Review- Conan: Black Colossus

Image is by RodrigoKatrakas, and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license

Spoilers for the story…

Reading Black Colossus makes you really realize how much more Howard influenced our modern games and adventures even more than Tolkien (and this is coming from a LOTR lover). The tale of the dark sorcerer, Thugra Khotan, entombed in a mysterious dome rising above the desert and the dried out river that had flowed with strength in his age. That’s a mystery that needs solving. That’s a dungeon that needs to be explored, and there’s treasure to be had—at great peril! 

It’s interesting to the elements of investigation touched on in the story, noting that the thief Shevatas put significant effort into his preparations. “Not for naught had he gained access into darksome cults, had harkened to the grisly whispers of the votaries of Skelos under midnight trees, and read the forbidden iron-bound books of Vathelos the Blind.” We can see not only in Conan, but in Shevatas the clear archetype of a cunning thief, who undertakes their business with great care, reflected in the description of his opening the door with a hidden combination on secret catches. This is continued with the fight with the guardian serpent, with poison of a snake exactly like it. “…the obtaining of that venom from the fiend-haunted swamps of Zingara would have made a saga in itself.”

There are of course elements that trouble a modern reader—the choices of language dismissing some of Howard’s fantastic cultures as uncivilized. The other standout is the perceived need to diminish Princess Yasmela through diminutive language to paint her as the damsel in distress, helpless without the aid of a masculine hero though she is the (abet caretaker) head of a kingdom. This of course culminates in her being snatched by the villain at the climax of the major battle and being taken as some sort of sacrifice, naked on an altar, and the descriptions of Conan’s passions for her overwhelming his reason—probably the ultimate source of many objectifying depictions of women in pulp sword & sorcery.

I enjoyed this passage and the image it invoked:

“Conan listened unperturbed. War was his trade. Life was a continual battle, or series of battles, since his birth. Death had been a constant companion. It stalked horrifically at his side; stood at his shoulder beside the gaming-tables; its bony fingers rattled the wine-cups. It loomed above him, a hooded and monstrous shadow, when he lay down to sleep. He minded its presence no more than a king minds the presence of his cupbearer. Some day its bony grasp would close; that was all. It was enough that he lived through the present.”

The battle of the pass and the Shemla Valley is also evocative, with some great descriptions of the actions of each side, and an interesting tactical depiction. I enjoyed this portion perhaps the most, and saw parallels to the battle of the first volume of the Black Company.

This story also speaks to the heroic journey from thief or adventurer to general and later ruler that characters were envisioned as following in early editions of RPGs. 

So in sum, there’s some bits that we are better off without in our fiction. But there’s also some really interesting plot elements that you can see have informed our current stories and games. So as with many past authors, there is much to emulate, some to avoid, and some to steal from Howard’s stories.

Robert E Howard Conan Reviews

This page serves to consolidate the reviews of Conan short stories by Robert E. Howard that I am slowly working through.

Gods of the North & Tower of the Elephant 

Rogues in the House

Black Colossus

Queen of the Black Coast

Lore Book: Book of Endless Dark

This lore book is for my Midgard Empire of the Ghouls campaign and is based upon the lore on the Night Cauldron of Chernobog found in Demon Cults & Secret Societies, and in a few Kobold Press blog posts.

This aged book’s pages are yellowed with age. The title is blazed across the second page, covering much of the page, as if the scribe sought to blot out the entire surface with the dark ink. Within the book speaks of “the deceptions of the gods” and their “lies that persuaded the Lord of the Night to allow the stars and sun to alight.”

It speaks of a future “age of glory to come, when the sun sets for the last time, and the stars are choked in endless void.” It urges followers of the Black God to throw off their shackles and embrace the Cauldron of Night, “heralding the “Architect of Disaster that is to come” and will “leave the World Tree burning” in their wake.

The book is inscribed to “My loyal pupil of the Night Cauldron, Fane Illmaladson, in preparation for you to receive the Black God’s Blessing,” and is signed with the symbol of a cauldron marked with a bear paw.

Reading Gods of the North & Tower of the Elephant

Artwork from the Marvel Comic's adaptation of Tower of the Elephant. 

The first Conan story by Robert E. Howard I ever read was the Tower of the Elephant, based upon Matt Colville mentioning it in a video. That was an early influence as I first started playing RPGs, but I think that short story would be highly recognizable to any player. Reading these stories helps show the influences that resulted in our current games and media, and perhaps some themes, ideas, and atmosphere that we reinject to change up our games (what’s old is new again). Mild spoilers follow...

The set up of this scenario is certainly seen in how most D&D campaigns and quests are framed. It begins in a tavern or gathering place in an interesting city. Exposition identifying a fantastic location (in this case the mysterious tower) is provided. A hero has an initial fight, which demonstrates his cunning and strength. He even falls in with another adventurer who is doomed to an untimely death--though it could just as easily been Conan! The twists and the turns show me that you can set up a treasure of MacGuffin hunt, and still be flexible and offer some agency to player characters who may change the adventure (as when Conan mercy-kills the tower's sad prisoner, then follows its desires to destroy the tower and the evil mage who rules it).

The Gods of the North struck me with how similar it seems to some of the ideas I had long prior to reading it in the game I had with a single player (the saga of Hurkaz the mighty). Conan essentially is running through a similar land of cold and ice, and finds himself face to face with fantastic foes. I especially loved the descriptions of the frost giants. I think their description is certainly part of how our own frost giants developed.

Looking forward to chewing further through the collected stories of Conan and considering how they have impacted both our fantasy stories, and our fantasy roleplaying games.