Well, gentle readers...

The Edge of the Aquilonian Empire version 2.5 is on line for your viewing pleasure. For those who might be unfamiliar, it is the world of Conan the Barbarian...

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/o09pnz71ylq9a3r/AADrO-InRbC8QbK3zZoNAokja?dl=0

I really appreciated the feedback and suggestions made by the community for the last edition, and I would be overjoyed if people would dig in on this one.

Play testing has been going well, and we're starting to feel pretty solid about what we've wrought. That being said, if you have the time, I'd love some serious thought about the updated melee ranges, and most especially, the section on Magic. Feel free to get crunchy on it...

Thanks in advance.

I've only browsed a few races so far, BUT...

I believe giving the same amount of XP to a character with a characteristic of 3 is an unfair advantage.

I knew that sounded familiar...

Now all I can think of is Thulsa Doom as a sith lord, named Darth Doom!

Font VinerhandITC not found error. Makes the page unreadable. (Used on the Colonist after Healer.)

Impressive amount of work, it's going to take a while to go through it!

Aww... For a brief moment I thought this was based on George Lucas' early drafts of Star Wars. Alderaan (well, sort of Alderaan meets Yavin) was called Aquilae (which I may have mispelled).

That said, kudos to you for getting something testing-worthy off the ground!

Thanks, Whafrog. It's been something of a labor of love.

It's been updated to v2.7, so if your perusing it, you might want to grab the latest version.

Hopefully that will take care of your font issue, Streak... although it loads just fine for me.

Again, any and all comments are more than welcome.

Cheers, and happy gaming...

Thoughts as they come to me:

1. Nicely laid out, and of course I love the Frazetta art

2. Definitely needs a linked index...

3. Races are interesting and capture the flavour pretty well. I think there are perhaps too many extra skills granted, but it looks like everybody gets something, so it probably balances out.

4. I do like the flavour of the boosts and setback dice for each race, but it's a lot to keep track of. If I think of my "rules-averse" player group, I'd have to do a lot of extra work, but maybe other tables won't mind. I'm also not sure about the double boosts and double setbacks, those are pretty major upgrades.

5. I'm not crazy about the addition of Social Fortitude. This is what Strain is for and it's just one more stat to track. I see how Social Fortitude works in the Social Combat rules, but I think it would be simpler if it was just refactored to use Strain (though obviously some things would have to change)

6. Also not crazy about the Combat and Social Defense mechanic. First, I doubt it's necessary, because there are plenty of Talents for increasing defense or upgrading opponent attack difficulties. Second, it seems arbitrary to related it to completing a Tier in a Talent tree, especially when a Talent tree might not have anything to do with either Combat or Social activities. Also, some trees require a very indirect route to fill in a row...anybody using those trees would be disadvantaged.

7. typo p.95: "They are nable"...

8. The split of Engaged range to Engaged + Close is inventive. I presume it was to allow a differentiation between Melee:Heavy and Melee:Light...seems like it would work. It also makes sense with the Duel rules and spending Advantage. I like the Duel rules, lots of flavour.

9. I skipped over the Mounted, Squad, and Mass combat rules...I'm assuming these are similar to what's been released already by FFG?

10. I like the Reputation effects, looks like fun. Might be an effective way to rein in murder hobos...or encourage them

Maneuvers:

11. the Proficiency die conversion of successes to advantages feels arbitrary, what is the purpose and why is it useful? I have a feeling that with Melee combat in EotE so strongly favouring the attacker, people aren't having any trouble hitting, and would really like more Advantages to trigger crits and the like. In which case...maybe Melee difficulty should not be fixed at PP?

12. I'm not sure about the Reckless Stance Maneuver, who would take it? If you have the maneuver, you might as well Aim, then your opponent doesn't get the boost as well.

Other

13. I'm not clear: are there eleven Melee skills, or two? Eleven seems like too many...

14. I know most of the Talents are "genre free", but what about Talents like Familiar Suns? Does this convert to something like "Familiar Lands"?

15. Magic is nasty I do think you should have the option of not using black pips. One of the points in EotE of getting a higher Force Rating is to avoid having to call on the dark side. Imposing Wounds puts severe limits on a caster's ability, but maybe that's the intent.

