We’re finally playing Harnmaster for the long game, with four sessions so far. You can see my slow and deliberate prior uptake in Dialing down the fantasy and Grit and focus.

If you’re not familiar with it (people seem to be 100% or 0% with hardly anyone in-between), Harn is a set of isles at the northwest of the supercontinent Lythia: fantasy Britain 11th-12th century C.E., with a hard spin on “fantasy” that steps away from being formally historical.

I’m using the original publication (1986) with a few, but very few dips into later or auxiliary content which I’ll cite as needed. I’m taking to heart the textual point that play begins in 720 S.T. (the in-fiction chronology term) and after that, whatever happens or is determined to “be” the case is is your Harn at the table. There are of course oceans of content developed since then, but my take is that instead of filling in every hex in Lythia and every year of the prior millenium, it’s better to find your own Harnic passion parallel to, but not the same as, what Crossby must have felt in play (which I think is evident that he did).

Here’s the very useful diagram made by Greg regarding historical publications.

The lead image at the post (taken from the maps-and-lands modules which precede the game publication) is at the southwest coast of Harn, specifically the town of Weseda in the region called Rethem. I couldn’t exactly tell you why I chose it, and if I’d really gone with my primary inspiration to play the game, I would have chosen somewhere near an orc colony. Maybe the map was easily available, and maybe I liked the unstable border and religious conflict with Kanday.

This is the big-scale yearly event calendar form, in which one labels the relevant locations at whatever scale is needed and rolls once per month, or at longer time-units if appropriate, as I’ve done for the places in the rightmost three columns as they are farther away from Weseda. Instead of starting on the first day of the first month of the year 720, I indulged an impulse to roll for our starting date as for a character’s birthday, landing almost exactly in the middle of the year on the 6th of Azura, which happens to be the start of Harn’s autumn. That allowed me to consider the previous months of the year in terms of event rolls. (I suppose I could have done that anyway if I’d started at the first of Nuzyael, just looking back into 719, but it feels good to “fill in” this way.)

The resulting rolls are everything I needed. Since the keep at Weseda is founded and supported by Tormau, but closer to Henwe (which supports the king), it’s vulnerable … and therefore disasters in prior months at both of the other places are actually good for the constable in Weseda. But then, just now, right in our starting month, the harvest (in this case fishing primarily as well as farming) has been terrible.

For making the characters, as I’ve done before, I did the extensive dice rolling that’s conducted prior to player decision-making, then handed the results over for the decisions and final development. These sheets might indicate these phases due to the shift in handwriting: you can see that the players received family backgrounds, physical and mental parameters, appearance, morality, and piety, and they chose the religious focus, professions, and nuances of skills.

• Lothar (Johan): a beggar, foster child of the prostitute-ish family that runs the inn-ish place in town
• Oscwen (Kristian): a mercantyler, daughter of a clothier at the keep, unacknowledged bastard child of her mentor
• Arthor (Filip): a man-at-arms, from a local laborer family
• Fergal (Erik): an acolyte of Morgath, son of the local sword-master

Students of early RuneQuest will quickly spot the similarities in terms of low-skilled young characters just making their way in the world, but with all the “in debt for your training, must go kill monsters to get loose cash to pay debts” is absent, replaced by complete naturalism. In “adventuring” terms this leaves us with nothing to do – unless the naturalistic content is played as if the characters lived in it, including local hassles, and feel like they want to do something.

It’s especially strong if you don’t start with the player-characters in some kind of group far from their home(s), and instead go local as a place to play as I did here, because character creation generates a huge supporting cast of family, mentors, and necessary interstitial characters.

I found a suitable coastal medieval town map which we can mentally wiggle into Weseda.

I’m still iffy about ethnicity. The “main” one seems to be more or less Romanized Brits with a Welsh and Saxon core (c. 1100 CE); the Ivinians are straightforwardly Nordic; but the barbarians, so-called, are a bit harder to see in my mind. It seems they might be unreconstructed Celts (“picts” I guess), but I’m wary of tying Harn too strongly to its earthly inspiration, as reinforced by the somewhat fanciful naming in the text, and it simply hasn’t gelled enough for me to use well. I might get somewhere or we might simply stay vague.

I created an ivashu, which is a random critter generated by the activities of a bizarre god, and I dipped into Harnmaster Gold for its enticing ivashu generation page. Despite it turning out to be a remarkably fun and productive situational character, I am now a little sad that I didn’t realize in time that the textual mere-dragons were conceivably available given the extensive, human-uninhabited fens, and therefore they would have been a great choice for the monster event exactly as indicated in the event roll in exactly the right place.

However, as I mentioned, this ivashu is a real knockout for play potential.

Here’s a clip taken out of session 3 in which we’ve seen enough of it in play for me to chat about creating and GMing it during a break in play.

The following file pages are super important. I decided to stick with the scheduled encounter-driven methods which are well-outlined in the book. You roll for encounters based on the current environ, in terms of both content and how often. I’m especially fond of anywhere designated a safe environment, in which you roll once per day and encounters are generally not fraught. In some places you roll as often as once a fictional minute + a higher chance for an encounter + nastier things to meet. That’s what’s being tracked in the Journal Page.

