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.
9 responses to “One bad harvest”
I really love Harnmaster and I’ll admit the initial briefing with the description of Weseda had me internally screaming “let me play!”.
I’m up to session 2 and a few thoughts/questions:
1. I think one of my favourite features (and this drew parallels that thanks to Ron I managed to trace back to discussions about Legendary Lives) of Harnmaster is how hard it goes on detailing characters on elements that many games born past the year 2000s would probably consider useless, and also how little control the player is technically given over it. I would argue that some of the detailing of senses and voice could be trimmed, but the way the game lets you choose a lot of things but not your family and social relations to me has some really brilliant implications. I think you can see the excitement and the impact of it in the preliminary session, but I’m curious about how the people at the table felt it affected play moving on. I know a lot of people like Harnmaster because of the immense catalogue of products and the incredibly detailed setting, but to me the character creation (and progression) rules always suggested a strong idea of tying characters to a location rather than to “setting” or “plot”.
2. another element I’m curious of hearing more about is the handling of failure. Having never played Runequest or many somewhat adjacent games, Harnmaster was for us uniquely punishing as in the initial stages of play failure was much more common that success. We later learned that it wasn’t such an uncommon approach but it was one of the first steps into trying to work out a way to handle failure that wasn’t dismissive of its consequences but also wasn’t about punishing the player for rolling low (or in more detail, the moral imperative of not rewarding players for not rolling high enough, which is a curious religious phenomenon I witnessed too frequently). The presence of critical failures does help a lot in my opinion in guiding the DM to a working approach to this.
Watching the play situations in the videos and the way Ron has handled failures made me realize that I see a narrative thread that leads me to think that in all fiction, if the heroes always succeeded or even succeeded most of the time, there would be very little story both in quantity and quality. I’m curious about how the experience of everyone at the table has been, regarding this.
3. last point ties to the previous, and it’s more of a brief appreciation rather than an attempt at insight. The rules frequently have nice provisions for failure and consequence, but in general outcomes in the game tend to be extremely detailed and informed by elements that would be easy to dismiss as “simulation”. It may be pure personal bias, but I always felt that rather than being that way because that’s how physics and logic works and we’re porting them into the game to simulate reality as closely as possible, it was more about allowing a lot of information about the details of the action to come from the dice rather than player’s fiat, and when I played Harnmaster I always felt like it was very rewarding to react to the details of that outcome (I have umiliated myself, I have spilled some detail I didn’t want to, the blow did or did not pierce my armor, that very big hit was on my shield arm etc) as if it were input from another player. I think it’s a very nice example of ruleset that incentivizes letting the dice talk – and listening to them.
That’s a lot of topics to pour into a single comment. I’ll focus on one of them.
Discussions here have emphasized failure as a core feature of play, when it’s not merely a speed-bump or swerve, but an event of change. You might remember it from the People and Play course, when I talked about the name for a fictional person who fails to spot or realize something very important, and/or fails to accomplish something very important, which is “protagonist.”
Monday Lab: Whoops (the first pass at opening the issue), We Both Fail (one of many posts/discussions to reference “Whoops”), You had one job! and Jack Cosmos and the Desolation of Smug (two good play examples), and most recently, Workshop: No, Not Blackleaf! (the workshop itself is a purchase item, but as a spoiler, it centers on the concept of defeat, which was eclipsed and forgotten due to obsessing over character death)
As a final point, I suggest critiquing the concept of incentives in play and procedures. To use the psychological term, positive/negative reinforcement methods do not work concerning things we actually want to do. We might talk about reinforcing in a different sense, more like amplifying or celebrating the way we do it, but I’d like to save that for another time. In this discussion (comment stream), let’s stay with the topic of failure as such.
I’ve familiarized myself with the content in the comment (lab aside, but I play to dedicate myself to it in the weekend).
I’ll process my thoughts on the matter further, but a rather schematic visualisation of what my most recent reflection on the matter have been could be a summary report of a conversation with a friend who was at the time writing what he defined as a “PBTA game”. In particular, going over his version of the conflict resolution sistem, he schematized that his 4 degrees of success would represent as:
– Great Success: you get A and B (where A is a positive resolution of whatever conflict triggered the roll, as detailed by you before the roll, and B is a contextual “enhancing” effect, like an extra interaction with some character or item, further knowledge acquired and so on).
– Success: you get A, not B.
– Failure: you get B, not A
– Great Failure: you get neither A or B
In the context of the discussion, I suggest that it would be more functional to describe the Great Failure outcome as “getting C”. Obviously this is a very specific example and doesn’t apply to the myriad ways the hobby is approached, but maybe starting with a linguistic approach could help.
I guess my question is: considering a type of play that is mostly made of narrating events, is there even something that can be defined “failure” in an extradiegetic context? If my goal is essentially narrating my character’s struggles and feats, the fact that he’s failing to do something diegetically is significantly different him obtaining it? I’m willing to bet that if we were to catalogue the most exciting scenes in narrative in most other media they would be completely filled with character failures.
