Conan Casting

So Netflix is working on a Conan series, and there was apparently word of such a series being worked on previously that would follow the stories by Howard more faithfully than other attempts at putting the Cimmerian on the screen.  Screen Rant had a fun little video with some dream casting, but it was all about characters from the movies who never show up in the stories, folks like Thulsa Doom (who’s actually from the Kull stories) and Subatai. 

 

So let’s do this right.  Assuming this new show follows the stories far more closely, who should be cast in the various roles?  Here are some of my ideas:

 

Tower of the Elephant

We start with this story because it’s probably the most classic, and certainly one of the best of Howard’s Conan stories.  With the popularity of D&D, leading with what is among the most dungeon-rompy of Conan’s stories seems a no-brainer.  And as this is our opener, we’re going in with a bang, spending some money on the cast.

Conan - Karl Urban

I’ve loved him in everything I’ve seen him in.  Momoa wouldn’t be bad either; I liked him in the role, I just thought the writing was poor.

Taurus, "Prince of Thieves" - Dave Bautista

We need someone with both bulk and agility, who combines joviality with menace.  I can’t think of anyone better, but I also can’t shake the thought I’m forgetting someone here.

Yag-kosha - Tim Allen

This is a purely voiced role.  We need someone who can bring pathos to the alien’s words.  In the same way Bernard Hill, who usually plays more comedic roles, infused Theodan with pathos and gravitas, I think Tim Allen’s empathy and sense of timing would work really, really well in this challenging role.  Besides, I want to save Mark Hamill for something bigger later in the series. 😉

Yara - Ian McShane

He’s a big name right now, everyone knows and enjoys him, and he looks like an evil sorcerer to boot!

 

The God in the Bowl

And immediately we’re switching gears with a whodunnit.  This nicely shows the sort of range of Howard’s stories; Conan is a thief in both, burglarizing a wealthy residence, but the stories are very different in feel and tone.  We’re also teasing Stygia here good and early.

Magistrate Demetrio - Casper Van Dien

The role calls for a chisel-jawed man who is driven by duty but not blinded by it.

Prefect of Police Dionus - Richard Brake

Brake can play those roles where the character needs to get under your skin and be annoying, but you’ll still kinda root for the guy.

 

The Hall of the Dead 

Instead of Conan escaping at the end of this one, we simply segue right into Rogues with Murilo visiting him either at the end of this one or the beginning of the next one.

Nestor - David Wenham

He’s got the look and the action skills already.

 

Rogues in the House

Murilo - Michael Gough

Nabonidus - Ian McDiarmid

We need two actors who can chew the scenery and yet ooze corruption that can contrast with Conan’s simple barbaric nobility.  These old hands would be awesome together as foes forced into alliance. 

Thak - John Cena

We need someone who’s big and physical, with the wrestling skills of, well, a pro. 

 

Frost-giant's Daughter

While this one probably happens earlier in most chronologies, Conan is not at his most empathetic here.  He’s also a full-on reaver in this one, while he’s more the thief in all the other tales.

Atali - Sophia Jane Myles

I think she’s terribly underrated and would make an excellent ice princess.  Watching her slowly drive Conan to the boiling point only to have him ambushed by her brothers would be a lot of fun.

The Brothers - two stuntmen whose faces we rarely get to see on the screen would be good, but what would be really cool is getting Matt Easton and Lindybeige to play these guys.  ;D

How to Describe Your Setting

So yeah, I'm on a bit of a Conan kick. The game made it worse, it didn't start it. I've been re-reading the Howard stuff and Conan really feels like REH at the top of his game.

In fiction writing, especially for short stories, much is made of the vital importance of the opening sentence. It has to ground the reader in the story, explain what sort of story it is, and, most importantly of all, hook the reader into reading the whole thing.

The very first sentence of the very first Conan story published is this:

Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west.

How's that for an intro to a D&D campaign?

