The sorcery system on The Thin Veneer is based on the Modiphius Conan role-playing game found in Resources. If you want to engage with this system, you are expected to read chapter 7 of Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of and chapters 1, 4, 6, and 7 of The Book of Skelos. You need not understand any of the game mechanics presented in these books—the important bits are the lore, flavour, and general ideas conveyed.

Below you’ll find a combination of summaries of the book contents, and some additional guidelines on how sorcery interfaces with role-play on the server.

On mystery and trust

The below guidelines may seem rather vague and lack concrete rules. This is done deliberately to preserve the mystery of sorcery. Quoting from The Book of Skelos:

You, as a gamemaster, must resist the urge to lean too heavily on “the rules”. By necessity, we have created rules for magic. These rules are flexible and seek to model the magic in the original stories. Narration comes before dice rolling. The effects of some of the things done by Thugra Khotan in “Black Colossus” are not written down anywhere in the rules. Akivasha the vampire is not a vampire in the traditional sense. There is no “race” of her kind.

The more we categorize and number the unnatural, the more mundane it becomes. As gamemaster, you’ll note sorcery is purposefully simplified. The depth comes from you and your players’ imaginations, not a tome of rules and spell descriptions.

An important difference is that we have no game master in The Thin Veneer who perpetually accompanies each player. This means that a great heap of trust is placed on players of sorcerous characters to correctly play to the tone of the setting, and to not ‘abuse’ their awesome powers. Abuse, however, is curtailed because sorcery works just the same as our system of conflict—it relies on trust, collaboration, and consent.

What is sorcery?

Sorcery exists as an unnatural anomaly outside the human capacity for understanding. It is both a science and an art, and it is distinctly neither of these things. Sorcery is a path of knowledge, power, corruption, madness, sacrifice, bargaining, and trickery. None who tread this path are unchanged by it, and only very few—typically priests—can resist the darker temptations of sorcery. But even those who treat with the sorcerous arts for benevolent reasons pay a heavy toll.

Most importantly, sorcery solves no mundane problems. There is no society on the face of the Earth which looks to sorcery to water their fields or to light their streets. The cost of sorcery almost always outweighs the benefit, and the benefit is rarely mundane in nature, for there is nothing mundane about sorcery.

But above all, sorcery is impossible to define. Quoting from The Book of Skelos:

Defining what Howardian sorcery is becomes an exercise of untangling Howard’s original ideas from the vast, collective unconscious of what we take today as “fantasy magic”. Howard’s magic has no common elements — all of it is unusual. There are few spells with precise effects, and much of what sorcerers do is science, alchemy, and trickery. When real magic appears, it is dark, powerful, and unexplained. You’ll find no theory of magic or a “magic system” in Howard’s work. He hints that sorcerous powers come from dark, evil places, but he never theorizes about how they are powered. Magic, like much in the world of Conan, remains mysterious.

[…]

In the simplest terms, Hyborian Age magic is slow. Wizards cannot summon columns of fire and ice to kill a charging enemy. In fact, in most of the stories, wizards often resort to something more mundane when attempting to halt a certain charging Cimmerian — tomb dust and flame powder among them. Tricks, mummery, and mesmerism are more commonplace than actual sorcery. Magic is ritual and rituals require both time and timing. It is seldom a quick affair. To the common person, however, the two are indistinguishable.

The power of Howardian sorcery is vast, but it moves slowly and mysteriously. It lacks “firepower”, if you will, in favor of manipulating fate, events, mortality, and even time.

Traditions

Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of presents several sorcerous traditions. They are western sorcery, eastern sorcery, theurgy, shamanism, witchcraft, and Acheronian magic. These traditions are further expanded upon in chapter 4 of The Book of Skelos.

These traditions are a fundamental component of how one role-plays a sorcerer. They guide every part of what it means to be a sorcerer. You are expected to pick one of these traditions for your sorcerous character.

Patronage and education

One is not born with an aptitude for sorcery, for it is a wholly unnatural thing. Each sorcerer has obtained their fell powers through learning. A sorcerous character must have a patron who taught them what they knew. The identity of the patron and circumstances of teaching can be incredibly varied. Below some ideas:

  • A traditional apprentice to a sorcerer.
  • An acolyte in a cult or temple.
  • A shaman who heeded whispers on the wind.
  • A petitioner to an inhuman entity.
  • A scholar who delved into eldritch tomes.
  • An adventurer who found an object possessed by an evil soul.

Because there is no private game master to role-play your patron, and because these are the Exiled Lands which you cannot escape, you should be mindful of your choice of patron. Patrons who demand extensive involvement are ill-advised, because you may not be able to interact with them much or at all.

Offerings

A sure and ofttimes necessary way to empower sorcery is sacrifice. Food, incense, riches, animals, blood, and—most grimly—humans can all be offered up in service to some great ritual.

However, there is a problem: excepting other players, and excepting emerald coins, all other resources on this Conan Exiles server are effectively infinite. There is no upper limit to the amount of in-game wood you could burn to satisfy sorcerous entities. For this reason, the Self-imposed restrictions rule exists. Résumé, it bids you acquire your sorcerous offerings in role-play.

The rule does not mean that every chicken you kill or stick of incense you burn should be acquired through role-play. You can, but you are assumed to be able to source some fundamentals for yourself. Rather, the rule exists as a self-imposed restriction that serves to facilitate role-play. Acquiring ingredients for awesome magic is as much part of sorcery as the casting thereof, and you make the server richer when you task adventurers with slaying the biggest elephant in the savannah for its mighty ivory tusks.

