2 replies to this topic

[ebluntzer]

I have written a sourcebook that provides a RPG setting for the Hyborian age that is compatible with White Wolf's World of Darkness. The sourcebook provides a world history (Thurian, Cataclysm, Acheronian, and Hyborian ages), and a personal history for the gods and demons of the Hyborian world. The premise of the sourcebook is the gods are real and are actually demons as per White Wolf's 2001 publication Demon the Fallen.

I did a fair amount of research to make the sourcebook as 'correct' as possible. I introduced a number of assumptions in order to reconcile the Demon and Hyborian storylines. The assumptions are presented in the first part of the sourcebook so they can easily be identified.

The sourcebook is available at https://rapidshare.c...orian_Age.docx. I am interested in constructive feedback you may like to offer.

[Taranaich]

Interesting stuff you have here, Eric. I have a few quibbles (Lemuria most likely wasn't Japan, Mu wasn't Australia, only Stygian women of the noble class were white skinned, the Stygian/Acheronian stuff, etc) but these might derive from the Mongoose RPG itself. That said, the spider-god of Yezud was a Howard creation, so don't feel bad about its conclusion (unless you have a scene of the PC being rescued by his horse!) and I'm of the same opinion in regards to the Khitans and Hyrkanians being Lemurian diaspora.

Even so, the fact that this is a "merging" of two universes can account for several differences.

[ebluntzer]

I've read the popular assertions that Lemuria and Mu respectively weren't Australia and Japan.


I did not plan for Lemuria to look like Japan, however when I analyzed the continents described by The Hyborian Age and turned them into maps, Lemuria turned out to look alot like Japan. Consider:

• 'the Lemurians...inhabited a chain of large islands in the eastern hemisphere.'
• 'Many Lemurians escaped to the eastern coast of the Thurian Continent...'
• Lemuria was a chain of large islands that were close enough for a large volume of residents to escape to the continent. Presuming that 'many' refers to more than mercenary marines, the islands of Lemuria had to be close enough to the Thurian continent to be reached by non trans-oceanic vessels.

When I drew 'large islands' close enough to the Thurian continent for to be reached by an exodous, I wound up with things that looked alot like Japan. I wasn't setting out with this in mind, however the data worked, which makes me question the common assertion that Lemuria wasn't Japan.


There is little hard material to identify the location of Mu. The Hyborian Age cites a people on 'a shadowy and nameless continent lying somewhere east of the Lemurian Islands'. There is also the continent that many assert is south and west of Lemuria (I never did find the primary source for this). It is not clear to me if this implies two continents or one, and which was the homeland of the Mu. Lacking conclusive documentation, I chose to set the Mu on a continent south and west of Lemuria. This made them close enough to compliment my theory that the people that enslaved the Lemurians on the Thurian continent were Mu. If Lemuria wound up being close to Japan (as described above), this places Mu close to Australia. Again, this was not my intention setting out, it was a derived result.


Given that Lemuria and Mu fall into place where they do, I am tempted to question the convention that the continents are not Japan and Australia. There may be a letter from Howard stating that the continents are not the same, however given his background as a writer of historical fiction, his tendency to pull cultures from historical sources and place them in roughly the same location they occupied on the Earth, and the fact that he re-wrote a number of historical stories as Conan stories in order to get them to sell, I suspect that there was at least a sub-concious tendency to lean toward actual geography. This might be a stretch given the map of the Hyborian world that a fan drew and Howard blessed, however instead of pushing the point I'll fall back and state 'I didn't plan to put Lemuria and Mu there, they just came out that way'.


> only Stygian women of the noble class were white skinned.
Did I write that, or is that something you're asserting from a different source? If the former, it wasn't strictly my intent. If the latter, hook me up!


Most of the odd ideas in the sourcebook are mine. The Mongoose material is faithful to published authors (Howard, DeCamp, etc.).