the story so far.

Alright, so we have now followed Conan from his captivity in Hyperborea south through Brythunia, Corinthia and into Zamora, and along his many meanderings into the southern reaches of Turan, or Turanian controlled territory.. Before he winds up back in Shadizar. His route is anything but circuitous and it is in many ways repetitive. It was already such with just the Andrew J. Offutt pastiches, it became especially so with the addition of the Tor Pastiches. But here goes, after having read the first dozen Conan stories in the William Galen Grey Continuity. I've come to at least one firm conclusion, Conan the Hunter does not belong this early in his career. It is disruptive, and no explination is made for what happened to Conan's traveling companions from "Defiant" who then re-appear in the very next Steve Perry book. I've got a suspicion of a place for it, where it should work better, but I'm not 100% certain yet. Other than that, if you read perhaps a bit more into the stories, you do see that they more or less can be made to follow a relatively strict coherency. Albeit with several large holes in it where there is mo material available, the most glaring of these holes is how Conan wound up in Arenjun for "Tower of the Elephant" after having arrived in Shadizar at the end of "Formidable"

Robert Jordan's Chronology includes his adaption of "Conan the Destroyer" between "Sword of Skelos" and "Magnificent" but I feel this is preposterous as it's definitely a sequel to "Conan the Barbarian"... Though it might fit fairly decently if he didn't moan about Valeria all the time in it. Since there is no Valeria present in any of the stories we have read so far.. It dosen't make much sense to include it.

So as far as the dis-inclusion of the two movie adaptions, I'm still firmly in favor of that. I've read one continuity at least where they attempted to break "Conan the barbarian' up by chapters and force it to fit around the rest of the books.. but then you run into the problem of a disappearing/re-appearing Subetai. I think that doing something like that is trying too hard.. I don't even like breaking up Queen of the Black Coast in order to fit in Conan the Rebel.

After I've finished up the remainder of the Shadizar centric stories, (Invincible, Halls of the Dead) And Conan is on his way westwards.. I'm going to scoot back to the beginning and read "Conan of Venerium" and "Conan the Bold" and see if I can find any comfortable way to add them to the continuity.

I've also begun to work on a new Hyborian Map. I'm doing this mainly because all the existing ones are lacking in some way or another for my needs. So I'm going to include a small picture of my prototype map. It will eventually be a black and white line map in PNG format, but for now you have to settle for a small .GIF which I've scrawled Conan's journeys up to this point on.

From Hyborean Apocrypha