And (no captatio benevolentiae here, it’s just the way it is) I think the single most successfull rules application that I’ve seen in actual play in this regard is players narrating “failure” in Trollbabe. It’s a dynamic that really sells the idea that the result of the roll gives us narrative currency no matter what the outcome. It’s a matter of defeating the perception that since I failed the roll, nothing happens.
I think you’re over-processing this and I fear further development. Let’s nail it down into clear points with no rabbit holes.
1. We’re talking about characters or similar fictional entities, not people. Failed play is an entirely different topic, and in fact, if characters’ failing in-fiction activities (which were presented in terms of succeed/fail) puts play itself at risk, then we’re talking about some shit activity which no sane person would want to do.
2. By “fail,” I mean defeat and misfortune that cannot be run around or done over. These are not delays and detours. At the very least they change the field-of-activity into a new form, likely a form which our fictional characters do not want. This point applies no matter what scale, duration, or impact is involved, i.e., it could be a little thing or not last very long, and the point still applies.
3. Fictional characters fail a lot, and with any degree of reflection at all, clearly it’s fundamental to anything we (the people) enjoy about fiction in any context of purpose. Resistance to this idea is argumentative claptrap based on all sorts of things of no merit.
I don’t care about your guy talking about his PbtA design. Your elaborate abstractions are not going to help much either. Get concrete – what if anything has occurred in play which illustrates anything relevant, regarding characters’ failed actions, perceptions, and goals? Including NPCs and monstrous foes.
I’ll focus on answering the last question but I’ll start with a couple things that caught my attention and I want to make sure I understand what you mean:
1. agreed, if I gave the impression that I was suggesting otherwise it was probably a communication error on my part.
2. again, I think we’re on the same page here, but just to be clear, I’m not suggesting ways to make failure feel “nice”.
In my experience not playing failure at all has been a more common occurence. Since the outcome wasn’t good for the character, let’s not dwell on it et cetera.
Moving from this point and addressing examples of play just from recent experiences, I don’t think it needs to anything particularly complex or elaborated. I could cite an example of when playing D&D me and another character fell from a rope bridge and ended up falling into the river below and miraculously surviving thanks to incredibly lucky fall damage rolls, and this prompting an entirely new segment of the adventure including locales and creatures, but something much more recent and much more relevant for what I’m thinking of is a situation when my character and another player’s attempted to impress the local countess and upon failing the roll, the countess dismissed us graceously but the GM stated “You pick up by the way the Count looks at you that he has decided you’re not very interesting people”. It was a very small thing but it did affect how we played the next few sessions quite deeply.
Thinking about it, just last night we played in a game where I think the players handled a sequence of successes and failures in a social encounter quite well, at least from my perspective. One of the players rolled a critical success in trying to befriend a group of fairly hostile soldiers my character and others had previously aggressively confronted, so we eventually ended up sharing food and studying each other in what could have been the quintessential fake interaction between antagonists pretending to be at peace, if the player who obtained the success didn’t play his interactions straight; and when another more antagonistic character openly lied and failed a roll to recover from it, the player rolled with it and played her character turning hostile and threatening, and the GM didn’t use this failure to undo the success from the other character but had several characters (including allies) react differently to it, which led to us losing access to informations from the soldier but also later generated new scenes where characters who picked up the lie confronted the lying character about it.
It’s quite hard for me to put in descriptive terms because I don’t think it’s something that you can immediately point a finger at and say “yes, that was good/bad”. I do feel it’s quite noticeable in play, however, and in my experience being dismissive of playing out failure or undoing it through ignoring consequences or simply allowing repetition is detrimental to the quality of play.
I’m lost. Is there something you’re looking for in this conversation?
SESSION 5
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We proceeded mainly by watch (four hours units), and since no encounters were rolled, sparing Fergal from more goats for instance, most of the movement and activity proceeded from what NPCs and player-characters simply did, given what they knew and what they wanted.
Here’s the preparation page I keep looking at during play.
I finally nailed down how the constable, local currency, religion, Lia-Kavair, a mercantile opportunity, and some creatures we haven’t seen yet are all active, in part due to the critical success rolled at the end of the last session. I think I might have missed recording an injury point or two, here and there, but otherwise the procedures and resolutions are coming along pretty well.
SESSION SIX
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My preparation consisted almost entirely of assessing the current attitudes and goals of every major NPC, because I had no idea who was going to encounter whom, and in which order. The only exception, logistically, was that I knew Petrayne would be emerging from the marshes with his mere-dragon escort, and that he would cross paths with Geralt, Rhodri, and Arthor first. After that, it was up to interactions and encounter rolls.
Preparation scribbles
Briefly: Oscwen received no encounters, and Fergal somehow managed to reverse a certain personal disaster into the most WTF combat situation ever, with three otherwise-rational people gorked out on, effectively, meth. Arthor is demonstrating that maybe the ability to no-sell injuries during a fight might not be the most desirable feature.
SESSION 7
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I prepared carefully for this session although it only required a single line in my notebook.
The bloody, confused, drugged-out fight shifts into a new phase and Agrik religion-and-politics descend upon Oscwen.
I don’t know why I kept thinking Rhodri was conscious and therefore kept checking his Shock roll with additional damage, when in fact he had fainted already. Fortunately I managed to collect my thoughts, as well as remember who had which weapon, after a round or so.