Hyborian War: The Game of Many Things
by Charles Mosteller
Hyborian War is a play by mail game run by Reality Simulations, Inc., or RSI as they are more affectionately known throughout the vast realm that is PBM gaming. Hyborian War is a war game, but it is also a game of many different things. Foremost among these and leading the pack is that Hyborian War is a game of excuses.
You may have heard of The Game Of Thrones. Well, Hyborian War is not that. Indeed, there are far more kingdoms involved in Hyborian War than form the landscape of Westeros. In Hyborian War, there are thirty-six kingdoms that are playable kingdoms, and these do not count all of the various non-player kingdoms and non-unified areas that are in the game. No matter what happens in Hyborian War, players of the game always seem to manage to parade their excuses before one and all. Yet, Hyborian War can be a very unforgiving game. It can be unforgiving of mistakes, and there are times when no amount of excuses can save’s one kingdom from shoddy, incompetent, foolish, or reckless gameplay.
Like all games, Hyborian War has rules that one must learn, if one is to master the basics of the game. Mastering the basics, though, doesn’t always come easy for some, and even veterans of many years of experience playing the game frequently flub something that qualifies as “one of the basics of Hyborian War.”
Everything that one needs to remember about Hyborian War isn’t necessarily covered in the rules. It’s simply impossible to write a manual to fully and adequately cover how to play against every style of play imaginable.
Players can many times be unpredictable, though more times than not, what they choose to do can be predicted, but faced with difficult choices available to you that present themselves over the course of playing the game, one tends to allow one’s own choices to rule their kingdom’s fate (for better or for worse), than whether something can be predicted or not.
One of the crucial things that new players bring to Hyborian War is their inherent willingness to try different things. Experienced players, by comparison, have a dreadful tendency to fall into the ruts of their respective preferred playing styles. Newcomers to Hyborian War are not as predictable as their experienced player counterparts. That’s been my first-hand experience down through the years, anyway. Hyborian War isn’t a game that a newcomer should allow to intimidate them – and neither should they allow veteran players to intimidate them. Often times, experienced players of the game are full of crap, plain and simple. They continuously snort and buy in to their own propaganda. Their barks are typically much worse than their bites.
My good friend of long acquaintance, Josh DeAmicis, started a new game of Hyborian War as Nemedia, recently. He called me, last night, and told me that a neighboring kingdom, Corinthia, had conquered the Nemedian homeland province of Hanumar from him. Now, he’s got a tougher road ahead of him.
One might be tempted to think that he’s just a terrible player (which he might well be), or that he’s never played the Kingdom of Nemedia before (which he has). In Hyborian War, things happen. Hyborian War is a game where things are always happening. When it rains, it pours, and when misfortune strikes your kingdom in Hyborian War, it frequently is a downpour.
Hyborian War is also a game where one can – and frequently does – make friends. It’s not inconceivable, at all, that one can become personal friends with even their enemies in Hyborian War. I’ve done it. Others have done it. I love Josh, whom goes by the moniker of JD, but just because he and I have been friends for what has probably been decades, by now, is not reason for me to not shake my head at him getting his ass kicked in that recent battle for Hanumar.
What matters aren’t his excuses. What good is an excuse? Yeah, you can tweak your fellow players’ noses with excuses, at times, but at the end of the day and at the end of a given turn, you either hold onto all of your kingdom’s provinces, or you don’t. It wasn’t so very long ago that I got my ass kicked out of Ianthe by the Ophirian player, in HW-982. So, I do know what it feels like to lose provinces to other players in games of Hyborian War. Unlike JD, I just try not to make a habit out of it.
Hyborian War is a game of opportunities. At times, it seems like a game of endless opportunities. And what do players of the game frequently do?
They drop the ball and start doling out one excuse after another.
Excuses come dirt cheap. If and when you screw up (which you will, if you play long enough), the key is to not despair. Once you begin to despair in a game of Hyborian War, despair can avalanche on you. And despair sometimes leads to players dropping out of the Hyborian War game that they are playing in. Despair, however, is an avoidable evil.
