Yes, Wanderer is a great book, but it’s unfortunate it ignores the Naacal people and their enslavement of the Lemurians. Also, it ignores them as ancestors to the Stygians.
For those of you guys that aren’t really into the setting, the Naacal were a people inhabiting the east of the Thurian continent during and after the cataclysm. After the destruction of Lemuria its survivors were enslaved by the Naacal, and then they migrated east to become the Hyrkanians. The Naacal also migrated, and after intermigling with some (human or inhuman) Stygian race they became the current Stygians. Other sourcebooks deal with this history.
Wanderer ignores all that. It states the Lemurians were enslaved by some inhuman race, and that some of the Lemurians migrated west to become ancestors of the Stygians. Others sourcebooks establish the Naacal as ancestors of the Stygians.
Seems to me that the info in Wanderer came directly from REH’s essay “The Hyborian Age”, which I’ve just looked at for confirmation. There, Howard gives the broad strokes of Lemurian migration, enslavement and eventual transformation into Stygians without going into any specifics. I didn’t see any mention of a people called the Naacal. What are these other sourcebooks you cite?
It is not because the whole RPG is only based on REH’s work. Everything else (the pastiges from the 1970s, novels written by other authors, comics, movies etc.) are ignored.
The only exceptions to this are The Exiles Sourcebook and the Age of Conan Sourcebook which will be published in Wave 4.
As far as I know they do not appear in any of REH’s Conan stories or essays. I do not know, if they appear in the Kull stories he wrote, I’ve never read one.
Interesting fact: the Naacal are an “invented” people like the Atlantians or the Lemurians. The Naacal were invented by Augustus Le Plongeon and liked with Mu by James Churchward.
Now the question is: why the Core book state them as ancestors of the Stygians, if they’re not part of cannon Howard writings? Unless they’re part of the Kull writings that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
That’s one for the developers to answer, of course.
That’s quite simple. REH’s stories and essay do not give us enough material for world building. So the writers were encouraged to add their own ideas as long as they do not contradict REH’s writings.
Thanks for listing the other sourcebook citations. I haven’t read through everything cover-to-cover yet, so I was genuinely unaware of them. I think Caranfang has it right though, that the writers are just filling in some blanks in REH’s world-building (without adding too much and, more importantly, contradicting him) in the interests of a more robust RPG game world.