I don't read much fiction, but someone recently pointed out that several of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are available for free from Project Gutenberg. I had previously read The Hour of the Dragon, the most-downloaded of the lot, and found it alright but not great. The seams of the serial structure in which it was originally published showed through pretty hard. The next most-read on Gutenberg was Red Nails.
I enjoyed Red Nails quite a bit (with the usual caveats about '30s pulp fiction), but more important, this is really good inspiration for old-school style dungeoncrawls. Without spoiling anything, there's a multi-level dungeon with competing factions, and those factions aren't monolithic, precisely in the way that dungeon factions are talked about in the OSR blogosphere. There are also a couple neat ideas for magic items and dungeon set dressing pieces. The dungeon bits of Hour of the Dragon don't hold a candle to this.
The Appendix N entry for Howard doesn't call out particular Conan stories, but I have to imagine that if it did, this one would've made the cut.
IIRC, the old TSR module B4 "The Lost City" was partly inspired by Red Nails.
ReplyDeleteI'll have to give that one a look, thanks!
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