Recommended reading / viewing :
Beyond The Black River ( E. Howard )
Wolves Beyond The Border ( E. Howard )
Last of the Mohicans ( film )
Black Robe ( film )
Having finally crumbled, I picked up Conan OGL and was pleased with what I found. Having read it a few times cover to cover to let things sink in, I was drawn to the Pictish Wilderness as an interesting and brutal place for a campaign. I was further intrigued when I discovered that Aquilonia had expanded westward into that land creating a kind of medieval meets French Indian wars scenario.
So I was well chuffed ( that means happy for you Americans reading this! ) when Mongoose released Across The Thunder River and I have to say it met most of my expectations.
The good points are thus : In the front is a decent map of the Westermark showing locations of the Aquilonian Provinces with capitals and forts. Also shown are the locations of the various Pictish tribes and some of them are perilously close to the Aquilonian settlements! History and some personalities of the provinces come next and although informative isn't the most interesting part of the book in my humble opinion. There are a number of good quality colour maps of Westermark towns and forts provided. Very handy I think, for planning out battles using floor plans and miniatures our even just conveying the layout of the land. On that point, it would be good to see Mongoose release Conan figures along with varied floor plans. A chapter on frontier life for settlers ( or is that invaders? ) manage to convey the danger, hardship and uncertainty of the Westermark. Loneliness and isolation on the frontier were explored and also the issue of sanity being eroded due to seclusion in the wilderness. Interesting.
Easily the best parts of the book are the chapters on the Picts - culture, daily life, spiritual practice / belief and war. There is a chapter with loads of Pictish feats; there is quite a good range including drum and mask creation and playing; feats that allow you to cause fear with your drum playing. There are feats like hunting masks that give pluses to hide & move silent. There are 2 marvelous feats for picts : sensing the weak and culling the weak which allows the character bonuses against an opponent with a successful sense motive check. One slight gripe : one of the chapters takes a broad look at the tribes each of which is named after an animal. The author was trying to convey a sense of identity of the individual tribes and in some cases this worked quite well; the alligator tribe has a tactic of lying in swamps waiting to ambush settlers, they have alligator forelimbs hanging off their wrists and use them to disguise their tracks. The Panthers and Wildcats are known to be excellent stalkers and skirmishers amongst the Picts. There were some nice illustrations showing a pict of that particular tribe and my favorite are the alligator and shark pictures; however a little picture for each tribe detailed would have been great. For a campaign you could do a lot worse than have your players as Picts fighting against the Aquilonian invader. A lot could be made of inter tribal politics, war parties, feuds, dark forest sorcery and collecting Aquilonian heads for your war lodge. That being said it's probably best for novices to the Hyborian Age to play settlers and adventurers in the Westermark. There are chapters on sorcery which includes new spells and the like, none of which are worth mentioning particularly. Once thing that has pissed me off is : Forest Devils appear in the story Beyond the Black River but they are not detailed in this supplement. They appear in The Scrolls of Skelos!
A bestiary is included and contains a number of creatures, some mundane and some exceptional examples of their species such as a lizard god whom the Picts worship, it is a 30 foot Dinosaur which if met, should cause one or two fatalities. There is a chapter of prestige classes which is nothing we haven't seen before; however it is telling that only one of the classes is meant for non Picts; the Forest Runner would best suit a borderer with enhanced travel through woods and a stacking increase in movement through gaining the fleet footed feat. The Pictish prestige classes are ok but I’m not sure why some have ten levels and others just five but that applies to all OGL / D20 Prestige classes. My particular favorite is the Hunt Master which turns your Pict into a formidable forest lurker well versed in ambush and stalking.
The final two chapters are good to end on; one contains notes and advice on running a westermark based campaign. How to recreate the flavor of the stories E Howard style. Included are a number of plot threads from which larger scenarios may spring; this is a good thing and I intend to use them as sub plots in my current campaign. 'Defending the West' is a small scenario at the end of the book and is pretty stereotyped in it's approach in terms of a threat, investigate, journey, fight etc but that's not necessarily a bad thing as most scenario's have that structure.
In conclusion, not a bad book - good setting for campaign, decent look at the Picts. Could have had more detail and should have been cheaper. £25 is a bit steep for 180 pages. Still pretty good overall.
Style : 4 (well presented and illustrated) , Substance : 3
Review Summary