HARNMASTER Good RPG System?

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

I just got into the HARN campaign setting (wonderful!) and was curious what people thought of the HarnMaster RPG rules for the setting. Any good? How does it compare to d20/3e? I got the d20 to Harn Conversion Guide, but it doesn't really clue me in to how the HarnMaster system works.

For those interested in HARN, go here:
http://www.columbiagames.com

 

[Garmorn]

Harnmaster is detailed

Harnmaster is a simple looking system that works well with detail.

The basic concept is a d100 roll where you must roll under your skill. All skill have critical success or failure affects and lots of modfiers. Criticals are easy to determine. If your roll ends in 0 or 5 then it is a critical success/failure.

Combat is very detailed and slower then what most people like. It does not use hit points but a realist type hit location and damage system. It has been a long time since I have played it so this discription is going to be vague and use in correct game terms.

Both sizes roll skill checks during an attack and then Weapon type v.s. defense type determins which chart you look at. Unlike many other only each players level of succes/failure is used. (i.e. normal success v.s. normal success) lots of combanations are quckly memorized because they are used so often or just so easy to remember. (Attack Normal Success v.s. Shield Normal Success means the weapon was blocked by the shield.) A Attack Critical Success v.s. a Defence Critical Failure is very bad news to the defender. An Attack Critical Failure v.s. and Defence Critical Success could easly result in a broken weapon or worst for the attacker.

If an actual hit occured a impact rating was determined. Armor rating was subtracted and a different chart was consulted that gave the location (determined by different die roll) injury. All injuries are location specific and ended up giving penalties and possibly bleeding results. No such things as hit points, ect.

The best realist combat system I have ever seen. The armor system was simple and very well done with three ratings that were easly used (impact, punture, and slashing)

The magic system in the early editions was wide open with little or no guidence on how to rate spells. It takes lots of work with a good GM and player for mages to work. Clerics did not get spells but set miricals that cost points (Don't remember what the are called but you got them by doing what your church requested of you)

I would like to play it again but it makes most of the low magic campains that people talk about on this board seem like they are way overpowered with magic.

 

[Cheerio]

Priestly magic points are called piety. Once you use them for a miracle, they are gone for good, so you're back to making services for your church (and converting others).

Character creation rules are fairly detailed, but only random based creation rules are provided (at least in the 1st edition). Characters have quite a lot of stats (for example one for each sense ("Eyesight", Hearing", ...)) and then there are some derived values as well (Initiative, Piety, ...). Different gender get also bonuses for different stats (can't remember details, but I'm fairly certain that women got bonus to Touch/Sense).

It is also possible to make a character Elf, Dwarf or Gargu ("orcs"), but they are not balanced with humans in any way and at least the first two should be very rare.

The rules are good for medieval low-fantasy. Did I said good? I meant very good. For other genres, there might be some problems.

BTW - Get Gods of Harn or Harnmaster Religions to get a very detailed and somwhat realistic pantheon for almost any fantasy.

Cheers.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I am not familiar with the Harn RPG, but I have the Harn setting (got it for free), plus some supplaments -- one for cities, one for castles and one for running fiefs. I have been very impressed with the historical detail and thoroughness of all the Harn material I've seen. But some of it is quite complex and requires a lot of rolling, looking on various charts and stuff.

 

[Kaptain_Kantrip]

BTW - Get Gods of Harn or Harnmaster Religions to get a very detailed and somwhat realistic pantheon for almost any fantasy.

I didn't buy those but did find this site from some of the Harn Religion contributors, which has tons of info on Harnic deities:

http://www.mindspring.com/~jchokey/HRT/HM_rules/index.html

Agrik, the Immortal Warlord of Balgashang, is the most detailed deity on the site, and makes for a near-perfect version of Bane, Hextor or any other LE tyrant-type god. There is easily 100 pages of information on Agrik alone on the site, including clerical orders, fighting orders, rituals, beliefs, war chants and songs, etc.

Also Halea, the Whore of Heaven, makes for an interesting hybrid of Waukeen/Zilchus and Tymora and Sune/Sharess/Nocticula/Socothbenoth. She's goddess of pleasure, courtesans, beauty, luck, wealth (opulence) and merchants. Her church sounds like lots of fun!

I highly recommend checking out this site to mine for ideas for any setting's deities!

 

[Lunn]

I have played HarnMaster for many years and have played all the editions. Is it better than D20/3E? Well that all depends on the type of campaign and level of magic you want.

HarnMaster is very good if you want a low magic system that deal with combat very well. But combat can be very slow. A encounter with more than 4 PCs and 4 monsters of the same skills could take more than 2 real hours to complete. If you wish to run a battle with 6 PCs against 30 Gargun's (think goblins), then the battle might take 6+ hours to complete.

Combat can also be very deadly. If you use the straight rules on IP, your skills ARMs and DRMs will drop very fast. There are a number of Harn websites that list rules mods.

Like I said, my group and I played HM for many years. It can be a fun game. One of my campaigns lasted over 2 real years and went for over 7 game years. It centered on a young knight and his retainers building his new manor. Some of my players still look back fondly on that campaign.

Harn the campaign setting is one of the best, with the best maps of any game. But when 3E came out, my group switched. Why? We were just ready for it.