Ok, I cheated; that's two sentences. If you used them, you'd absolutely need to start the campaign in Aquilonia (as Howard sets his story there). The second sentence is the jewel riding atop the ring of the first. Your players will expect Aquilonia to figure importantly in the campaign early on with a set-up like that.

It tells the players that history will be important to this story; they'll expect at some point to come across the relics or even the ruins of "Atlantis and the gleaming cities." Likewise, they'll expect to plunder at least one spider-haunted tower of Zamora and a "shadow-guarded" tomb of Stygia.

The player who wants a paladin or knight already has an idea that Zingara might be a good homeland for their character. Likewise, the halflings and druids most likely come for Koth or Shem. For your own campaign setting, you'd probably want to touch on individual places that cater to specific fantasy archetypes, if not the character classes and races you'll be using.

You'll be sorely tempted to expand on things. The goal is a phrase for each kingdom, and the whole under 300 words. Howard only uses 104 here. Short, pithy, punchy, and hooky.

Conan: Exiles for cRPG of the Decade

So yeah, to my utter surprise, I’m finding Conan: Exiles to be the best computer RPG I’ve played since Ultima V. Granted, I should point out that I’ve not yet tried Divinity: Original Sin II, Planescape: Torment, or any of the Witcher games. The problem is, I’m not very likely to, either.

Oh, I may give them a shake, but I suspect I’ll have a similar experience to Dragon Age; the fights will get monotonous, the quests will shatter my suspension of disbelief, and the interactions will feel wooden and limited.

Not that interactions with NPCs are much to write home about in C:E; most just shout a battle cry and charge. But your interactions with the environment more than make up for the lack.

C:E isn’t officially an RPG; technically, it’s billed as a “survival game.” This is a new flavor of computer game where you’re dumped in a wilderness and must use the environment around you to survive. Being a Conan game, this means you start the game buck-naked and crucified. You’re rescued by the eponymous Cimmarian himself, and you start the game ripping apart bushes for plant material you’ll knot and weave into makeshift clothing before binding rocks to sticks to make tools and weapons.

The thing that makes C:E for me is the little details; kill a crocodile or a rabbit or a subhuman “imp” and it doesn’t drop a chest full of gold. Instead, you’ll get hide and bones and meat that you can turn into armour or arrows or a meal. Human foes might carry better stuff (though, alas, they rarely carry the weapons they’re wielding against you), but not always. And yes, you can totally butcher humans for meat as well.

Which is another thing I appreciate about this game. There’s no good-evil slider that moves because you picked the impolite conversation option. You can totally eat human flesh, or build an altar to Set and sacrifice human hearts to it, or club humans over the head and break their wills on the “wheel of pain” to turn them into your slaves. Or not, if you want to be all goody-two-shoes about it. You can instead build an altar to Mitra and craft healing ambrosia (though the manner in which that’s done doesn’t exactly promote being all peaceful and not-killy; Mitra is not a god for pacifists). Or go completely off the deep end and worship Yog to acquire greater strength from eating human flesh.

(Hard mode is, of course, worshipping Crom who gives you nothing but the opportunity to grow strong through adversity. He’s the honeybadger of C:E deities.)

There are stats you can improve, as you’d expect in a cRPG, but they’re not the usual D&D-esque basic physical and mental attributes. Instead they’re vague amalgamations of skill and attributes; the Strength stat encompasses both your muscles and your skill with melee weapons, while Survival is both your hardiness and your bushcraft.

But what really counts is your gear. You’ll start the game naked and alone in the desert, and “advance” largely by crafting better gear, building a hovel that you’ll likely expand into a castle staffed with numerous slaves, and wearing weapons and armour forged with secrets of the ancient races that ruled the world in previous epochs. And this feels incredibly organic to me. Here we have a game that’s not all about the magical ding that grants you more hit points. Instead, you get more powerful by expanding your influence and acquiring followers and crafting infrastructure like castles and forges and altars to the gods. You don't slaughter monsters and acquire insane (and largely useless) amounts of gold coins, but quarry stone and chop trees for lumber and build a smithy capable of forging supernatural elements into axes and breastplates.

