If you watch the film, Crom answers prayers. Conan is freed, and driven off like a dog being set free. In the nexy scene we see wild dogs drive Conan to the sword which outperforms his father’s blade. One dog is even left behind on a hill, barking approval when Conan emerges with the sword like it was indeed divine luck/intervention. Arguably the corpse could be the last avatar of Crom, and Conan is the successor.
Conan prays for the strength to defeat the Settites, and threatens Crom with abandonment if he fails. The Settites lose.
Crom even elevates Valeria to some pseudo valkyrie status inspiring Conan.
I’m curious if the choice of making Crom powerless in the game was based on anything other than game design, like Crom in the comics or animated TV show.
Directly from the creator of Conan himself, Robert E. Howard. The Arnold movies are very bad Conan stories. Good movies, but terrible representations of Conan.
This is also directly lifted from a scene from the Robert E. Howard story “Queen of the Black Coast”, which does not have Valeria in it at all (in fact, Valeria only shows up in Red Nails, and she lives.). It is Belit who dies in that story and comes back in such a manner to save Conan, but this has absolutely nothing to do with Crom what so ever.
The headlong rush of the winged one had not wavered. It towered over the prostrate Cimmerian like a black shadow, arms thrown wide—a glimmer of white flashed between it and its victim.
In one mad instant she was there—a tense white shape, vibrant with love fierce as a she-panther’s. The dazed Cimmerian saw between him and the onrushing death, her lithe figure, shimmering like ivory beneath the moon; he saw the blaze of her dark eyes, the thick cluster of her burnished hair; her bosom heaved, her red lips were parted, she cried out sharp and ringing as the ring of steel as she thrust at the winged monster’s breast.
“Bêlit!” screamed Conan. She flashed a quick glance at him, and in her dark eyes he saw her love flaming, a naked elemental thing of raw fire and molten lava. Then she was gone, and the Cimmerian saw only the winged fiend which had staggered back in unwonted fear, arms lifted as if to fend off attack. And he knew that Bêlit in truth lay on her pyre on the Tigress’s deck. In his ears rang her passionate cry: “Were I still in death and you fighting for life I would come back from the abyss—”
But they just took it and adapted it to fit Valeria and tossed it into the movie anyway. But again, it was HER promise to him and not the will of any “god” that brought her back in the short story, and in the movie alike.
Crom laughs at the pitiful excuse of human flesh shown on the silver screen. Crom scoffs at the fake entity-thing pretending to be him that listens to the mewlings of mortals.