there are many armours in the game that I feel just shouldt be…
namely, full plate armours like silent legion, that belongs to the medieval period while
conan’s age I believe is way before that. Im not a great armour expert but I know that much. chainmail also i dont think belongs to the time period
The Hyborian Age dominated Earth from 14,000 to 9500 BC.
So if we should consider the time period it takes place in then pretty much nothing of what we have in the game should be possible, other than perhaps some stone tools and some animal hide cloths covering our bodies, but Robert E Howard describes the Hyborian age as a fictional setting where way more modern stuff is blended in
Read the books. Chain and plate mail both are part of the universe, as are crossbows.
for what Ive read conan is between 9000 to 3500 BC.
still unimmersive though
Didn’t I hear something about crossbows making a comeback is this a thing?
Silent Legion armour is based on Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer. The setting for that armour set is even earlier than the Hyborian Age.
In the Conan universe, the world goes through cycles of advancement and destruction. Cultures and technology flourish, then are lost and forgotten to a cataclysmic event, only to be rediscovered once again in the next cycle.
The Hyborian Age is in a different cycle than our own time and the technology that exists in it should in no way be compared to recent history.
k i didnt know that was a lore thing
Don’t fret it in this game and on these forums everyone and everything has lore.
That last stone node you destroyed…. It probably had lore too.
When the story is nearly one hundred years old, yeah, there is a lot of lore.
As for the date of the Hyborian Age, Dale Rippke places it around 32,500 BC. While other people certainly dispute that number and give varying alternatives, Conan Exiles follows Dale Rippke’s chronology, so his opinion may be given more weight than others’.
For those who want our own history…
Crossbows (Chinese) and Armour of Iron Mail (Celtic) start circulation around 500 BCE.
Plate armour of the Bronze variety (Dendra Panoply, Mycenaean, Greek) is about a millennium older.
Lamellars (some varieties called “scaled” armour), later metal, but earlier leather or horn have been around about as long as reinforced textile/hardened linen, both of which are basically as old as organized warfare as we understand it.
Before and simultaneously with that, there was always partially cured rhino hide.
Now, fun little fact, “pre-history”, depending upon which scholar you ask, runs right up to the bronze age in about 3300 BCE. We have artifacts from before that, but little in the way of writings and this can lead to wild speculation (and lots of internal wibbles when trying to overturn blatantly fallacious suppositions by decayed aristos in Victorian England who spent more time chasing the dragon in an opium den than they did researching and cataloguing).
For a product to be Conan ™, it cannot be immersive to any of our own historical time periods. At least not fully. It’s a deliberately designed patische of premodernality. That’s before we even touch on the blatantly super natural elements.
As mentioned above, one of the core principles of the Hyborian Age is that it is post plural apocalypses. The civilizations contemporaneous to Conan are successors states built over the ruins of significantly more advanced civilizations. Some of which were directly touched by alien intelligences out of Lovecraftian Mythos. Literally, as the two authors (Howard and Lovecraft) were penpals and collaborators.
There will be many things that seem anachronistic to any of our own historical periods. That’s deliberate.
That is the immersion, because it’s explicitly fictional, as much fantasy as mytho-history.
The core game Plate Armour, Silent Legion, is explicitly regalia of that same group, which was in direct service to the child of one of the Giant Kings (one of those far more advanced vanished cultures). You learn how to make it by magically communing with an ancient lorestones.
That having been said…
This one is very much in support of more savage or ancient armours.
Wolf and Bear pelts, horn lamellars.
The recent Stygian and Turanian offerings have tickled the itch, but there is still plenty of room to grow.
For example, literally any Kushite outfit or armour.
I tend to think of unimmersive armours in game as someone running around looking like they’re wearing a muppet pelt. Oh look, Pictish Warchief armour complete with Cookie Monster fur.
When i hear unimmersive armor I imagine players dressed up in bright different coloured dyed armour pretending to be the power rangers.
This one impressed me with his wide knowledge. I totally had the wrong idea about the conan lore not having read any of the books. It kinda makes sense now so thx.
I personally want to see more vendhya stuff
In another time, this one professionally imparted knowledge of the past.
Did you know (a form of) Ice Cream sandwiches predate the Roman Empire?
That aside, another thing about Conan lore is going to be purity.
Conan ™ as an intellectual property has been passed around with little care and much variation over the years.
He was an Avenger eating dinner with Dr Doom not long ago.
The leads at Funcom tend to lean heavily towards Howard purism, with a few exceptions.
So other than some serial publications, if you want the least contentious assembled documents, the early Gnome press stuff is your best option, excluding anything by Nyberg and sometimes anything “finished” by de Camp.
So basically:
The Coming of Conan
Conan the Barbarian
The Sword of Conan
King Conan
Hour of the Dragon
To note, these are mostly compilations of short stories published in Weird Tales back in the 30s.
From a purist perspective, absolutely skip Tales of Conan, as Howard had written those stories to be generic medieval, and de Camp rewrote Conan as a character into them.
Tower of the Elephant and Red Nails maybe good intros.
But in short, the lore is a bit of a hornet’s nest and people can be very… passionate… about their fandoms.
Vendyhan npc factions, or at least members of groups like the Black Hand would be nice too.
If you think plate armor is unimmersive… wait till you hear about Food Replicators and Force Field Belts in the actual stories.
The Hyborian Age is regarded as the origin of the Sword and Sorcery genre. What is fascinating about it is it is closer to a post apocalyptic science fiction. The Hyborian age takes place between around 12,000-10,000BC with the Thulian age (where Kull of Atlantis takes place) around 10,000 years prior to that.
In both ages they were predated by cataclysms that reverted technological advancement. There were also entities (Serpent Men and Giant Kings) that possessed technological devices that appeared as magic to most humans.
Also the Giant Kings that we see heavily referenced in Conan Exiles are well known to be aliens to the world that the setting takes place.
Finally one should be aware that the real medieval age while possessing technology that was superior to the age that preceded it, also had a technological regression in its own right in some fields. The same happened in the Thulian and Hyborian ages.
I really recommend the Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard. Everything you need, including unfinished stories (without any later author’s attempts to “finish” them, collected in one book.
Just like in the real world, different Hyborian Age cultures developed technology at different paces. So we have people with full plate armor fighting people with copper or stone weapons. At least no culture in the Hyborian Age has developed gunpowder.
could you imagine
what is dragonpowder?
Pseudo-magickal not gunpowder.
Note that it uses Demon Blood as an ingredient.
Absolutely not natural combination of bat scat and sulfur…
The description notes it is from Khitai, which is a land of Sorcerors. It’s also basically an Ancient China Stand in, with elements ranging from the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors phase, thru the Spring and Autumn phase, all the way into elements from the Yuan dynasty and arguably later. Covering literal millenia.
But yes, basically, it’s gunpowder, but powered by magically reagents rather than just Sulfur, Charcoal, and Fledermaus Feces.