A few weeks ago, with the help of my friend Tony, I started to get interested in the new MMO, Age of Conan. Since it wasn’t out yet, I decided to start re-reading the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. I first got a used copy of the Ace Fantasy “Conan”, which features some great stories, including The Tower of the Elephant and The Thing in the Crypt. The beginning of the movie Conan the Barbarian, where Conan is being chased by wolves, then falls into the cave and finds the sword, is loosely based on The Thing in the Crypt. The original story is much better, of course, since (spoiler alert!) Conan not only finds the sword, but the skeleton of the sword’s previous owner comes to life and he and Conan have a classic fight scene. I haven’t read all the stories in this paperback, but keep it in my camera bag for times when I have a few free moments.
Last week I picked up The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, which is a larger compilation of early Conan stories, written by Robert E. Howard himself. Many Conan stories were written by other Fantasy authors, and supposedly many of them were pretty bad, so I felt good reading these original stories. Howard’s writing is straightforward and refreshing, getting right to the meat of the stories. And the stories are great! There’s tons of action, of course, but the settings and characters are so fantastic. The world that Conan lives in is brutal and savage, filled with warriors, thieves, and sorcerers, all wanting wealth and power. Conan is no different. In some stories, he is a simple thief, in others he is a fugitive, and in others, he is King Conan of Aquilonia. The stories are not in chronological order, and Howard didn’t write them as a Conan biography. He wrote them in the same manner as someone would retell parts of his or her own life, taking stories from here and there. It’s actually pretty cool to read them in this way. Although Conan’s status changes, his basic outlook and determination is constant.
Now that the Age of Conan game is out, we have been playing it a bit, and I think it is a great MMO. The graphics are really awesome! A nice change from the cartoony WoW style (which I like too). I have just left the starter town of Tortage, and traveled to the cities of Old Tarantia and Khemi. They really capture the feeling of the books. I read that the people who created the game did a lot of research into the Conan stories, and it really shows. I had read a passage the other night about how the city of Khemi looks, and when I visited the game version, it was spot on. Besides the overall atmosphere, the combat in the game matches the brutality of the books. Age of Conan is the first major MMO to receive an M (mature) rating, for its gore and nudity. There really is a lot of blood being spilled in combat, and occasionally your character will pull of a “fatality” move, where your opponent dies a fantastic death, sometime with his head flying off. It’s really kind of cool. (There is a setting to turn off the excessive gore and nudity, if you want) My main character is a ranger, whose main ability is archery, but also has some cool melee skills. It’s a really good game, but of course as an MMO, you gotta be careful not to play too much!
By the way, I am a huge fan of the first Conan movie, which I feel is a classic. It also captured the feel of the Robert E. Howard stories quite well. One thing that I noticed is that the archery in the game feels very much like Subotai’s archery in the movie. I like that.
If you are into Fantasy novels at all, I totally recommend picking up a Conan paperback. It may seem a little cliché, but Conan is one of the true originals of the genre. It’s kind a strange to think that these stories were written back in the 1930’s because they are still so fresh! And Robert E. Howard lived in the Hill Country of Texas, by the way. In fact, his vision of Cimmeria (Conan’s homeland) was largely based off of the Hill Country landscape. The biggest difference is that Conan’s Cimmeria was frozen, while the Texas Hill Country gets super-hot!
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