 

[Sebastian]

Harnmaster is bad

At first glance, Harnmaster is a simulationists wet dream. If you play it for some time though, you realise that it has terrible problems.
First, as other posters mentioned, it is extremely slow. This is expecially true, if characters start to max out their layered armors. Then most combats go on until either the players or the characters drop from exhaustion.
The skill system is set up in a way, that only magic users have any real chance to improve their characters. All other characters will rarely change, except for permanent maimings that tend to accumulate over time. In the long campaign that I once played, half the characters had lost one eye.

I think in general if a RPG system ends with ~master, it is to be avoided.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

One thing about Harnmaster is that it really is not for combat heavy games, unless you like making replacement characters regularly.

One significant downside of HarnMaster is it is quite expensive. You must buy HarnMaster Compedium, HarnMaster Magic, and HarnMaster Religion to have a complete system. That will be ~$100-$120 US for the three.

Is it good. Yes, I think so, although I would suggest making some simplifications.

If money is a problem, pick up The Book of Knights. It is a ~$15 Pendragon supplement that has all the basic rules for playing Knights. It is basically a BRP system using d20s. Quite fast and simple.

Pendragon is a "King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table" campaign. I think it would meld fabulous with Harnworld.

Another game system, a bit cheaper but similarly complex, is Chivalry & Sorcery 4th Edition. It is hard to find

 

[Shadow of Bukrai]

Hi. I am one of the authors the D&D Hârn Guide. I play HârnMaster and D&D/D20 so perhaps I can shed some light here.

For a good description of HârnMaster (Core) go here:
http://www.lythia.com/articles/hmintro.php

There is a very good comparison between D20 and HM here:
http://www.warflail.com/downloads/

HM is designed specifically for use with Hârn World. As has been mentioned, Hârn is a very low magic (powerful magic does exist, but it's very rare), historically "accurate" campaign world, modelled after 11th century England. You don't play heroic characters in Hârn. You play normal people - knights, soldeirs, cutpurses, bandits, tribal hunters/warriors, street urchins, merchants, vikings, priests... you can even play escaped slaves, serfs, normal villagers, a baker, the village reeve, etc, if you want. So it's not so much "adventurers" having adventures as much as normal folks from society having adventures. You might think of HM as a game system for the NPC classes you find in the DMG.

I must take exception with the notion that HM is very slow. Personally, I find HM combat faster and smoother than D20 combat, but not because it is simpler (it isn't), but because it is much less tactile. The GM isn't burdened with having to remember the bajillion and one modifiers to all the combat rolls due to feats, magic items, and special abilities (something I lack the ability to do well) that the PCs and monsers have. He also doesn't have to arbitrate variable DC targets - any modifiers are applied to any already established number.

Compared to Rolemaster, HM is zippy stoopid fast.

Granted, I know some people who think HM is WAY slower than D20, but I attribute that to differences in GMing style.

Like D&D, HM is a great system for what it's designed to do. D&D is for high fantasy, high adventure, heroic play where the point is for your character to progress in power by a system of rewards for overcoming obstacles. HM is for gritty and dark, heavy roleplaying, more freeform kind of play where the point is for your character to help progress a story by interacting with NPCs and the environment; developing your character's stats is secondary.

As for combat, if your idea of combat is that getting stabbed, poked, prodded, smashed, skewered, etc, with ANY medieval weapon is going to hurt a lot, and likely cause you to fall to the ground writhing in pain, then you'll like HM.

Hope that helps.

A definite bad thing about HM is that it isn't complete. There are a few rules suppliments that never saw the light of day. But there's TONS of houserules to fill the gaps.

-Shane9
Shadow of Bukrai
http://www.dndharnguide.addr.com

Be sure to visit http://www.swordsandshields.org which will be
THE place for D20 Hârn.

 

[TruffleGrubber]

I use Harnmaster Core(aka 2nd ED) plus Patrick's House Rules Pro (with some modification) which can be found at his Swords & Shields website (along with tons of other good Harnic information and downloads). I find that the system runs extremely well for my games, which are not combat laden. Combat does seem, at first, complex but it is no more so (IMHO less) than d20. In HM Combat, after you and your players get the process down, everything is done pretty much the same way every time, unlike d20, in which (at higher levels) all sorts of feats can come into play adding modifiers, granting extra attacks if this or that happens, etc. I like d20 for High Fantasy games, but IMHO it is ill suited to adapt to Harn (beleive me I tried). It works well to get people hooked into Harn, but once that is done I would switch to a system better suited for Harn, such as Harnmaster, Chivalry & Sorcery or Ars Magica. Of course this just my opinion, there is an extremely successful d20 (iirc) Harn game being run called "Nolomar Rising" details of which can be found at Shane's The Shadow of Burkai site.

The major problem I had with d20 and Harn is meshing a magic system that I felt fit the setting into d20. After nearly getting ulcers over it, I just decided to hit my players with Harnmaster and be done with it. They all seem to be happy with the system and the transition went very smooth (despite them nearly disembowling me when I first proposed the idea).

Also on the d20 note, I'm currently in the process of doing Harn d20 lst files for PCGen (actually due to a couple of mundane factors its been on hold for the past few weeks) and plan to have them done in the next month or two.

When it comes down to it however, no matter what system you decide to use, Harn is perhaps the best low-fantasy setting to be found and has one of the best communities around.