rhialto wrote:

The folded map from the back of the book.

Hah! I thought it was some Kickstarter goodie I missed out on.

Ghul wrote:

francisca wrote:

Actually, I've made the decision to use AS&SH for eveything, from here on out.  All my home campaigns and FRPG con games will now be run with AS&SH.

Gosh, I'm flattered, Rich! I'm delighted to hear you enjoy it that much. Cheers!
 

You've done a great job with the game and the setting.  Plus, pretty much my houserule has been, "you can be any race you want as long as it is human" and my games routinely feature Lovecraftian, REH, Leiber, and now - CAS elements.  So, it just makes sense.

Last edited by francisca (10/16/2017 8:01 am)

I'm looking to run a bunch of modules in the Gal Hills, surrounding mountains, and the Red Desert regions once I get and absorb the new rules.  Sadly, it will be a solo campaign, using the Mythic GM Emulator and the Scarlet Heroes rules.  Still, it should be fun!

Hey Morgan, thanks for your interest!

I'll probably have a main PC be a foreigner and another PC be a local.  Anything South and West of Gal is game, ethnically speaking, with Vikland being a strong contender as well.  I'm just now getting an idea of which modules to run in what order while resisting the urge to get too far ahead of myself.  I may just start with my 1st edition box set and adjust for second edition whenever it comes, as I'm pretty excited about this.
 

Brock Savage - I can see using Hyperborea with a lot of Hyborian Age connections being a really fun thing to do. I did the same thing with 13th Age. I used the world basically as written, but added REH Hyborian Age elements as well as Thulsa Doom and his Mountain of Power from the Conan film. It was a fun campaign that lasted 2 years.

Started my Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of the Hyborian Age campaign today. We all had a blast! I GM'ed my regular 3 player group. 

The party started in Aghrapur where the Assassin was given a guild mission to assassinate the Living Tarim, who was verbally opposing King Yezdigerd. They became distracted when they saw a Zamorian dancer sold at a slave auction, and rescued her. She actually had some info about the cult of the new Living Tarim, having encountered them before she was captured as a slave. She revealed that they believed in Hyrkanian purity and removing all foreigners from Turan/Hyrkania.
On the way to the abandoned desert border fort that the cult was using as it's HQ, the party fought a giant beetle that had ambushed and eaten a merchant wagon, outsmarting it with a trap that the Huntsman (Huntswoman) set. 
They were then ambushed by two tigers at an oasis, which killed one of their horses, and mauled the Huntswoman pretty good. She managed to pull one down with her whip, and with the other two PC's firing arrows and her mountain lion attacking at opportune times they won the fight. 
(I should mention the 3 PC's are only 3rd level, so these were pretty rough fights.)
They also found some rare (for the area) purple lotus to harvest.
They finally arrived at the fort and mingled with the pilgrims there long enough to see the prophet and self-proclaimed Living Tarim give a sermon. It was obvious he was using sorcery to sway the Turanians and Hyrkanians into cleansing the nations of all but pure Lemurian bloodline. They snuck into the fort at night and assassinated the Living Tarim (with the assassin succeeding at her assassination roll!).
They found a shrine to the Living Tarim underneath the fort, and what they at first thought was the Tarim statue glowing blue turned out to be a blue ooze daemon of the Outer Dark which had been putting all the thoughts into the prophets head. They killed the demon with fire and a "magical" ancient Zhemri dagger.

Best session of gaming I have had in a very long time.

Last edited by Grimmshade (10/20/2017 8:18 pm)

I don't think we'll start a new campaign, but everyone's pretty psyched to have the new edition. Aaaaand there *was*a little matter of a 10HD fireball in our last session of Maze of the Blue Medusa that pretty much took out everyone under fifth level, so there are suddenly some entry-level positions open. I think the plan for this weekend is to take a bunch of first-level new PCs out for a spin before melding them into the main party. Thinking either Luke Gearing's new Fever Swamp or Zzarchov's Price of Evil, though I'm not really sure what the players will elect to do.

Pretty sure a cryomancer amd runegraver have already been rolled up.

I'm starting a Hyperborea 5e campaign in early 2018. I'm experimenting with something new, a loosely structured sandbox based on the Open Table model. I've assembled a laundry list of OSR and classic adventures which I'll reskin and tweak for Hyperborea to serve as a pool of adventures. The default activity for players consists of plundering ancient ruins, tombs, and dungeons in search of gold and magical treasure. Players will have a variety of adventure seeds representing rumors, job offers, insider information, treasure maps, and the like. Player activity, including downtime, can generate more lucrative adventures that reward items or spells that they desire. Like I said, I'm venturing into new territory so I'm excited and anxious to see how it all turns out.

Handy Haversack wrote:

our last session of Maze of the Blue Medusa

You run Maze of the Blue Medusa in Hyperborea? I'd love to hear more. If I ran MotBM I'm afraid the players would feel like they are exploring a massive, weird, and deadly piece of performance art instead of a dungeon. I had to read it a couple times to really "grok" it.  "Genius" isn't the right word to describe MotBM but it's definitely smart, innovative, evocative, and a little pretentious. It's only $5 on RPGNow and worth every penny.

ThornPlutonius wrote:

I am in the process of starting a new campaign in Hyperborea, but will be using the Mythras rules instead of the AS&SH rules. I deeply respect Ghul's d20 rules set, but just am not into the d20 level/class sort of gaming right now.

I don't think there's any disrespect in running Hyperborea using a different system. I believe Hyperborea is the greatest fantasy setting ever created but decided to use a hacked and reskinned version of D&D 5e because reasons. On the boards, Ghul consistently encourages fans of Hyperborea to make the setting their own and I've never seen him criticize someone for breaking with canon, such as it is. 

Brock Savage wrote:

I don't think there's any disrespect in running Hyperborea using a different system. I believe Hyperborea is the greatest fantasy setting ever created but decided to use a hacked and reskinned version of D&D 5e because reasons. On the boards, Ghul consistently encourages fans of Hyperborea to make the setting their own and I've never seen him criticize someone for breaking with canon, such as it is. 

I agree.  I use a simplified version particularly with convention games.  For me the classes are one of the things that made me fall in love with the game.  I don't want to do the work to convert to a completely different system so I stay with the system in the book. Though 5E is reasonable close to OSR systems so not too bad I suppose.
 

rhialto wrote:

I've been letting my group know I want to get back to AS&SH when 2e was available in print (I only use PDFs for quick searching a pulling out the bits I need: I have a hard time reading them as I would a physical book). While they have two groups of PCs in my campaign world (one 6th - 7th level, one their henchmen run as a one-off that turned into a mini-campaign of now 3rd level) I've been itching to do a Viking-themed game, set in my version of Earth, post-Atlantean apocalypse (codename "Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Old Terra", or SSOOT, pronounced "soot" ).

A Viking themed game would be fun!