THREEDOM: Conaning it up with our One-Dice Wife in Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of

So the grandest campaign we have played in recent times was run by the Mysterious Third (Chris) and actually featured a Fourth (Dan, who isn’t even a Forever GM!). So it’s not really Threedom at all. Nevertheless, we must make our report! Since there is much to speak of, including the origins of one of our most important in-jokes, we will be efficient and concise, probably. 

So: this was the Modiphius 2d20 system Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of (pub 2017), an official adventure — Waves Stained Crimson — adapted by (Chris) for his regular group and then run again for our pleasure. In it we capsized, captured a ship, killed many people by accident, more on purpose, freed slaves, got hitched, rescued a lost bride, and learned dark sea magicks. Also: we did some VENGEANCE. All very Conan-y.

Let’s get into the sinewy, muscular details.

Jim: So I remember spending the first session just making characters. It’s the first time we’ve done that for a while. And we even speeded it along using automated online character generation systems! I fucked it up entirely of course and made a wizard who was bad at magic and could barely read, and had few other redeeming qualities. I have no excuse for this. But I knew immediately that I wanted to be a sorcerer because The Mysterious Third (Chris) told me that magic in this system was dangerous and overpowered. I certainly left some horrible entities lingering about, and also embarrassed an evil magic user in his own dreams, so no regrets there.

Kieron: Conversely, I made Conan, but Mesopotamian, and started my slow march to becoming a combine harvester with legs, as is my wont. There’s probably room for some self-analysis when presented to a game with more crunch than most the things I play, I’ll inevitably min-max some combat monster, because I care enough about system mastery to do the job, but I will never learn your crunchy magic system, not for you, not for anyone, 

I think my prejudices there were misplaced though – magic didn’t really look more complicated than anything else in the game, at least from my perspective, across the table, covered in entrails as I’m parading a head around the battlefield to scare off lesser men. But I’m getting ahead of myself in the details, right? I suspect we better lay out where we are with the might-thewed ones. Conan fan, Jim?

Jim: I read like one Robert E Howard story, I think? I can’t even really remember which. It was a bit racist, I recall. Obviously the Schwarzeneggar movies loomed large in my teenage imagination, but I feel like renting the VHS tape three times from the cornershop and then recording it off BBC2 in the 90s probably doesn’t make me a true fan of the fiction. I’ve read a handful of the comics and such since we played, and greatly enjoyed them. But I would say my exposure to pre-D&D sword & sorcery is vanishingly thin. I definitely appreciate the form, but I learned more about it in our weeks of play than I knew previously. It strikes me that this is a bit like when I got my non-Warhammer friends to play some Dark Heresy with me a couple of years ago. Sure, they knew what Warhammer was, and had absorbed some of the tropes via cultural osmosis, but at a fundamental level I could tell they didn’t get it. They didn’t understand the Inquisition. They could not fully accept and embrace the grimdark. There was definitely a worry about that for me with Conan, especially since the Mysterious Third is SO versed in the universe, and so fluent in what makes it come alive for modern audiences. Did you have those feelings, KG?

Kieron: Yes – though I feel less than you. I only had a little more experience with Conan. Yes, the movies absolutely imprinted on me, and I knew enough to know that Conan fans think the movie Conan isn’t faithful enough as he’s too thick and a blonde. There was also a chunk of comic reading – Conan is a big deal in comics, both in America, and especially outside of America, so I’ve read at least some of the various versions. However, I also figured if I’m playing Conan, I’m going to try and learn more to get out of it, so I broke the spine on a big collection and read a bunch of Conan short stories to get a taste – which really is a mix of really driven sword & sorcery tales which are genuinely exciting and creepy, and with their own tropes, with regular jump scares of horrific racism and sexism. So I had basically done some homework on it, enough to spot and appreciate the tropes, but it’s still a lot. The short stories are fragmentary, and don’t (say) have the map, and each takes place in a set area, so I’m getting all the tropes without context. It’s the equivalent of knowing Tolkein though there being Moria, Rivendell, Mordor and the Shire, but having no fuck how it all connects to each other.

