The Anvil of Crom: Uncommon fun

I'm standing high above the stone and stucco portcullises of Tarantia, the glare of the sunshine doubly bright as it bounces off the dirty white dwellings and the twin daggers poised in my calloused hands. The Iron Tower, a bleakly bronzed pillar of darkness amid a sea of sandstone, rises menacingly to the west, casting a lengthy shadow over the maze of rooftops that stretches in all directions.

My cloak whips to and fro in the hefty breeze; my sandalled feet inch backward toward the edge of a high rooftop as three masked Crows close fast. I risk a glance over my shoulder, and the dizzying height makes my head spin. One of the Crows lashes out with a short sword and whiffs as I step off the ledge and drop like a stone toward the glassy surface of the canal several stories below.

With a rush of wind, the building walls bleed and run as I plummet past, indistinguishable streaks of tan on white. The shock of the water whips me back into the here and now; I surface for air and drag myself up on the bank, trying not to dwell on the stench that plasters the cloak to my skin.

Welcome to another leisurely stroll through the Commons.

First off, yes I really did leap off a rooftop into a canal to escape certain death at the hands of a pull gone horribly wrong. While I freely admit to taking a few artistic liberties with the prologue, the core of the experience actually happened to me in game the other night, and that's just one of the reasons Age of Conan's Tarantia Commons zone is such spectacular fun.

It's not hard to get excited by the prospect of exploring Tarantia if you're even a little bit familiar with Robert E. Howard, as few places in the Conan-verse have been described with the lush prose the fantasy author lavished upon the seat of Hyborean power. "The proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west," he wrote in 1932's The Phoenix on the Sword. For the third stop on our ongoing zone impressions tour (following Conall's Valley and the Field of the Dead) it's time to take a look at the seedy, smuggler-friendly underbelly of Aquilonia.

Funcom does an admirable job of expanding on Howard's visual descriptions throughout Age of Conan, but nowhere is the intersection of world-building and game design more enjoyable than Tarantia Commons. The high-level zone, intended for players in their mid to upper 70s, features a satisfying set of quests, a solo and six-man dungeon, and of course, the imposing Iron Tower endgame dungeon.

While AoC has always afforded adventurers the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time in the Aquilonian capital, the game initially restricted players to Old Tarantia and the Noble District. In the summer of 2009, the city finally began to resemble a sprawling medieval metropolis, thanks to the Gangs of Tarantia update. With the addition of the Commons district, Tarantia feels complete, as opposed to simply a loose collection of zones and dungeons. If you've got the hardware to run the framerate gauntlet, it's arguably the game's showcase old-world (i.e., pre-expansion) location.

The environment design is first-rate, as the Commons district not only covers a fair bit of horizontal real estate (including slums, a shanty town, a large graveyard, a leper colony, and extensive waterways), but also expands vertically, and frankly this kicks a large amount of ass. If you see a ladder in the Commons, it isn't just for show, so feel free to clamber on up to the rooftops, scale the sides of the sheer rock cliff that overlooks the city, and even take a high dive off the rickety wooden plank that serves as an execution tool for local gang members.

Speaking of gangs, the zone's quest content finds you taking up arms for either the Wharf Rats or the Crows, a collection of wannabe street toughs grappling for control of the riot-stricken district. The quests are largely soloable depending on your gear and level, with a couple of climactic boss encounters in the Crow's Nest dungeon for which you'll want a tank and a healer. The initial quest chain also grants some cosmetically pleasing (but statistically underwhelming) armor. You can choose to side with one gang or the other, or play both sides of the fence for two different sets of rewards.

All of the quest content in the Commons is well-designed, and will take you over, around, and through the whole of the area and net you a few levels in the process. The zone also features a smattering of group quests in the form of the aforementioned Crow's Nest instance and the Iron Tower dungeon. As of press time I was unable to get a PUG to take my assassin into the Tower, so we'll have to save that particular adventure for a future article (and judging by the pickiness of the Tower groups as well as Funcom's own description of the instance, a stand-alone article is probably warranted).

Getting back to the outdoor areas of the Commons, you'll find a zone that absolutely oozes with flavor; from the animals running amok amidst overturned fruit stands to the dynamic spawns of rioting citizens and city watch guards, Funcom has gone out of its way to make the Commons feel immersive and alive. There are also plenty of dark atmospherics to go around, in addition to what has to be a genre first in terms of the ability to contract a sexually transmitted disease from an NPC (which manifests itself in a temporary movement speed debuff, yes really). Juvenile humor aside, the zone delivers aesthetics in spades. I've already blown through the area's quest content, but I find myself returning several times a week to roleplay, take screenshots, and just run around gawking at the scenery.

In a nutshell, Tarantia Commons is a must-see section of Hyboria. Whether you're a tad too low to experience the new expansion content or you're bored with the tried and true 70-to-80-leveling-treadmill that is Kheshatta, you could do a lot worse than working your way through the quest lines and dungeon encounters in the Aquilonian slums. It's not the most inviting place, particularly when masked thugs are shadowing you from street level and the rooftops, but boy is it a heck of a lot of fun. Until next week, I leave you with what is an unusually appropriate depiction of rogues, rascals, and renegades, no doubt somewhere in the Commons.

Jef Reahard is an Age of Conan beta and launch day veteran, as well as the creator of Massively's weekly Anvil of Crom. Feel free to suggest a column topic, propose a guide, or perform a verbal fatality via jef@massively.com.