The excellent folks at Mödiphius have gotten the license for the Conan roleplaying game. Now I’m not much on the sword-and-sorcery genre since I left my high school days behind, but for those of you that want some gritty fantasy goodness, jump on this bad boy! They’ve already blown past their $65k goal and at last look were at about $360k…enough they funded 11 other products off this.

I’ve had a look at the quickstart rules, and was impressed with how gorgeous even that 50 page taste of the game was. They’ve pulled top-notch artists for the project — Brom, Jusko, Tim Truman, Syrigos, among others. The system is 2d20 — a rules set that borrows a lot of good concepts, looks to play pretty simply. (Some of the writing makes it seem a bit more complex than I suspect it is.) An looks to capture the vicious, gritty side of fantasy, instead of the more friendly Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. (Which I, surprisingly, liked!)

Speaking of — the 5th edition D&D is gorgeous. Truly a spectacular job from the production side of things, and Conan looks to be matching or surpassing that.

It’s not my cup of tea — I’m a bit more interested in the John Carter line —  but check it out, by Crom!