us had the writeup for Conan. That was added later by the Lambards in editing. All we knew is that he'd be north of 300 points, and for low-tech fantasy in BSII, 300 points was one whole hell of a lot. My original writeup for Belit didn't have her as high as 235; that was tweaked in editing. (By contrast, the stats for the crew are as I wrote them.) Then as now, I picture 500 pts as pretty much entering superhero country.

[Lisandro]

Hi,

I bought Wyrmslayer, Thunder River, and Moon of Blood to create a campaign for two players. Any tips on using it as an adventure for a group?

Thanks!

[mlangsdorf]

You're probably going to want to work through each of them a couple of times to get the paths.

Wyrmslayer has two major parts: the above-ground action and then the delve through the caves. The above-ground action has the fight against the great apes and then the rescue and death of the girl. I'd consolidate that into one action sequence and then figure out a way to motivate your players to descend into the caves. The caves start around paragraph #269 and it should be possible with some notes to decipher all the loops and twists, find the individual rooms, and recreate a single cave complex that hits all the interesting bits without forcing your players to traverse the same room sequence a half-dozen times.

Thunder River is more complicated. There's a lot of wandering about during the day to get information and allies and then the night raid across the river. I'd try to pull find the various day encounters and pick a couple that you like for your players, then work through the night raid. From my notes, I think paragraph #2 is a starting point for the night raid but I'm not sure.

Moon of Blood is a lot more complicated and I'm not sure how to break it down.

One thing I'd consider adjusting is the difficulty of the opponents. The Picts in Thunder River and Blood Moon have middling skills and no armor. A pair of reasonably built, 250+ point 4e adventurers will go through very quickly: Extra Attack into a Feint followed by a deceptive attack cutting attack will incapacitate a Pict per turn per character, and a Pict hitting with an axe for 1d+3 cu or whatever will bounce against heavy DR, should the Pict get lucky enough to get through the PC's defenses. If you want escapist fights, this is great, but if you want something more challenging, give the Pict some champions and leaders with better skills, weapons, and some armor.