I played with a tab open, including the map, and another fan article which listed the names of each of the areas, and what the general vibe was. It really is a grab bag of Howard’s favourite periods, and cramming it together for shits and giggles. People tut-tut at Tolkiens’ mountain-range structure, but Howard just lobs ancient Assyria down here, and puts Renaissance Italy a little down the coast and then glares at you, daring you to say anything.

So I viewed it as a research thing, in part, and a research thing I was absolutely up for exploring a little. I suspect it may help that it is so much “Basically, Assyrians” is stuff that we probably know a bit about, so it’s not quite the Warhammer level of specific bespoke nerdery.

Getting enough to see how the tropes popped up in the game and were mechanised was great. Conan basically picks up warriors who join him on a mission, and inevitably they’re all dead by the end. Being the combat hero, I was regularly getting mobs of soldiers moving around with me, and acting like ablative armour. 

Jim: Yeah, that was not the sorcerer experience. It’s not exactly glass cannon, but we had to think about when we were going to use Drago’s ONE power. To be fair, though, it was sort of a multi-purpose tool. SUMMON HORROR, which no, wait. We’ll circle back around to this. First we need to talk TWO-D-TWENTY. The system that this runs on is Modiphius’ 2D20 system, which the Mysterious Third describes as “my beloved 2D20”, and I can see precisely why. There’s quite a lot of crunch. There are also, however, FAR MORE THAN TWO D20s! It lies! Two is just a starting point for the rolls, and you will need more to succeed in tricky challenges. Basically: to get a success you need to roll under a number supplied by combining an attribute with a skill, and then you need to get the requisite number of successes, from one to five. As previously teased, you can’t get two five successes with two dice, and so for that you will need more dice. These come from various pools of additional currencies and talents. One currency is Fortune, your character’s personal pool of luck-derived bonus dice, and the other is Momentum. This is a shared pool which describes the group’s ongoing successes, into which spare successes (rolling better than you need) go until they’re needed. Then there’s a GM-facing pool of dice called Doom. You can choose to give the GM Doom, supplying them more dice to use against you later, if you can’t use Momentum. If any of these resources are available then you can call on them to make those really tough rolls. And you’ll need them, as some abilities are super demanding, like magic. But again, we’ll come back to that. Because there’s also the combat dice. KG, do you want to talk combat now that I’ve described the core roll?

Kieron: I am all about talking about combat, though right now I feel tired about doing so – which says something. It’s the end of the writing day, and just doing it? It’s intimidating. That says it. I wouldn’t be intimidated about writing about Mork Borg’s combat, or the Between’s Day & Night moves. This is combat like nothing much we really play – significantly more granular with more dials and places to actually spend resources and maximise your dice pools and all the rest. 

It starts with the core mechanic, where you’re working out how many… oh god, I’m too tired to finish writing this today. I’ll come back tomorrow. I swear, this isn’t a bit.

I’m back! And maybe I can pretend this is actually me demonstrating how the momentum mechanic works. Things go well if they’re going well, and if not, you take real effort to get the ball rolling again. This is especially true in combat. Roll your dice pool and to hit you want to hit the level of successes… but you really want to roll more than that, as for each extra success you get a momentum, which you can spend to add more dice. When some abilities are triggered by momentum – like the one I had, which lets you add two dice for everyone momentum spent – you can see the synergies there. Especially when I had my selection of other ones I wanted to activate, so it became about me wanting to make sure there were enough successes around when I needed to turn everything on and turn someone into mist.

But there’s more than that there – as momentum is shared among the party, you think about the order the players activate. Like, my abilities made me very good at generating momentum, which meant that if I go first, generate a bunch of momentum then other people who are less apt at it, can spend it to maximise their own abilities and so on.

So now you’ve hit, and then you roll another set of dice – a pool of D6, depending on the weapon. 1 and 2 is the amount of damage on the dice. 3 and 4 are no damage. 5 and 6 are one point of damage… and to activate any relevant special ability. Which is really where the second part of my combine harvester activates, as one ability let each of those 5 and 6s counts as 3 damage, so I’m regularly throwing out 15+ damage.