The exact offerings can vary from casting to casting. Again, magic is mysterious, and there are no hard rules that govern sorcery. As a general rule, more powerful magic demands more taxing sacrifice, but you are encouraged to be creative.

There is always a price

Sorcery does not come cheaply at all. A price is always incurred on the sorcerer, immediately or in due time. Page 110 of The Book of Skelos provides multiple suggestions for portraying this. You need not cripple your character with penalties.

Mimicking magic

Not everything that sorcerers do is strictly magical in nature, even if it is indistinguishable to the layperson. There are many non-sorcerous arts and trappings which are typically employed by sorcerers as part of their schemes. In fact, learned men and women without a sorcerous background may have studied these lores, too.

When mimicking magic, you are invited to look to real-world ‘magic’ for inspiration. Real-world druids, shaman, theurgists, and oracles performed magic that was sincerely believed to have treated with the supernatural.

Divination

The Book of Skelos mentions only astrology, but there are many methods of divination—the art of prophecy. This Wikipedia article contains an absolute wealth of ideas for divination. Reading auspices can be an important religious duty, or a reliable source of income from the superstitious.

Do any methods of divination actually work? You are allowed to play with this theme if you like, but if it matters for role-play, then yes, learned diviners can make reasonably accurate predictions under the right circumstances. But sometimes fate changes its course, and sometimes the auspices lie.

Mummery

Mummery is the artifice of magic. It is sleight of hand and practical effects which bedazzle and deceive the audience. It is most similar to the art of real-life magicians. The chief benefit of mummery to sorcerers is to display their supposed magical prowess without expending any power.

Mesmerism

Mesmerism, or hypnotism, is the art of altering the mind state of others. This can simply be quackery performed on the superstitious, or it can be sorcerous in nature, truly putting a mind in a trance.

The people of Cimmeria, Hyperborea, and Nordheim are surprisingly more resistant to mesmerism, owing to this tradition not existing in their lands.

Herbalism

More than most endeavours practised by sorcerers, herbalism is firmly rooted in the physical and the natural. Some plants simply have special properties, and one need only know them, and in some cases correctly prepare them.

Alchemy

Alchemy is the diligent study of matter. It is the weighing and separating of reagents in formulae, and slavishly studying and recording what happens when minute changes are made to the method. Skilled alchemists can produce fire that burns on water and other such awesome feats of the natural world that border on the unnatural.

Spells

The Modiphius books contain several spells that are rather broad in their application, and they typically have ‘momentum spends’ and ‘alternative effects’ to modify the behaviour of the spell. Some notes about these spells:

  • These spells are given names, but in-universe, these are unlikely to be the names of a sorcerer’s spells, if they have names at all.
  • The effects of the spells are sometimes very heavy in game mechanics. These can be ignored, or you can try to read the fictional intent behind these mechanics.
  • The spell often lists a difficulty. This difficulty can guide you in your role-play.
  • Failing to cast a spell should result in a ‘complication’. The Modiphius RPG is deliberately vague about this (page 95), and you are allowed to be creative.
  • You are allowed quite a lot of creative liberty with these spells. The manner of casting and the exact details of what happens is where your imagination takes over. You may read the Mongoose RPG’s spells (chiefly in the base book and in its Secrets of Skelos) for additional inspiration, but be mindful that the magic system depicted therein is very different and more codified, and sometimes doesn’t respect the theme of the setting very well.

You may pick two spells that your sorcerer knows, appropriate to their sorcerous tradition but not strictly limited by it. This number is deliberatively low, both in the RPG as on this server. This keeps magic rare, and means that any one sorcerer cannot solve every problem.

Your sorcerous character may desire greatly to acquire new powers. In collaboration with a game master via tickets, you may sparingly learn new spells. See also Tickets.

If you find that a spell is missing or incomplete, likewise open a ticket (or mention it in your whitelisting ticket), and we can see about conjuring something up. This is no guarantee that you will get what you want.

The spell Favor of the Gods is not available to pick. It is entirely too dependent on the rules of the RPG to translate well to this role-playing server.

Counter magic

As on page 172 of the Modiphius RPG, sorcerers can block the spells of rivals. If you witness a spell being cast that is in your repertoire, you may pit your skill against the other sorcerer’s to prevent the spell from being cast.

TODO: When a dice system is implemented, there will be a dice-adjudicated way of doing this.

Grand workings

The Book of Skelos presents several grand workings—epic and rare rituals that can only be cast once in an age. The time scale on a role-playing server works a little differently—perhaps the Exiled Lands are simply unique and more sorcerous—but you are allowed to perform such rituals in collaboration with game masters.

You should not expect to be able to cast more than one grand working, if at all. It’ll be a long journey full of preparatory role-play. Your character may be foiled at some stages, but they should also play to lift and ultimately allow the ritual to happen.

You may, if you want, invent your own grand workings.

In-game sorcery

The in-game sorcery system is available to sorcerers, but very little of it actually matches the theme of the system as described here. You may do with it as you like, but on the whole you should consider it more a game mechanic than a fictional element.

Tickets

As a sorcerer, perhaps more so than most people, you should open tickets generously. When you want to conduct an awesome ritual that requires game master support, or do some type of sorcery that you think might not be supported by the rules, or have any other questions or input, you should open a ticket.

We cannot guarantee that the answers you get will be consistent across time and game masters. This sucks, and may come across unfair, but you are asked to assume good faith. Owing to its mysterious nature, it is incredibly difficult to rule consistently on sorcery. Sorcery is a cruel mistress, and the unfortunate inconsistency of tickets is but one way in which this manifests.

Last updated 25 Jul 2026, 14:53 +0200. history