Mythic

Battles: CONAN

Version: Dec. 2020. By Felix Girke. For private playtest use only.

Contents:
Dashboards, Activation and Recruitment Cards for
1 Deity, 4 Heroes, 5 Monsters, 6 Troops, 5 Leaders

Activation and recruitment cards are formatted to be printed, cut out and glued to superfluous (2nd
language?) Mythic Battles cards. I apologize for the poor design of the dashboards. Do I know why the
names of the units on the dashboards are so ill-formatted? No. Do I care overly? Also no.

Preliminary Remarks:
These playtest package materials serve to use some of the contents of the “Conan” game retail box
in the Mythic Battles games line, all by Monolith.
The content is designed towards use in skirmishes, no scenarios are provided.
Most of the materials follow established templates, but the emphasis on “leaders” (functional
equivalents to Jarl Jorun from the Pandora box) seeks to further develop mechanisms that have been
barely introduced in the Mythic Battles game line.
Where the material diverges from established patterns is in the innovative design of Conan’s god
Crom (or Crom!) of Cimmeria. As there is no Crom! miniature in the Conan retail box (or game,
period), the divinity Crom! is never on the board and has none of the usual stats. Thus, the Crom!
player cannot lose by way of the death of the divinity. Since Crom! is a god of men, the Crom! player
may not recruit monsters and loses either when another divinity has reach their win condition, or
when the Crom! player’s last hero is killed. To even the playing field, Crom! can use his activation
cards to remove divine stones from the game.

In this playtest package, I have usually erred –with seeing eyes! - towards making units a bit too
powerful rather than too weak, as the aim was to explore “fun” abilities first and achieve balance
second. I also used quotes from the fiction to label abilities, and in many cases looked into the
original stories to lend flavor to powers and to justify talents.

I’m looking forward for any sort of feedback, be it general experiences like “too weak”, “too good”,
“too complex”, “boring”, just as much as more specific comments and suggestions regarding powers,
talents, stat lines.


Comments on individual units:

Crom!: This clearly requires most testing, as the mechanism so strongly upsets established patterns.
One important dial is the number of activation cards Crom! gets, and how the removal of stones
messes with the game.

1

Conan: Conan is a murder machine. At a cost of 5, he should be roughly equivalent to Veteran
Achilles or Veteran Heracles, but he will likely turn out to be a bit stronger than either, so I would be
grateful for suggestions on how to maintain the fun while not have him overshadow these others.
(Probably: reduce his stats a bit)

Bêlit: She is currently overly endowed with (highly thematic) powers, abilities and specials, mostly to
justify my decision to make her a 5-point hero as well. My main concern is whether this cornucopia
of sheer stuff that comes with Bêlit is just too much or whether it’s fun and good. Also: The
dashboard says 4 activation cards, I provide 5. Just try it out. ;-)

Hadrathus: Hadrathus is rather techy, and has poor stats, but does interesting things nobody else is
really doing; I am curious whether that is interesting for people.

Shevatas: He follows other “thief” templates, but again is clearly different enough from Autolycus to
require some more testing.

Thak: Everything with move 1 is a hard sell, but Thak is so tough otherwise and brings an interesting
challenge to the opponent to hopefully make recruiting him attractive.

Khosatral Khel: A big tough guy who can absorb divine stones can shake up the game considerably;
the strategic shifts he brings to the table are really fun for me, but the question whether his stats are
adequate is still open.

Dark Demon: There is no real justification to make this guy fireproof, but he needed a little
something, and the lore provided few pointers. This is the one unit to which I am least committed in
terms of powers. Maybe it’s enough, though, and he’s no Minotaur 2.0.

Outer Dark Demon: The stats aren’t great, but it, again, can do things nobody else can and which
turn it into a really annoying 3-pt. flyer. I expect it will be fun for players to play around with this
suite of abilities.

The Leaders: First of all, there are two variants of Skuthus and I like both, so I would much appreciate
feedback which one of them is more “attractive”. For balancing, I looked at Jarl Jorun who gives 1
AoW card, 1 activation, +1 attack and +1 defense: and in general, better basic stats (especially attack
and defense) seem more valuable than more situational talents, so some of these leaders improve
stats and lend talents in the hope that they don’t overshadow the Jarl. But as we have only seen one
Jarl so far, some of these might turn out to be markedly better than others.

The Troops: I consider most of these fairly uncontroversial; but it was fun to stick some talents to
troops so far only found on heroes, monsters and divinities. The Pict Hunters are a bit weird, and the
Archers could turn out to be quite strong; one dial to fiddle with could be the number of figures in
each troop unit. I’m probably too generous here.