It’s not a straight hit-points-to-death system. If you go over a threshold in a single blow, you do an injury. If someone would go beneath zero, it’s an injury. There’s probably some more in there – but it’s number of injuries which lead to death. Oh – and to finish off my one-man-blender, this is where I spend a momentum to add an extra injury whenever I do an injury. So when I’m at all cooking, I’m doing 3 injuries whenever I attack, which kills most people.

What I’m saying, I really did feel like Conan.

Jim: Yeah, I definitely didn’t feel like Conan. Which was fair enough because I was a wily, scrawny sorcerer from the northern wastes, and I really didn’t process the character creation and ended up with a guy who had a stick to hit people with and wasn’t any good at doing that. We did mend my melee a little as time went on, but realistically my sorcerer was a super-weapon that we deployed when we needed a summon a “horror”, ie a monster that was pretty much going to fuck up anything we encountered. This was a horrible angel-like abomination that (Chris) cooked up and it was fucking cool, and later a sea monster too. I could also detach my own shadow for some reason. The way sorcery worked, though, meant that we had to be certain that there were enough dice in the mix to get the successes we needed not only to summon the horror, but to then control it, give it instructions, and then send it back to whence it came when we were finished with its actions. We did end up leaving a few monsters loose in our wake, which didn’t seem to affect us all that much, and in the end it didn’t cause us all that much grief. Anyway, eventually I got a knife and I did stab some guys. It wasn’t a lot, but I felt I like I was helping as your windmill of death ploughed through enemies, sending limbs and heads in all directions..

Kieron: It’s worth noting that for all my monstrosity with the axe, I’m still relatively fragile. You’re spending those points to keep going when injuries come on you, as if you’re injured, you lose dice and if you lose dice, you’re less likely to get momentum and if you don’t get momentum you can’t be Conan.

The system also spins over to the mental side of things – you can choose to do attacks to target a separate set of hit points for someone’s courage. I had a particularly nasty stare attack. There’s a whole set of rules for what happens if you murder someone huge and then hold parts of them up at the opposition. I wasn’t joking about the “hold a head up and everyone else runs” of it. I killed a lizardman and brandished its corpse while coated in blood as the lesser lizards ran. It’s very conan.

Jim: Something you mentioned in our notes was that because this was a campaign of a certain length, (Chris) adjusted the XP costs of things so that we could actually afford to progress in the time we had. It was certainly necessary, but it also means that as written the game is a very slow burn indeed. As we experienced it,  we got to max out certain paths. There were actually a lot of things available to me as a sorcerer, but just going deeper and darker down the summoning a horror path seemed like the way to go. I had one job, and that was to fuck things up with a horror. The system is such that when you are pumped and have dice, you can really do the business. Much as with your scything of death, I was able to screw with the nemeses on their own turf. There was a scene which I just loved, where I was in the dream of the evil wizard we were pursuing, and even though it was his dream, I still summoned enough power to wreck things. It was a fantastic boost. And it got even better when we came to the sad tale of the One Dice Wife. Oh, the things she taught me.

Kieron: So many things. Mainly how to get an extra dice. 

The tweaks (Chris) made – to campaign and campaign rules both – does make me glad we don’t do anything as tawdry as a review here (glances at things tagged “reviews” and pretends it’s not there.) Like, we were playing a hack. A minor hack, but a hack nevertheless.

Jim: Also a supported rules hack in combat, as we played with a version of the Guard rule that streamlined things. It’s quite combatty, so speeding that up was a boost to playing online, which we were.

Kieron: It’s times like this where I realise that why (say) Quinns’ position of running the games he reviews rather than playing the games he reviews makes sense in RPGs – to review, you actually do need to know what the game you’re playing is, and in anything which has a classic GM, they’re the only person who’ll actually know.

Because if we did play with the main rules, with the costs to advance included, we’d have had almost static characters across the period… and we’d have been absolutely stuck at the builds we started with. In my case, I’d have not quite been the murder machine I was – as I spent my first bits of XP on that – but it would have left the party this hilariously limited thing. We couldn’t talk well enough to order fast food without it escalating into a fight. As it was, I eventually spent points on ways to buff my communications on intimidation – which wasn’t done by increasing the personality stat, but by using a feat which let me add extra free dice. I mention that, as it is a good example of the sort of system mastery Conan absolutely does – there’s lots of ways of constructing things, and playing with things, and dials to prod and all of that. I don’t think we’ve said there isn’t a class system as such as such but you’re just guided by your picks and the prerequisites of all your abilities. It’s the amount of work that I can handle as a player, but I would never run as a GM. 

