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Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of: Player`s Guide

Conan Player's Guide

This book is intended for those members of your group who want to play rather than GM, the idea being that if they're not going to GM they do not need the additional information provided for GMs. After all, where's the point in buying a book where you only need a part of it. As the information here is reproduced from the core rulebook, if you have that you don't need this as well.

It starts off by explaining what a role-playing game is, then gets straight on with character generation, detailing the steps necessary for creating your character. This involves a 10-step process that builds a description of your character in terms of his attributes, skills, talents, and equipment. These steps can be followed by rolling on a series of tables or by making deliberate choices as you go along depending on preference. Some players may have a clear image of the character that they want to play, and the dice should not be allowed to get in their way!

The whole thing begins by determining where the character comes from - his homeland. Next comes a quite complex system for allocating numbers to the seven attributes of Agility, Awareness, Brawn, Coordination, Intelligence, Personality, and Willpower. Next comes social class or Caste of origin, followed by Story - little snippets associated with your Caste that provide a spark to start in on developing your backstory. A choice of Archetype then gives skills, talents and equipment to the growing character. A lot of choice is involved at every stage, making this a quite involved process but one which produces rich and rounded characters.

But we're not done yet! Determine your character's Nature, Education and War Story. Just about everyone has seen at least a bit of war, and will have seen or done something that affected them, which - like everything else - contributes to skills and talents as well as to the character's backstory. We round off with Finishing Touches and some Final Calculations... and at some point you'd better decide on a name, age, appearance, etc. If this seems all too much and you're itching to play already, there is a fast random method; and those who want a particular slant have some alternate methods - this may be mandated by the GM, depending on the game that's being planned.

Following chapters go into much more detail about Skills and Talents, with plenty of examples, as well as Equipment. Here you'll find out how to use what you've got. Finally there's a Rules chapter with many detailed explanations of how the rules actually work and how to use them to best effect during play and a further chapter on Action Scenes which focusses on the rules for combat.

If you're certain you never want to GM this game, go ahead and get this book. It contains all that you'll ever need to create and play characters to good effect, with loads of detailed explanations and examples, and some beautiful illustrations.

Return to Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of Player's Guide page.

Reviewed: 4 June 2018