Back in 1984, Conan was hot. The Arnold Schwarzenegger movies had come out to the general acclaim of – well – fantasy fans. (The first movie found a more general audience, but the second did not). And TSR somehow gained the license to do Conan-based RPGs. There was an actual Conan RPG, plus three AD&D adventures – two Conan adventures and one Red Sonja adventure – produced, and then the license must have come to an end.
Conan Unchained! was the first of those adventures. Written by David Cook, who was unabashedly a Conan fan (just see Dwellers of the Forbidden City), the adventure is written for four characters of levels 10-14. Unusually, it provides pregenerated characters for the players to use, as well as variant rules to make the game work better in the Hyborean Age. These rules include Fear, Heroism and Luck, and slower Healing.
One innovative aspect of the adventure is its dividing of encounters into three categories, “Normal”, “Random” and “Plot”. The last are the encounters that make sure the story unfolds the way it should. Cook notes that although you don’t want to force the players, you still need to get them to do certain things or the adventure can’t continue. This form of story-based adventure would become a lot more prevalent in later years, but this is one of the earliest ones that not only knows it’s a narrative story, but admits that to the DM.
The adventure begins with the characters in an army marching towards a rebellious city. Conan and his friends are mercenaries who have joined the army for the promise of plunder. Then, while the army is still on the way to the city, a great black cloud of shadows engulfs the army, destroying it. The characters get to do some fighting, but it is hopeless. Eventually they’re the only survivors and are alone in the steppe.
The next section of the adventure has the characters captured by the kozaki bandits – similar to the Mongol nomads – and through a series of encounters attempt to gain their freedom, potentially becoming accepted by the tribe. This feels very Conan-y, and quite unlike most AD&D adventures.
Eventually, the real plot comes a-calling in the form of a slave girl (who is actually a hidden princess), who is promptly kidnapped by an evil sorcerer. The characters go on a sea voyage to reach the sorcerer’s citadel, fight their way through the monsters in his stronghold, and eventually confront and kill the sorcerer.
Well, it’s an adventure!
To me, it feels like Conan. It just doesn’t feel like a good game.
It’s astonishing how much time is spent with the kozaki bandits. This segment of the adventure uses up ten pages. The DM has information on events that happen, the personalities of the band, and details on how the kozaki bandits live. The encounters each have variants depending on whether the players are free or still slaves. The “captured by pirates and rising to be their leader” is a real Conan trope. For those unfamiliar with the stories, however, this may be very trying. Are you sure we can’t escape? (There’s nowhere to escape to! Stay with the kozaki until they reach somewhere to where you could escape!)
By contrast, the sea voyage and the sorcerer’s tower take up a mere eight pages.
There are times when events are very linear. And then there are times when it is still constrained, but not quite linear. Really, player freedom to go where they want isn’t a big feature of this adventure. I think it’s better at evoking Conan’s world than anything else.
And then there’s boxed text. Lots and lots of boxed text. When you finally get the briefing from the slave girl, it’s an entire column of very small type. To be fair, most of the boxed text is much shorter and not overlong to modern eyes.
One thing I expected to see but didn’t notice on my read-though: The cause of the original army’s defeat is not a spell cast by the final boss. I rather thought this might be the case!
Overall, this is a fascinating adventure, with many innovations to the standard AD&D adventure format. However, it’s not a particularly successful adventure – although the material with the kozaki bandits may prove useful to some.