Now I think about it, the One Dice Wife was also born of one of (Chris)’ tweaks to the scenario, right?

Jim: Yes, she’s a character called Zabihi, who we encountered as a treacherous witch who could help us in a raid on the evil wizard’s base. She’s basically an acolyte who betrays him and assists us. Chris hugely streamlined this stretch of the adventure, which was a sneaky infiltration and battle, in which we learned more about our nemesis. The upshot of the chaos in the campaign as written, though, is that Zabihi has a temple collapsed on her and is dying. You need to get a difficulty 4 roll success even to save her life, and then she loses her memory anyway and basically disappears from the adventure. (Chris) was exasperated by the lack of female agency and wanted to do something (we were basically playing a Rescue The Princess campaign, as the lost bride was the other main female character who became more of a pirate queen by the end.) Zabihi was plucked from doom to accompany us as the adventure continued, which I am glad about because she ended up being the most interesting part of the campaign for me. She clearly had an agenda, and was going to use my superstitious and egotistical hierophant of a wizard to get there. She supported my actions and taught me cool sea magic. When it came to it, of course, she wanted more. And as things climaxed, she insisted with rule the doomed world together under a black sun, and I think you had to crack her over the head with an axe to stave off disaster. None of this happened in the base adventure, but it was a fantastic bit of betrayal that I leaned into because I could see it coming and wanted to know how (Chris) would play it out. (I think there’s some stuff here about being a good player meaning you should make decisions that are going to play out dramatically even as you put yourself at massive risk, but that’s probably for another time.) She also gave me an extra dice in spell-casting, and honestly any level of risk is worth that.

Kieron: All that was great. She was wonderful, as much as we did wind up (Chris) with the One Dice Wife moniker, endlessly. Remember talking about the emotional impact in Conan.

I may actually write something about One Dice Wife in games after this – there’s an interesting compare/contrast with how 7 Part Pact treats its support networks which would get a good 600 words out of.

We do circle around the problem with this as a review, don’t we? This was a dish (Chris) served up. Is it mostly Conan? Certainly. Is it a set adventure? Definitely. Is it chopped to pieces by him? Absolutely. We can hit on aspects of the system we found fun or not, but this is really us talking about a specific experience rather than someone can have at home. Unless they kidnap (Chris). Don’t kidnap him!

Which gets me thinking about one of the interesting things about RPGs and reviews. At least in something which is adjacent to trad with that power differential between “GM” and “Player”, the players don’t really have any idea what’s going on. If we hadn’t talked to (Chris) about this, we could have written a piece that sounded absolutely certain of what Conan is… and it’s not what Conan is. 

I can’t think of many reviewers who aren’t regularly the GM in this space… but the GM experience isn’t the whole experience. That said, it’s also true that if reviews are buyers guides (as opposed to criticism, which mostly isn’t) then the real audience is actually the GM, who is usually the person who buys things.

But it also has me thinking about all those perspectives annihilated. I find myself thinking if I was running an RPG magazine, or actually doing real reviews on a site, I’d bring back ideas from the legendary Brit computer magazines Crash and ZZAP64, with multiple reviewers giving multiple perspectives. So you had the main body, and then multiple people chipping in with a paragraph.

Now, I personally question how useful that is in a videogame (which is another essay – mainly, they either agree, so waste space, or disagree, and confuse the issue. And often they’re just faked) However in RPGs, they can be really interesting – you have the GM do a normal structure review, and then you have player testimonials from the game of what they thought. That actually seems useful. 

But when we’re brainstorming tactics to review RPGs, we’re well off topic. We haven’t even touched the fundamental weirdness of this exercise – the Modiphius Conan is no longer available, as the licence has ended. The current Conan one is Monolith’s Conan: The Hyborian Age RPG.

Anyway. Wrapping it up, Jim, what is best in life?

Jim: To crush your enemies and roll 1-5 d20s to hear the lamentation of their One Dice Wives. Something like that.

Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of is out of print, so that’s a shame,