Setting Study: Aquilonia, Jewel of the West
MMORPG Age of Conan Reporter John Humphrey writes this look at the Aquilonia region, one of the primary areas in Funcom's Age of Conan.
Aquilonia is the center of the civilized world in Age of Conan, one of nine Hyborian Kingdoms that Robert E. Howard imagined. When Howard created the Hyborian World in 1932 (long before Tolkien's Middle-Earth in the late 1930's), he placed Aquilonia in the area of Southern England and France, before a cataclysm that shifted the continents and sent the Pictish Wilderness under the North Sea. Let this not deceive you though. It is a hotspot of political intrigue, deception, plots, and outright insurrection. Aquilonia faces war on two fronts. On the eastern front, Nemedia was defeated less than a year earlier after trying to replace Conan with his predecessor's last living heir; friction remains despite the Nemedian Ambassador's attempts to generate a trade treaty. On the western front, the Westermarck yet feels the strain of repeated invasions by collected hordes of Picts.