As the Red Terror, a bizarre, magical dark force whose victims disappear without a trace, descends upon Aquilonia, King Conan sets out to destroy its source, evil, conquest-hungry sorcerer-priests from across the sea.

"The Castle of Terror" is a short story written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. It was first published in the 1969 collection Conan of Cimmeria.An exhausted Conan seeks shelter in a ruined castle, where he encounters a pack of slavers and an undead horror.

Conan the Freebooter is a 1968 collection of five fantasy short stories written by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, featuring Howard's seminal sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. Most of the stories originally appeared in the fantasy magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s.In these stories from Conan's late twenties, the Cimmerian is a mercenary with the Free Company in the city-states of Shem and the lands to the north and east, a war leader of the steppe-raiding Kozaki, and finally a soldier in the service of the kingdom of Kauran.Chronologically, the five short stories collected as Conan the Freebooter fall between Conan of Cimmeria and Conan the Wanderer.