Hyborian Tales is a Live Roleplaying game based on the works of Robert E. Howard, particularly his stories set during the Hyborian Age and featuring his most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian.

So, what’s different about Hyborian Tales? Why should you play this, instead of a generic fantasy LRP game?

What we have set out to do with Hyborian Tales is to provide an intense, heroic, and challenging series of games. There are three main strengths Hyborian Tales has, in terms of achieving those objectives:

The setting itself

Howard’s “Hyborian Age”, that time before the oceans drank Atlantis, when a bold warrior could become Queen not by birth or destiny but by making her own luck at the point of a sword; when a wily cat-burglar could be acknowledged the greatest thief in the world not by working his way up a “Thieves’ Guild” but by stealing the most fabled treasures of the ancients using nothing more than his quick wits and a dagger. The Hyborian Age is a rich and detailed setting, yet one which is flexible enough to have a huge variety of sword and sorcery tales set within it. Howard’s tales have also influenced our two other strengths, the system and the adventures.

The game system

Drawing on other live-combat LRP games, but adding unique twists to allow player characters to replicate some of the near-superhuman feats achieved by Conan, the Hyborian Tales game system is designed to maximise heroic combat against all the odds. Play a preternaturally quick-witted savage Pict, or a stoic Nordheimer barbarian, or a civilised pikeman from Gunderland, or any of a host of other character types. This is a sword-and-sorcery game, so most characters will be reasonably combat-oriented, but there is room to play a more stealthy, magical, or social character if you so wish, and each adventuring party would be well advised to ensure it is not purely reliant on fighting skills for every encounter.

The adventures

Tired of having to fight your way past the other players to even get a chance at combat? Tired of super-monsters that can only be killed by the whole mob of you piling onto them? Look no further than Hyborian Tales. With a maximum player character “party” size of 8, and a typical monster/NPC crew of 20 or more, you’ll have some of the toughest LRP encounters of your life on a Hyborian Tales adventure. At present, the plan is to run three six-hour adventures and one tavern evening over the course of each weekend event, so that each player will play one adventure and crew the other two, as well as playing his or her main character during the tavern evening. This is what will allow us to have such an excellent ratio of crew to players. The six-hour time-slot for each adventure is superb in creating the rapid-fire direct action feeling of a Robert E. Howard story, and will be quite enough to test you and your character to the limit! We intend for each six-hour adventure to provide some of the most intense sword-and-sorcery challenges you will ever face.

Notes

Hyborian Tales is a commercially run game. Thus, we do at some point intend to make a profit out of running it. That said, with commercial goals comes professional responsibility, and our first aim is always to provide you with one of the best LRP experiences in the world. In any case, we fully anticipate ploughing all of our income from the first few events back into the game, in the form of props, catering, monster kit and so forth; we’re not going to start paying ourselves anything till we’re satisfied that we’re running the best events we can. All four members of the core crew will draw equal payments from Hyborian Tales, once we do start paying ourselves; there is no one person who will be creaming off a vast profit, but we do wish to get some kind of pay for the time we put into this.

Hyborian Tales is based on the out-of-copyright works of Robert E. Howard, including “Beyond the Black River”, “Black Colossus”, “The Devil in Iron”, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, “The Hour of the Dragon”, “The Hyborian Age”, “The Jewels of Gwahlur”, “The People of the Black Circle”, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, “The Pool of the Black One”, “Queen of the Black Coast”, “Red Nails”, “Rogues in the House”, “The Scarlet Citadel”, “Shadows in the Moonlight”, “Shadows in Zamboula”, “The Slithering Shadow”, “The Tower of the Elephant”, and “A Witch Shall Be Born.” For further information on the copyright status of Howard’s writings, see the excellent online essay by Paul Herman, “The Copyright and Ownership Status of the Works and Words of Robert E. Howard.” http://www.robert-e-howard.org/AnotherThought4ws02.html