Then I’d ask you to take a look at Beyond The Road of Kings. In their own words…
Beyond the Road of Kings
This is not the Exiled Lands.
This is not Siptah’s Isle.
You are not an Exile.
You have chosen to be here.
Know O Prince, that in those times, to the north of Turan, between the shining Vilayet Sea and the eastern borders of Zamora, where the mighty Kezankian Mountains stood like a bulwark between east and west, there lay a wild, untamed hinterland. Here, perhaps more than any other land in the north, there were yet to be found the signs of the great civilisations that reigned supreme, before the waves swept over Atlantis, and wild, tawny haired barbarians threw down the devil haunted empire of Acheron.
Ruins stood there, the remnants of palaces and plazas and the tombs of long dead kings. And in those tombs were riches beyond imagining….
Beyond the Road of Kings is a heavily lore adherent RP server, with RP within the world created by Howard very much the emphasis. When we say that we are lore adherent, we mean it. We draw only on Howard’s work, or on sources approved by credible Howard scholars such as Dale Rippke’s “The Hyborian Heresies” and the excellent ongoing “Robert E. Howard Conan Lore Project” as well as the Modiphius Conan RPG sourcebooks. Our main admins have been reading Howard’s works, and studying them, for many years. We are passionate about the world, and we strive to bring it, in as pure a form as we can, to our server. We will accept some third party suggestions, but as a rule we do not use the Mongoose RPG books, Xoth.net or the CLA as our primary sources for lore.
We set our server to the north of the Vilayet Sea, an area largely undocumented in Howard’s stories, which gives us a fantastic blank page on which to write wonderful Hyborian Age tales. No Exiles here, just adventurers, cut from the same cloth as the eponymous Cimmerian.
We have an overarching server plotline as well as episodic events that evoke Howard’s Conan stories in look and feel. Our server GMs have decades of experience in running events in many formats of roleplaying, from MMOs and tabletop to freeform and LARP events. This experience allows them to approach scenario building and running from many angles not often seen in online RP. Players will be free to build and create, and to craft their own stories as they would on any server, but they will also be able to become embroiled in the ongoing server plot, or to drop in to short, self contained events on a more casual basis.
For players who wish for their characters to become sorcerers, that option is available, though the slots for sorcerous characters will be limited and there will be a series of trials and interactions and quests that the player will need to complete before any magical abilities become available to them. As with Howard’s tales, the path to sorcery is a dark and dangerous one, and at the end of that path, there are no Gandalfs or Harry Potters.
Our RP Dice System, used for some events, is bespoke and captures the feel of Howard’s Sword and Sorcery tales. The system has been designed from the ground up to enable fast play with an emphasis on RP. Players can select abilities that evoke Howard’s dynamic writing style such as “Rush in and die, dogs!”, “I have read from the iron bound books of Vathelos the Blind” and “When the broadswords sing” The system was written specifically for our server by one of our GMs, who was also part of the writing and design team on the multi award winning “Adventures in Middle Earth” books for 5th ed D&D.
For other events, we will use a “PVP/PVE Lite” method, with some aspects being not dissimilar to a LARP, in which some players will be invited to play NPC roles, and then statted, equipped and briefed regarding personality, motivation and behaviour. The fights on these events will be a mix of player controlled enemies and PVE “mobs” and will be crafted with the emphasis on entertainment for the players far more than any sort of PVP challenge. This is a method that we have used before, during the Age of Conan days, to great effect. It can result in the players using very creative ways to deal with challenges.
In all honesty, if you want a high fantasy, high magic server, with a diversity of otherworldly and magical races, ours is not for you. If, however, you are searching for a server that captures the pulp sword and sorcery stories of Robert E Howard, we may be exactly what you’re looking for.
I can say the above is absolutely true. I don’t usually shill for specific servers but this one is absolutely unique in its direction. As great as the maps of the Exiled Lands and Isle of Siptah are, what I have missed the most since playing Conan Exiles is… Hyboria itself. I don’t need a magical slave bracelet or to have been convicted of a crime and exiled to places REH NEVER wrote about. The world Howard created is all I have ever wanted and is the one thing I do miss about Age of Conan, because that game did do a beautiful job of giving us a great visual glimpse of that world. This server uses the excellent Savage Wilds map and does a great job of imposing the idea of the Turanian frontier over it. The mod list is good and, most importantly, under control, so performance is stable on the server. It’s PVP enabled with smart, concise rules that utilize either the PVP mechanics in game OR an excellent and fast moving dice system that’s actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be. The person behind that system is very obviously a pro in such gaming systems professionally and does a great job of expanding the possibilities of your characters without bogging things down. It’s still a young server so there’s still lots of prime real estate to choose from. I’d encourage you to do so!
Discord: Beyond the Road of Kings