"As for Conan's eventual fate—frankly, I can't predict it. In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him." —Robert E. Howard
Call me crazy, but methinks there's a core game mechanic in this.
As an indie game sort of thing, it would be set in a DnD-fantasy-style world. The conceit is a bunch of adventurers gathered in a tavern, telling old war stories. Everyone in the group creates and plays one of these grizzled adventurers.
Each session focuses on one of the adventurers and his "story." The other players take on the roles of ancillary characters from the story—fellow adventurers who are doomed to die grizzly deaths before the end of the session. There would have to be some sort of method, either mechanical or narrative, for determining in which "phase" of the central adventurer's life this story takes place: as a young novice, as a seasoned veteran, as a world-weary conqueror. Next week, it's onto another player's adventurer and their tale, which could come from any point in their long and bloody career.
The only hard-and-fast rule is that the central adventurer—the one spinning the yarn—can't die. If the game ends up in a position where there is no possible escape from death for the storyteller, the narrative simply fades to black and the story concludes with something like, "How I got out of that tight jam, well that's a tale for another day..."
Thus, every week you have one player with death immunity who gets to guide the story; I could see this easily being a GM-less game.
Or, indeed, if one wanted to root this in a more traditional mechanic, this would be an interesting way to run D&D or a derivative system (Dungeon Crawl Classics and Lamentations of the Flame Princess both leap immediately to mind) as a series of effective one-shots with rotating GMs, jumping around between levels instead of doing the usual linear level progression thing.