And there even good story and characters. Also, awesome games (especially old ones - Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen) with great fantasy feeling. There is only one problem with this setting - it is dead. Totally: almost all characters, races and even the world itself. It was killed in an awful event "End of times" (you can read about it here: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/The_End_Times ) and now replaced by horrible Age of Sigmar setting. :(

That setting I also want to get into. And things like Age of Conan Hyborian Adventures and the Movie showed me that there is more to Conan than I thought.

So many books of this franchise and yet I don't know where to start.

Assuming you're asking about Conan, start with the R.E. Howard stories. Alternatively, you could go with the Marvel Comics from the 70s, but those may prove harder to find.

Apart from a few exceptions most movies and books about it are pretty bad, but the idea of a barbarian in a darkage world is pretty cool. Too bad most attempts at creating stories about it fail miserably, the same could be said about the Cthullhu mythos.

I read through all of Howard's Conan and Kull stories this year. They are pretty cool and still hold up well. I'd recommend you just find those in some collected edition. I'm not sure if any of the stories written by other authors are worth looking into. I've read some of Carter and De Camp's contributions, and they are rather mediocre. Not terrible or anything, but not nearly as good as Howard's stuff. The Kull stories are often very weird and dark, in some ways more ambitious and imaginative than Conan. On the other hand Conan is just incredibly fun to read. I guess you could say Kull is Diablo and Conan is Torchlight :D And, as an added bonus now, it's easy to see what an extreme influence the Conan stories were on D&D. You can almost see every character's character sheet and turn every story into a D&D adventure in ten minutes tops.

And yeah, no adaptation really follows Howard's writing very well, but the first Conan movie still feels very true to the spirit of things, even if the story has pretty much nothing to do with Conan's adventures from the books.

But then again I'm the one guy actually enjoyed the Kull movie, so what do I know.