Conan from Mongoose

The other day I received a couple of supplements for the Conan role-playing game from Mongoose games “The Free Companies” and “Across Thunder River”. I’ve been reading through them and I am really impressed at the quality of the work. I wish these had come out during my glory days of gaming, when I used to game all night long every weekend. Alas, now I'm relegated to a few stolen hours every few weeks, but I digress.
When the Conan stuff from Mongoose first came out I couldn’t believe the price, there was no way in Hell I was gonna spend almost $50.00 for a game! I figured I’d survived this long without it; I would just go on surviving. Adding fuel to my indignation was the fact that when it came out it was full of typos and other editing problems (now, I am in no way a master of grammar, but if you want me to fork out fifty bucks for a product then that product should be professionally edited).
It seems that Mongoose has corrected the editing problems with the second printing, so I finally broke down and bought “the Atlantean” version of the rules
(FYI: remember, if the copy you see on EBay for $6.00 doesn’t say “Atlantean edition” then someone is trying to sell you a first printing lemon that they got stuck with). The book blew me away, first of all it’s beautiful and secondly it’s packed with tons of information on running a game in the Hyborian age of Conan. Even if you don’t use the D20 rules (I use the old TSR Conan rules set) the book, and the supplements that followed it are worth the price. I would even suggest the books to folks who don’t game just for the supplemental information alone, its fun reading and much better than many of the pastiche efforts that TOR books was putting out.
At the moment I am running a Conan game on Yahoogroups, and though it’s just starting out, I'm having a good time working on the adventure and reading the supplements for flavor and inspiration.