Outing myself a little, I have read a distressing number of these (they were there, I was deperate) and... the early ones aren't actually all that much worse than, say, Conan novels. (Weird bits of plot (the early ones actually had plot, rather than quivering) still float up in my brain as inventive.) Ignoring the horror of the prose style, I do recall there were a number of good bits.

The tarn races through the knife-edged rings, and Tarl's ridiculously loyal, ridiculously powerful half-feral tarn, who showed up a bit like Fury of the Broken Wheel Ranch to save the say when it was needed and fucked off to do his own thing in the meantime. Tarl getting his entire city blotted off the map and being sold into slavery. It was all very Corwin of Amber there for a while, only with notoriously poor writing.

OMG, do I have to claim John Norman as an influence? I don't know if I can handle that the same week I tripped over elements of The Greatest American Hero in my own work.