After Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Tim Cain worked up a proposal for a Troika RPG based on Conan

GamesRPGAfter Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Tim Cain worked up a proposal for a Troika RPG based on ConanWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Cain on Games is back with another dive into the lost history of Troika. This time, Tim Cain has been digging through the proposals Troika sent out to various publishers as work on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was winding down, and he’s come up with a doozy.

It turns out that in June, 2004, Cain pitched a third-person action RPG based on Conan the Barbarian. As he explains in the video, the Dungeons & Dragons campaign he ran in high school was set in Conan’s Hyborian age because “it was one of the few fantasy series with a map that my friends hadn’t read,” which meant he had “extensive notes on all the countries, on languages, on cultures, on how magic worked” he’d written up as a 14-year-old. Thank goodness for the obsessive teenage nerd brain.

All this would be seen via an over-the-shoulder camera, using the Source Engine as Bloodlines did and promising “realistic facial animations” as well as physics-based attacks. The proposal also highlights the idea that, instead of the standard zero-to-hero format of RPG progression, players would be playing Conan as a badass from the start—earning even more abilities like a “cyclone strike” or more stealth options as they choose.

Another proposal in the pile wasTroika’s pitch for Baldur’s Gate 3, as Cain has discussed in a previous video. Really, it seems like a bottomless pit of games industry lore over there at Castle Cain, and I hope he continues digging through it.

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