Can't really comment on the equipment, that would require play testing, but I can see Conan (Brawn 5) with plate (Soak 6, 4 defense) and large shield (Soak 3, +3 defense) being impossible to take down... I would think the stacking effects of all the dice would make any combat fairly static. What's your experience been?

Whafrog - first of all, thanks for your time and comments... the effort that this community puts out for this game is fantastic, and this is one of the few forums I've been able to stomach for more than a few weeks. Kudos to all...

to your comments -

1. thanks!

2. agreed... I'm just waiting for a few more iterations to do it. Almost... there...

5. yeah... we went back and forth on this one. We really wanted Social Combat to work, to reflect the back and forth of verbal sparring, and to be as engaging for social characters (who we love) as swordplay is for the combat monster. Using Strain alone just didn't work. It would be like spending wounds to activate talents in melee, which no one would do... it's been working out ok, but we're still bashing it out.

6. It's actually been working out in our test play. We wanted something to represent the increased difficulty of attacking a skilled opponent, without making the difficulty an opposed check... the choice of making it talent based was somewhat arbitrary, but... you spend your exp, you get a bonus. It also encourages a broad spread of talents, which we like...

7. ugh... typos...

8. thanks... we like it too. it helps the close-in knife fighter, and the dance of changing ranges (or trying to...) can get to be really fun. The use of weapons with Reach becomes pretty tactical, as well, with the opposed range changing rules.

9. Duel, mass combat, squad combat, riding, and reputation... all based on the FFG rules and reflavored. We tried keeping to the source material wherever possible.

11. We're big fans of spreading advantages around the table, and setting up other characters to succeed. Anything we could do to add to the Advantage/Disadvantage and Strain 'economy' at the table is a win, as far as we're concerned. It's only come up a few times, and it hasn't been too game breaking. With higher level characters, though... I could see problems.

12. combat against minions, which happens a lot in our games. They're there to get killed, after all... It also appealed to my sense of symmetry to have something equivalent to Guarded Stance.

13. There are two. I'm cleaning up language as we speak, so thanks for pointing out your confusion there.

14. Look through the talent trees... they've all been re-skinned there, and you're dead on. Where we couldn't re-skin, comparable talents were swapped in.

15. Yeah... we really wanted Magic to be nasty. That's the way it is in the books... and the only way to do big magic is to have either sacrifices or 'willing' participants to spread the pain. Really, higher level magic should be plot level only as far as we're concerned, and well out of character's hands. We wanted to keep characters at 1-3 force dice fairly easily, and also at most.

Lastly- regarding armor... it seems like most Conan stories are fairly armor-lite, which we also wanted to keep. Which is why any 'good' armor has the Bulky quality, which hits pretty hard. Want to run around in a chain mail shirt? knock yourself out. Full Plate? Good luck doing anything besides staying on your horse.

Our playtesting has been pretty great so far, but then, it's based on EotE, so we're playing with gold.

Keep the comments coming, please!

Thanks again...

Holy.... wow... This book is collossal. It puts my conversionis to shame. Nice work!

Brash -

don't sell yourself short...

and for anyone who's been watching this (or better yet, playing with it), Version 3.5 is in the works. F&D has offered up some new rules to adapt, and a few new ideas to chew on... We're just waiting for the Bounty Hunter book to drop, and then we'll be done.

Please God, let it be the next book.

Again, for anyone who *is* actually playing around with it, perusing it, or using it for anything other than changing the cat litter, let us know what you think, what you like, and what you don't...

Wow, you've put a lot of work into this. It looks really good. I just recently received my copy of the Primeval Thule conversion for D&D5E, and had been making some notes to convert it to the SWRPG mechanics. I like a lot of what you have here and may use it when our group plays Thule when we take a short break from our EotE campaign.

Khoram -

please do... feel free to loot, pillage, use whole cloth, as you will. All I ask is that if you come across something that you either really like, or really don't like - let us know.

(and thanks for the compliment...)

(and now I need to check out Primeval Thule...)