To defeat despair requires something called resolve. Hyborian War is a game where there’s always other players who crave some province that your enemy has. Hyborian War is a game of temptation, a game of countless battles of temptation. Temptation is one of the greatest tools that any player of Hyborian War has at their disposal. Here’s the catch, though – it isn’t mentioned in the rules.
The rules of Hyborian War deal with the mechanics of the game and its underlying code that has been programmed in such a way that Hyborian War is still alive and well in the 21st Century, decades after it first arrived on the PBM gaming scene. One of the “secrets” to doing well in the game is to “learn” the mechanics of the players, themselves – and that tends to require the acquisition of experience.
After all, all players of Hyborian War are bound by the limitations of the same set of rules and game mechanics (unless players are involved in some organized game of Hyborian War where the players in that game agree ahead of time on certain things that are or are not allow, separate and apart from the standard rules for the game. The rules of Hyborian War allow for player-to-player communication, but they don’t require it. Some believe that the key to success in battle is effective communications. And if you’re not communicating while every other player around you is, then that places you at quite the disadvantage. Hyborian War is definitely a game of communication, and not communicating, while allowed, places your neck on the chopping block. While you busy yourself not communicating with your fellow players, others busy themselves with coordinating your kingdom’s downfall. Hyborian War is a game of kingdom downfalls.
Battles, conquests, spying, assassinating, kidnapping, casting a wide variety of magic spells – Hyborian War is a game about all of these things, and more. So, the next time that you’re sitting around bored out of your mind, know that there is an alternative – one that can bring a lot of fun into your life, if you will but allow it to. And while Hyborian War’s population of players is predominantly male, rest assured, there have been women who have played Hyborian War down through the years which have left their mark on the game. Hyborian War is a game where you can leave your mark by winning, but it is also a game where you can leave your mark in a much bigger way by contributing your presence, your dialogue and conversations, and your strategy and tactics. All strategy and tactics have a point of origin, and it isn’t as though everything that is possible has already been tried in Hyborian War. Rest assured, it hasn’t!
If nothing else, new players bring to Hyborian War new personalities, each with their own unique style of communication wielded in combination with their own frequency of communication. If you’re ever talking on the phone with a fellow player (which still happens, sometimes, even in this day and age), then even the tone and sound of your voice can potentially give you an edge in your inter-player diplomacy and communication over other players.
Hyborian War is a game where personalities can – and frequently do – come into play. And this is true, even if the only way that one chooses to communicate in the game is via the written word. Many players try a mix of both verbal and written communication, and your gameplay in Hyborian War can be enhanced or diminished, depending upon how and why and when you choose to communicate or not.
Why have just one mentor, when you can have many? Or you may not even want a mentor to narrow the learning curve of getting used to playing the game and mastering its basics. Hyborian War is a game of mentors, but it is also a game of individualists. Hither came Conan.
More importantly, though, hither comes you! Even the character of Conan is crafted into the programming of Hyborian War. That character of great fame and infamy, in all of his greatness and with all of the skills at his disposal, is less important to any game of Hyborian War than any player, new or veteran, to grace the PBM playing field. Hyborian War, like I said before, is a game of many things. Above all, it’s a game OF people, and it’s a game FOR people.
Hyborian War is a game that benefits from having more players, rather than fewer players. That’s true of all PBM games, though. Hyborian War is fortunate, in that it is a game that has a sizable and fairly stable community of players. It is also a game that desires YOUR presence to drink war to the lees with OTHER players.
In a way, Hyborian War is like having access to Valhalla on Earth.
Whether you win or whether you lose, it is the waging of war on the Thurian continent over and over and over, again, that is the true and crowning glory of the game.
If you’ve never played Hyborian War before, then you’ve never lost at Hyborian War before. Therefore, you enter undefeated. Hyborian War is a game that makes losing fun. If you’ve never tried your hand at it before, then though you may be undefeated, by virtue of having never played, the taste of victory eludes you.
Tell me, what is good in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
What is also good in life is playing Hyborian War, and the enormous joy that can – and routinely does – come from playing it.
