Hyborian Tales

Hyborian Tales is a Live Roleplaying game based on the works of Robert E. Howard, particularly his stories set during the Hyborian Age and featuring his most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian.

So, what’s different about Hyborian Tales? Why should you play this, instead of a generic fantasy LRP game?

What we have set out to do with Hyborian Tales is to provide an intense, heroic, and challenging series of games. There are three main strengths Hyborian Tales has, in terms of achieving those objectives:
The setting itself

Howard’s “Hyborian Age”, that time before the oceans drank Atlantis, when a bold warrior could become Queen not by birth or destiny but by making her own luck at the point of a sword; when a wily cat-burglar could be acknowledged the greatest thief in the world not by working his way up a “Thieves’ Guild” but by stealing the most fabled treasures of the ancients using nothing more than his quick wits and a dagger. The Hyborian Age is a rich and detailed setting, yet one which is flexible enough to have a huge variety of sword and sorcery tales set within it. Howard’s tales have also influenced our two other strengths, the system and the adventures.
The game system

Drawing on other live-combat LRP games, but adding unique twists to allow player characters to replicate some of the near-superhuman feats achieved by Conan, the Hyborian Tales game system is designed to maximise heroic combat against all the odds. Play a preternaturally quick-witted savage Pict, or a stoic Nordheimer barbarian, or a civilised pikeman from Gunderland, or any of a host of other character types. This is a sword-and-sorcery game, so most characters will be reasonably combat-oriented, but there is room to play a more stealthy, magical, or social character if you so wish, and each adventuring party would be well advised to ensure it is not purely reliant on fighting skills for every encounter.
The adventures

Tired of having to fight your way past the other players to even get a chance at combat? Tired of super-monsters that can only be killed by the whole mob of you piling onto them? Look no further than Hyborian Tales. With a maximum player character “party” size of 8, and a typical monster/NPC crew of 20 or more, you’ll have some of the toughest LRP encounters of your life on a Hyborian Tales adventure. At present, the plan is to run three six-hour adventures and one tavern evening over the course of each weekend event, so that each player will play one adventure and crew the other two, as well as playing his or her main character during the tavern evening. This is what will allow us to have such an excellent ratio of crew to players. The six-hour time-slot for each adventure is superb in creating the rapid-fire direct action feeling of a Robert E. Howard story, and will be quite enough to test you and your character to the limit! We intend for each six-hour adventure to provide some of the most intense sword-and-sorcery challenges you will ever face.

And so it began......

Dawn breaks, war looms, the evil Lord is gathering his armies to wage a campaign of destruction upon the free peoples of the world. It is up to I, Sir Maximilan Pegasus to stop him, with my trusted band of adventurers we must gather the enchanted sword of Tek, the Shield of Way-Lem and the amulet of Subsidence and together we shall slay this abomination! “TIME FREEZE” And bam, the fantasy world fades away, the enchanted sword of Tek in my hand is a rubber sword smothered in coloured ribbons with a laminated card cable tied to the hilt, I look down and I’m wearing plastic armour and unflattering heropants, and the magical world of my imagination washes away to reveal a field in Wigan, but you know what? It’s larp and I’m a larper, it’s what I do.
I started larping when I was 17, I’d never role-played before, I’d never played D&D or Warhammer, never played WoW or any form of online game, I’d never even read Lord of the Rings, I feel somewhat privileged that I hadn’t done any of those things, I think it gave me an untainted attitude towards what larp could be, I had no preconceptions about saving the maiden fair, slaying the dragon or smiting the liche, to me it was just a new thing to try.
It was cold, really cold, 10am on a September morning, the rain was battering down and I’d been given a faux fur tunic, a mouldy old sword and been pointed towards a man and told, “You’re monstering, there’s the ref he’ll tell you what to do.” I obeyed, I played wave after wave of zombies, orcs and various line monsters and to be honest, was cold, bored and hungry. That is, until lunchtime, the teams switched sides, I got into the kit I’d scrounged up, as with most first timers, a black trenchcoat. I took the mouldy old sword, stood with my fellow adventurers and it hit me, I’m a god damn hero!
Pow, there it was, a new larper was born.