Which of the Lankhmar stories would you consider to be the best ons? I've read seven so far and thought them rather lacking. Which one should I read to get good examples of how good they can be?

I think it actually improves things a lot. 1 minute per round seems just way too long. When you jump into a hole with several enemies, there will be a lot more than just 2 people lying dead or mortally wounded after one minute. When swords and arrows are flying, one minute is a very long time.

The only real issue I am seeing with it so fat seems to be a lack of culture. There's a great amount of very interesting cities and dungeons, that immediately make me come up with two or three cool adventures I could run there with only one paragraph of description. The density of ideas compressed into the amount of text is outstanding.
But there seems to be only very few information about how the people of Thule live. How they dress, how their society is structured, what their soldiers and warriors look like, and what the values and and priority of their cultures are.
Many highly praised sandbox settings have even less information on these things, so it's probably not a thing that would worry most people. But personally it's an aspect of settings that interests me the most, so I would have loved to see some more in this regard.
The material is great for one-shot adventures and has enough stuff to do lots of them in a series. But for longer storylines that involve characters into things that are going on in society, it's a bit lacking.  There's really cool cities, but their description primarily deals with things that are important to use them as adventuring sites. They are fascinating environments that can be a great change from dungeons and wilderness, but not so much about the people, other than questgivers and villains. (Which again, are mostly pretty interesting.) Which I believe is actually what the designers meant to do. It even says that Thule is made for episodic adventures.

I use the combat phases as quidelines to determine who goes first and last during a round, in case that it matters. But since the players announce their actions at the same time, it usually becomes obvious if any of them want to delay their action until others have done theirs, so it's rarely neccessary.
Most of the time either all PCs go first and then all enemies, or first all enemies, then the PCs. More differentiation usually doesn't seem necessary to me.

It's not what they call it themselves, but what other people have refered it as. People who might not be in-depth experts into the finer details of the genre.

15€ really isn't that much for the pdf and at 270 pages it's a good amount of content. I am really tempted to get it on a hunch. And maybe be one of the first to tell people what's actually inside it. (Which one might call something to be expected from the publishers for a product that's not lying out in a store to flip thorugh...)

I am looking for something new to read, but don't really much about S&S literature. I read most of Conan and Princess of Mars, but don't know much about anything else.
I'd like to find something with a Bronze Age or Iron Age style, preferably focused more on wilderness and exploration than big cities. (Sorry, F and Mouser.) And maybe somewhat longer narratives than Conan.

Anything you can recommend?

Galadrin wrote:

Yora wrote:

Spellcasting and spellcasting clases are almost completely replaced with the magic system from the D&D 3rd Edition Expanded Psionic Handbook. There is only mage (based on the framework of magicians) and warmage (based on cleric).

Ooh, how does this work? I'm not familiar with 3rd Edition.

It's basically a mana-system. A first level character knows 3 psionic powers and has a number of power points per day. A first level power costs 1 power point, a second level power 3 pp, third level 5 pp, and so on. You can cast any of the power you know at any time, as long as you still have power points to pay for it. There are no spell slots. The power you know are fixed and you can never switch them out, but you add 2 more powers to that list at every new level.
The most interesting element, that makes the whole thing special, is that you can spend more than the minimum cost of power points to cast a power. A second level power may cost a minimum of 3 pp and deal 3d6 points of damage, but if you're a 7th level character, you can spend up to 7pp and increase the damage to 7d6. There is only a single charm power. At 1st level, when you can spend 1 pp, you can use it to charm a person. As you get higher levels you can spend more points when you cast the power, which allows you to also charm animals, dragons, or demons. You don't have to learn hold person and hold monster as two different powers, you just learn it once and unlock additional use options as you increase in level.

The best thing about it is that conversion of standard D&D spells is often very simple. The cost of power points is always defined by the power/spell level, and when it's a damage dealing spell, the number of damage dice is always equal to the number of pp you spend to cast it. It often makes sense to merge spells that have similar powers of different strengths at different spell levels, but that's not very hard to do. But all the stuff about

Reminds me of Numenera. Isn't that game all about weird items?

I use it during the summer break, while not everyone is in town, and it works without problems.
What customizations are you thinking about?

I only saw this now. And it's awesome.

I even know most of the scenes from reading the stories, but this does a great job of highlighting all the awesomeness. ^^