🐍 Exploration of The Arcane: Sorcery Lore, Gameplay Insights, and Role-Playing As A Sorcerer In Conan Exiles

[darkpower]

I’m opening this thread for players that have a genuine interest in the sorcery in the game, the lore, and the canon by Robert E. Howard, and want to discuss these things with other players to learn and enhance the gameplay experience for players that role-play as a sorcerer in the game.

I was reviewing my post history here and saw a post that I made before and that is what sparked the idea for this thread. I thought about why I like this game, what’s so awesome about it, and why I have spent 7,400+ hours playing it. I thought about the experience the game allows for and how it is the only game that allows for a Howardian sorcery experience.

So, to get started, I’ll introduce myself as a player and let you know what I like about the game, why I play it, and how I play it, as well as what it is that I like about the sorcery.

In Robert E. Howard’s stories about Conan and the Hyborian Age, there are spectacular moments of truly strange and unexpected activity or behavior by the characters. Specifically, this is expressed in the most imaginative and interesting ways with the sorcerers and sorcery of the Hyborian Age. For example, in the story, “People of The Black Circle”, these types of strange and interesting events take place when Khemsa attacks people with sorcery and when the Black Seers of Yimsha dealt with Khemsa for his violations. The same strangeness is also observed in the story, “The Tower of The Elephant”, when Conan presents the gem to Yara, a sorcerer, and utters the message from Yag-Kosha. What follows is one of the most strange and unexpected things that a person could perceive. Such moments are truly brilliant in how they are expressed. The Conan Exiles game allows a person to experience this type of interesting strangeness with their own Hyborian Age story in every gameplay session when role-playing as a sorcerer. It’s awesome. The latest update expands this type of experience.

I’ll post some images of my character and lair later on.

What do you like about the sorcery in the game?

What arcane insights do you have?

What are your favorite sorcerous moments Robert E. Howard’s stories?

Which dark powers have you found to be of use in uncommon ways during gameplay?

Do you have any lore to share?

[Khaletohep]

My favorite magic in CE was the gazelle’s ability to suddenly float up into heaven, but that was patched, I think.

Jokes aside, the game in my opinion more or less adequately tries to resemble magic from REH’s stories, not in detail, but in style: no fireball throwing, but manipulating the weather. No flaming swords, but summoning foul beasts.

Some things such as the ice bridge or resource harvesting are a bit too obvious in my view, but it’s not really lore or immersion breaking, either, and fits into a game about exploration and resource gathering. So, it’s a somewhat fitting continuation of the lore in my opinion.

In the game as well as in REH’s stories, I think it’s hard to differentiate between magic and supernatural effects and things that either a.) just work by different natural laws and/or b.) are just not understood by the protagonists.

In Xuthal of the Dust, Conan encounters - at least as I understand it - the remnants of a civilization that used magic as well as advanced technology, the latter to produce food and possible other items, maybe similar to Star Trek replicators. To Conan, all of that is “magic”.

The same goes for the “dragon” he encounters, which to the modern readers seems to be a dinosaur or similar creature, not a dragon as we have in our myths. But to Conan, a large lizard-like creature appears to be a dragon.

The same ambiguity is in my opinion well-represented in the game. Did the Giant Kings use magic to erect their gigantic city and aqueduct, or are those just the product of decades of labor and clever construction? We wouldn’t know. They could have had modern cranes and bulldozers for all we know, and they only rusted away during the last couple of centuries.

What “strange science”, as the Giant Kings call it, did the Witch Queen use to kill their army in what is now the sulfur lake? It may have been a spell, or it may have been some kind of science fiction chemical weapon. We don’t have any weapons that turn people into weird dead trees, but a technology like that doesn’t seem impossible in principle, especially in a world with slightly bent natural laws.

Even the “magical” bracelets may be technological devices that translate languages and give deadly shocks once they get a radio signal from the wardstones. Except for the battery technology, we could create such devices in real life even now, and the Giant Kings seem to have been somewhat stupid or naive, but also very long-lived and knowledgeable.

Other things such as the undead skeletons walking the Exiled Lands are clearly magical.

The Staff of the Triumvirate and the sandstorm sit somewhere in between, I think. The effects they produce could be caused by technology. The staff isn’t much more than a tape recorder playing back bad advice or a malicious LLM. The sandstorm could be caused by some kind of weather control device or even just a huge helicopter-like machine, but even the Giant Kings seem to have seen them as magical in nature, so I think we should assume that they are.

Are alchemical items such as aloe potions magical? Their effect is much greater than any medication could produce in our world, but the game represents them as non-magical “alchemy”. Weak aloe potions can be crafted by a level 1 Exile by hand, so we know that there’s no complicated technological or even magical procedure involved. Unless the Exiled Lands, the bracelets or some other unseen effect causes their great healing power, they seem to be a result of different laws of nature - such as steel is produced not by mixing iron and coal as in the real world, but iron and “steelfire”.

The “ichor” that can be gathered from spiders and similar creatures most certainly is not actual ichor. I don’t know if spiders and insects even produce ichor (i. e. white blood cells), but most certainly not in the amounts that the Exiled Lands creatures seem to have in their body. It’s probably just bodily fluid. Our player characters identify that smelly substance as “ichor”, because that’s also a smelly liquid.

This mixture of weird technology, weird magic and weird laws of nature is, in my opinion, a fitting continuation of REH’s stories. Just as in the Conan stories: Through the game, we experience a world through the eyes of people that don’t understand the world they live in. And that is underlined by the fact that we understand their world a little bit better, but still not to the full extent. That creates a sense of wonder, exploration and tension.

[darkpower]

That was a good read. Yes, Funcom got a lot right in keeping with Robert E. Howard’s style and how they made everything fit into place with the lore. It’s amazing and not common, which makes it exceptional. The game provides a Hyborian Age experience in ways that are everything that makes a good game.

[darkpower]

This is my character.

[darkpower]

This is a tour of my lair.

😈Hold of The Inner Dark (RP Lair Tour) 🗡️Conan Exiles 🏝️Isle of Siptah

[darkpower]

Sorcery gameplay with a short story in the description:

😈Shadow of The Inner Dark ⚔️ Conan Exiles 🎮PlayStation 5

[sestus2009]

Thanks for video I have done more with Sorcery today than I have since it came out not sure I like it but experimenting