Quote from: The Butcher;832007Runequest 6 with the magic system from Mongoose Elric, or at least the demon summoning and eldricht pacts; I might retain some or all of the "runes" (spells, really) as rituals.

/thread

I was actually going to post almost exactly this:D!
My suggestion was going to be RQ6 with MRQ Vikings, though. Elric might actually work better, though I've never read it, apart from reviews.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;834039Again, the era it was written in.  Casual racism was common at all strata of life in the '30's.  And in his case, if you read more of REH's stuff, he starts to stop being completely racist to drinking his own Kool Aid and thinking that anything outside of Barbarianism is weak and pathetic.

I don't really care about REH's personal views (which impression is seem highly variable - unlike HPL's, say - though HPL managed to be anti-Semitic while married to a Jewish woman, so I guess he was pretty complicated too). I doubt REH was all that keen IRL on murdering policemen/guards/sheriffs/judges et al either. Just talking about Conan the character.

Quote from: RPGPundit;833768Doesn't this depend on seeing Conan as the good guy?

Are there any good guys in Howard's Conan?  

Even the faceless minions (guards, tribesmen, sailors) are ready to kill at any given moment.  People are constantly scheming against one another, especially those they supposedly owe their loyalty to.  I have yet to come across a sorcerer who is not, at the very least, self serving.

I may very well be forgetting details (that's what I do), but I remember that even the good guys are surprisingly violent, but that being violent is more of a societal norm than a character flaw in Hyboria (or is it Hyperborea, damn you AS&SoH).

Quote from: Bloodwolf;834168Are there any good guys in Howard's Conan?  

Even the faceless minions (guards, tribesmen, sailors) are ready to kill at any given moment.  People are constantly scheming against one another, especially those they supposedly owe their loyalty to.  I have yet to come across a sorcerer who is not, at the very least, self serving.

I may very well be forgetting details (that's what I do), but I remember that even the good guys are surprisingly violent, but that being violent is more of a societal norm than a character flaw in Hyboria (or is it Hyperborea, damn you AS&SoH).

Let me get this straight. Do you mean that being violent prevents a character from being one of the good guys?
Even then I'd remember a few good people in the REH stories, but I'd need to check for names.

There are a few "good guys" in the Conan tales I think. For the most part though they seem to be good guys mostly in relation to the context of events.

Conan is shown as a guy who follows a set of mostly consistent, self defined, morals rather than being a guy who is universally recognized as "good". Still in certain situations he is objectively wrong, I mean lets call it like it is, in "The Frost Giants Daughter" he seems hell bent on committing a rape. In that situation he's a dick. In the "The Tower of the Elephant" he makes a kill out of apparently sincere mercy.

What I'm getting at is that speaking of "good guys" and moral objectivity is kind of missing the point in regard to the spirit of the stories. They aren't tales about men who are "Heroes" in character but rather who are of "Heroic" stature. There is sort of a frivolous humanity to it all, the characters, Conan in particular, are just men being the tumultuous creatures that they are.

Just about everything REH wrote is a Western. Chalk it up to a childhood in early 20th-century Texas, growing up to the sound of aging pioneers sharing how the West was built one yarn at a time.

Conan is the Man with the Gun, only his "gun" is being a Barbarian, made strong by the harsh lifestyle (plus racist "Aryan master race" shenanigans, but let's not go there for the purposes of this exercise), but rising up to defend Civilization from the Barbarians outside and, more often, from the decadence and corruption within. I imagine Howard's storytelling pioneers complaining a lot about how oil wealth and civilized comforts made people weak and corrupt, or something.

Being a Barbarian and inured to the cruelties of both men and nature, Conan is liable to act outside civilized morals. Even the rape thing can be excused by pointing to nature... not that I'd condone such an explanation, in fact even Howard derided his readership for enjoying Conan's aggressive sexuality in his correspondence. I believe "the common man is a brute and a rapist at heart" were his words -- shit, would that make REH a proto-feminist?

Contrast with Solomon Kane, who holds itself to the high moral standards of a Puritan and yet is said to have "something of the pagan" in his relentless pursuit and smiting of evil around the world.

Quote from: AsenRG;834172Let me get this straight. Do you mean that being violent prevents a character from being one of the good guys?

You can interpret it that way if you want.
That was not my intent, however.
Maybe use "murderous" instead of "violent"
Life is cheap in Conan's world, to the point of death being almost inconsequential.

I'm suggesting that there are no good guys, per se, in a world full of grey morality.  Well, black and grey morality, actually (what with there being evil people and, on the other side, everyone else (who are not evil)).  There are protagonists and antagonists.  The protagonists aren't the good guys, they just happen to be the star of the show.

Yes, I guess you could say Conan was a 'good guy' in the sense of what a mentally-disturbed Texan would think of as a 'good guy'.

Quote from: Bloodwolf;834191You can interpret it that way if you want.
That was not my intent, however.
Maybe use "murderous" instead of "violent"
Life is cheap in Conan's world, to the point of death being almost inconsequential.

I'm suggesting that there are no good guys, per se, in a world full of grey morality.  Well, black and grey morality, actually (what with there being evil people and, on the other side, everyone else (who are not evil)).  There are protagonists and antagonists.  The protagonists aren't the good guys, they just happen to be the star of the show.

Ahem, our world is full of grey morality. I posit that there are still good guys, and gals, around, including a vanishingly small number of those that have had to kill other people:).

Quote from: RPGPundit;834516Yes, I guess you could say Conan was a 'good guy' in the sense of what a mentally-disturbed Texan would think of as a 'good guy'.

Given who the author is, I'm inclined to say there could be no other criteria;).

Quote from: RPGPundit;834516Yes, I guess you could say Conan was a 'good guy' in the sense of what a mentally-disturbed Texan would think of as a 'good guy'.

Hehe, yeah, we saw what you did there. Conan's more of a protagonist than a hero, but that further reinforces the zeitgeist of the Hyborian Age. Conan's warts aren't nearly so large and festering as most of the characters' warts in the books, so he pretty much gets the "hero" title by default.