A company called Pulposaurs Entertainment is picking up on the hype surrounding Conan right now with quite a surprise. How would you feel about pre-painted, mass combat skirmish game featuring both the forces of Conan and his enemy Thoth-Amon? Rise of Monsters is your answer...

CROM (a neat acronym) will feature two Starter Sets of pre-painted 28mm plastic figures that come with rules, special dice, cards and markers for this mass combat game. Additional forces will then be added to the game in sets which include heroes, warbands and monsters for both sides.

This is a shot of the box art for the Circle of Iron who are the followers of Conan. The other side will be the Legion of Set that are commanded by the Necromancer and Sorcerer Thoth-Amon.

The team behind is certainly seems to have some pedigree too...

Jack Emmert is a co-founder and current CEO of Cryptic Studios. He has launched numerous award-winning games including: City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and most recently Neverwinter. Previous to Cryptic, Jack contributed to a number of different RPG lines, including Deadlands and Marvel Super Heroes.

Shane Hensley is the President of Pinnacle Entertainment Group. He’s written and created dozens of award-winning miniatures roleplaying, card, and video games, has worked on licenses from Star Wars and Army of Darkness to Marvel, and has successfully licensed his own properties to television and video games.

Timothy Brown is the award-winning designer of Dark Sun and 2300AD, and was Director of Creative Services at TSR supervising the best of the AD&D game worlds, including Ravenloft and Planescape. He is a Brand Manager for Pinnacle Entertainment Group and recently ran his own successful Kickstarter campaign to launch an original new game world, Dragon Kings.

George Vasilakos is the President and Art Director of Eden Studios. He has worked as Art Director and Creative Director of licensed games for his company and for Last Unicorn Games, Decipher and Wizards of the Coast including properties as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Army of Darkness, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Dune.

Where Next?

Interestingly even though the game is explained as a mass combat game it does look like it starts off at the skirmish level. I want to see if the game can scale because it could end up being quite the nice package.

The other elephant in the room of course is the word pre-paints and online there have been a few shots of the miniatures which look to be from the Legion of Set and could well be zombies or mummies of some kind.

Are these going to be pre-paints in the style of WizKids or will they be something a bit more high detail like the products we've seen from Fantasy Flight's X-Wing?

Does this sound good to you?