Conan: Exiles is a game about exploring wilderness and ruins, uncovering lost ancient secrets, building a base (or multiple bases) of operations. There are fights, but they feel more organic as mostly it’s wilderness critters who are as happy to hunt other critters as they are you. And they’re not the end-all be-all of the game.

And finally, it feels like a Conan story. You’ll climb up a tree to escape a hungry crocodile. You’ll be stalking a rabbit or gathering wood when you’ll stumble across an enchanted monolith or ghostly apparition. You’ll fret over the state of your waterskin when you’re not gorging yourself on roasted meat. And when you do fight, you’ll hurl yourself amidst your foes, laying about you on all sides with your club or axe or sword, scattering blood and limbs all about. It’s a game that’s full of what feel like organic surprises, events that both fit with the game, the setting, and the source material. It feels like being inside a Conan story, and that’s about as high praise as I think I can give a game.

What is Best in Life?

Whew!

This troll spent the last week and a bit moving to a new cave. Eventually, a troll's cave gets so funky all you can do is set it on fire and move to a new one. Now that it's done, I should be getting back to the hex mapping articles soon. Maybe by Friday, but certainly by Wednesday.

In the meantime, to celebrate having moved all my loot to a better cave, I treated myself to the new Conan movie. It's not bad, and I can understand why some folks might even compare it favorably to the Schwarzenegger film from the 80s. I'm not quite willing to go that far just yet, but it wasn't horrible. It was much better than "Sucker Punch" for instance.

What follows isn't a review of the movie. Frankly you probably already know if you're going to see it and reviews are unlikely to sway you one way or the other. You know if you are this movie's audience. And after you see it, you'll know whether or not you liked it. I did, however, want to point out a few interesting things I noticed.

(Spoilers follow, so if you don't want to know too much before seeing the flick, stop here.)

First, something silly that amused me: adult Conan does not wear pants. It's a sartorial choice he shares with John Carter when the latter is on Mars. So let the ladies have their pants! The look of today's masculine fantasy hero is a layered kilt and boots.

There were a lot of missed opportunities in this film, and I suspect most of them are the fault of the writers. There are three writers listed, and I suspect it was a matter of rewriting rather than collaboration. Toss in the cutting-and-editing process, and who knows what was originally intended?

Early in the second act, we are treated to a scene of the bad-guy army dragging a boat through a forest. It's a neat visual and immediately makes you wonder why they're doing that. It's intriguing. Unfortunately, it's also never explained. The ship on wheels is never used in the water, it's never demonstrated to have magical powers, and ends up just seeming kinda silly.

The villain's sorceress daughter (apparently rewritten from an original male version) has a neat look and a creepy vibe. We get one brief interaction between her and her father with Electral undertones. It makes both of them a lot more interesting. Dad has a goal that isn't just the typical take-over-the-world, and Daughter is a little conflicted about bringing Mom back from the grave. Again, this is set up in the second act and nothing is ever done with it. I was kind of hoping that these issues would explode into some really interesting dynamics in the final confrontation. That never happens. Instead, we get a fairly bog-standard mano-y-mano fight at the end.

If you get inspired to throw in little twists in the story or adventure, be sure to do some follow-through. Make it matter! This is at the heart of old-school improvisation. You just rolled hobgoblins on the wandering monster table. Sure, you could just have a randomly generated band of hobgoblins sitting in the middle of the road waiting for the PCs to arrive so they can fight.

BOOOOOOOORINNNNNNNNNG!

Why are they here? Are they part of the larger tribe? Is it nearby? Are they renegades? Survivors of genocide? Scouts looking for a good target for a raid? Heroes seeking some lost hobgoblin relic? Even if all you want is a brief little battle, you can at least have them ambush the party.

On the other hand, if the players really are not that terribly interested in your hobgoblins, there's no reason to beat them over the heads with whatever clever idea came up with. Not everything needs to be explained or make sense. But if your players do seem intrigued you should absolutely take advantage of that.