It’s a bit harder when you have a location like “this town,” with different characters who deal differently with different sub-locations, or at least, it’s harder if you treat it this way as I was inclined to do. It’s why we took three sessions to make it through about nine hours of fictional time, with the first few being one brief scene. I developed a better method, or a way to handle it better, for the fourth session.

The second page is my design to break out the days by character, and then I follow the watch schedule per day by hand – that’ why you don’t see notes on that sheet after the first session, as I’m using the other sheet for recording events (you can see checks as successful rolls, e.g. double-checks for critical successes; and X’s for failures).

Some things are still a work in progress. It’s hard for me to see the listed gods as a socially-functioning pantheon, and the text seems to lose the RuneQuest concept that any religious practice is first and foremost serving social outcomes which its followers want or need. One can easily slide into thinking the gods are basically miracle and spell providers at the piety-points bank. I think the videos show us catching it better, if slowly, as we go along.

When I went a bit into the available auxiliary content, e.g., Harnmaster Religion, it’s big on adding overwhelming details but never really gets to that topic, and I also have to squint a bit to get past the obvious “wicked cruel attack-and-expand nightmare society” gods of the terrible east (Morgath, Halea, Agrik, plus Naveh), vs. the “allied defenders of human ethics and hope” of the relatively noble west and specifically in Harn (Larani, Peony, Save-Knorr). As is often the case, there’s a lot of Ivanhoe in the roots of the content.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I am still wiggling my notions about how a political and social region of any sort (in this case Rethem) functions in the context of effectively maddened gods perceived as “us and about us” by the people. But upon writing it this way, “hearing it out loud” as it were, that’s not … well, um … that’s not actually all that off the mark regarding real things, is it. Working up ordinary practices for Morgath worship seems easier all of a sudden.

Here’s a hugely important thing: what all these NPCs have in their pockets, as rolled. For example, Dafydd is clearly in an unusual situation as a mercantyler with no promissory notes or ready coin, having instead the statue and the incribed bracelet; Petrayne quite reasonably possesses a disposable map; Dernil has potent stimulant which is easily understood to be his payment from Petrayne. All of these both inspire and constrain easy creative decisions about what they’re up to, “inside” the bigger picture of Weseda’s current difficult circumtances.

I could put it like this: fully undirected and highly-contingent situational play, focusing on the player-characters, exists/occurs between the rolled (and interpreted) big location events, like the bad harvest, and the rolled (and interpreted) micro-details, like the items in NPCs’ posession.

In the videos: as with a lot of the play I’ve recorded lately, e.g., Dallas, I’ve retained most of our learning process, which in this case is distinctly mutualistic and everyone’s-equal, with GMing as merely another instrument in the mix. It’s a good group of personalities for it since we all like examining text and we’re all OK with being individually wrong once in a while, as well as shifting the “instructor” role from moment to moment. There are many examples, perhaps making for a less entertaining watch sometimes, but I especially recommend everything about Fergal missing his jump into the cart near the end of session 3.

You’ll see me talking through GMing a bit, partly as my own learning process and also to share how it works. Ideally, I’d really like it if anyone in the group found it possible or even relatively easy to GM a Harnmaster game later.

Combat happens to be the most-inclusive of three type of rolling:

• Skill rolls compared for offensive and defense
• Multiple-d6 rolls vs. attributes for immediate effects
• Long-term effects, usually rolled later, whether skills or multiple-d6 depending on details

Combat uses all of them, beginning with comparing skill rolls, However, the core of the whole system isn’t exactly the skills alone, but the subsequent multiple-d6 rolls which resolve immediate effects like being stunned, dropping things, fainting, and just about anything else. Most spells and psionics effects are handled this way too, and upon complete reading, the basic idea is on-hand for any effect roll you need, as we did for Lothar’s stress-nausea response.

Last August, we managed pretty well in learning the combat procedures, but for some reason I had a tougher time revisiting them, and frankly, since they are quite easy and fun, it’s embarrassing to watch myself blunder through learning them this time.

Kristian also produced his own summary for group table-reference.

Finally, skill improvement is integrated with everything I’ve listed so far. It’s definitely the single best use-based improvement system I have seen.

• A successful development roll exceeds your skill level and gains 1%
• You get three development rolls per month to be assigned to skills as seems reasonable for what you spend free time doing
  • With extra rolls for anything you’re formally training in
• You get a development roll for any skill used in stressful circumstances
  • It might even gain several development rolls for a given use, if the stress seems especially worthwhile
  • Weapons and spells are a bit simplified here, in the sense of “once per fight”
  • We interpreted this as rolling for development at that moment too, which is fun, but maybe it’s supposed to be a month-thing
• In all cases, you get as many development rolls for a given skill as warranted by any of the above, and you don’t stop just because you succeed at one of them

We didn’t really get it until later in play, so the beginning of the fourth session catches up on prior play, and you can see us working through the learning during the session itself. (and I confess, not quite right even then, but the learning continues)

Over here in the Too Much Information department, I am feeling uncomfortably close to Helma in this game. She was really interested in Harnmaster and loved the grubby orcs; her first major role-playing experience was in early RuneQuest and she appreciated the games which evolved from it; and I think she would have liked Kristian as a fellow player and vice versa. As a personal pyschological phenomenon (or problem), I can sense-imagine her at the table with us, trouble-making, supercharging, and either getting bent out of shape or ramping up the positive social space as the moment demands.