We’ve continued with our Harnmaster game throughout the past two months, originally discussed through session 7 at One bad harvest. As of last week, we played the twelfth and final session, so I have a lot of catching up to do.
My concepts and preparation for this game do have a fundamental flaw. I never should have created and included the ivashu, as it screwed up my attention to the location and its attendant prior-six-months events roll. Sticking to that (which I didn’t really understand at first) supplied ample content, specifically, that the “monster in the marshes” event would be wonderfully accounted for by mere-dragons. (When I finally get the chance to post the Gothcon game, you’ll see me do a better job, which in that case legitimately included ivashu.)
I worked hard to get the combat procedure handled properly, and I fortunately learned a lot from the Gothcon game between sessions 8 and 9. I only borked it again once (although just cognitively, not procedurally) in the final session.
- It’s really one thing: the impact roll of a successful hit is not compared to the target’s Edurance as a shock roll. That doesn’t happen until after the injury is assessed all the way through armor and the exact outcome-table effect (bleeding, etc), and it’s an entirely different roll.
This transition into session 8 marks a real shift into player proactivity as well. From the moment Artor chose to kill Geralt, which effectively meant he adopted the ivashu (because it was now convinced Fergal was kind of useless), and from the moment Fergal chose to defy Sir Petryn, and from the moment when Oscwen chose to defy Orthas … well, there was no going back.
I hope it’s apparent from my notes how the entire shape of play changed constantly due to incredibly important rhetoric rolls, incredibly important “realization” rolls (Intelligence default, monster Prescience), and incredibly important decisions made by many NPCs. I monitored all of the following including rolling for many of their actions and effects during play, whether in or out of the player-characters’ perception.
- The monster
- Its Prescience checks, which determined whether I played it especially smart vs. reckless in each appearance
- Whether and when it had fed
- Its degree of success or failure at Stealth for every appearance
- Its realization that once in town, Oscwen posed the biggest risk to it
- The populace and its subsets including the refugees and important local people like Sofie, especially in response to Oscwen’s interactions with them
- Decisions and ideas from minor characters like Ymr and Usvarl
- Those two qualify high on the list for “luckiest people in Lythia” given the events of play
- The mere-dragons
- Who, incidentally, ate Geralt’s and Rhodri’s bodies and, as it turned out, also did not react well to the searchers sent by Sir Petryn, which is why they never returned
- I didn’t nail this down in play until session 11, as you can see from some of my table-talk in session 10
- Sir Petryn, especially given Artor’s critical success with his blatant lies about Geralt and Petrayne, which totally diverted Sir Petryn from understanding anything about the situation.
- Which is why he turned to simple, straightforward physical crackdown against the Liak-Kvair, the refugees, and the Morgath network
- Orthas and his unbelievable inclusion in the moment that the monster attacked Oscwen, which I don’t think she ever realized was a rescue in effect.
- His failed Divine Intervention attempt, which not only did not bring a V’Hir down upon Oscwen and secondarily all of Weseda, but knocked him out of commission for a full day and night
- After his fate was sealed, the local Agrik hierarchy, which was, if a bit shocked and scattered, by no means powerless or inactive
- Eilewydd and her family, and by extension, the local Morgath network
- Including of course her successful Divine Intervention attempt, following Fergal’s failed one
- Dafydd’s journey back from Henwe
- His two encounter checks on the way back were remarkably significant considering they added both speed and safety, making Usvarl’s trip to fetch him much quicker both there and back
You can see a certain Circle of Hands brutality in effect, which I think is fitting for Harn, or my Harn anyway. E.g., Petryn was rather “good” in local terms but hard-core in modern terms, thinking little of summary executions and interrogation by beatings.
I have continued thinking about cults and evil in fantasy role-playing (Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts), and I think the four of us really found our footing regarding Agrik and Morgath as social institutions.
- This may sound kind of awful, but I think ostensibly “impossible” EEVILL religions like these are more authentic, socially speaking, than any sort of necessarily good ones … given the broken-ness of society at a root economic level.
- Think of things we don’t call religions in modern life but which in faith and practice terms do fulfill the definition, which demand explicit displays of compliance, and which exist primarily to establish servitude, disinformation, abuse of designated scapegoats, disruption of functional family/community ties, and extraction of funds upwards
- My attention turned toward ordinary people who’d internalized enough to participate actively but who were essentially ordinary and a bit sympathetic, like the devil-hat clown guy, or the temple minders who were perplexed that they had to take care of refugees
- My eventual understanding (as I’ll give credit here to the authors) of Morgath as dependent on non-observants using the cult as a “dirty deeds done dirt cheap” service – indeed, if they’d had the chance, Hyvrik and Eilywydd would have punished Fergal severely for his actions, because no one was paying to have Petrayne killed
- As mentioned above, the sequence of failed and successful divine interventions, which ultimately laid out the parameters of change for the entire situation.
- Especially in light of Crossby’s excellent essay On Divinity, which is definitely going to feature in my workshop at the Happening. Specifically, the point that magic or no magic, no one can ever know whether a call for divine intervention actually contacted anything, or whether anything we do regarding some entity or purpose actually matches what any such thing, if present, actually thinks or wants.
Here are my closing thoughts on where it’s all ending for our little corner of Harn.
- Artor is not likely to survive the immediate backlash from killing Sir Petryn, as that very group is composed of frustrated, desperate, confused people who really need to kill someone to feel better at this point.
- This has come about specifically because his prior sequence of critically successful Rhetoric rolls, i.e., blatant bullshit, came to an end with that critical social fail in pretending to lead the search for the monster while staying far away from the monster.
- Oscwen and Dafydd have a good shot at getting to Kanday, as he is well-prepared to talk to the mere-dragons for safe passage; and who knows? There could be wedding bells. Ymr is a decent guy.
- It is amazing that Oscwen survived the lethal intentions of both the ivashu and a high priest of Agrik.
- Fergal’s little undead-apocalypse is about 50-50 in being either put down hard by the local populace (with probable backing from Agrik authorities in the long-term) or degenerating into self-destruction because soon there will be more amorvrin involved, not just him, and I can’t imagine any group of such beings getting along for more than a minute.
I look forward to any and all comments! (except wanking about what this or that supplement says about this or that bit of lore; I had enough of that at YouTube)
2 responses to “The gods must be evil”
Excellent writeup!
As one of the players (playing Oscwen I have to say it was a great game with excellent efforts from all involved!
This was the first time playing harnmaster for me and I thought it was a comprehensive and for the most part well designed ruleset for the type of game we were playing.
It allowed for a considerable degree of player freedom and going by the rules of character creation you got a foundation for characters that had both strengths and weaknesses both from a mechanical and narrative perspective. I found it a fun and not too difficult challenge to get “in character” given the basics of morality, piety, occupation, family background, social standing and baseline stats of which most were rolled up at random.
The structure of play, while as I understand it was somewhat cumbersome to manage, felt like it offered meaningful “everyday” opportunities of play even if your character isn’t working towards a concrete goal. The rather severe limitations on physicial ability (except agility), faithlessness and moral fiber (who would have guessed not lying out of convenience was so hard?) Oscwen had combined with the pretty good advantages in terms of taking advantage of her social standing and ability to talk made for a fun way to play where I as a player had to both think in character to act in naïve and downright (unintentional?) disrespectful ways and try to come up with plans to get out of the current troubles in one piece.
Mechanically the game was initially a bit daunting, but the resolution of skill checks out of combat felt rational and easy once you got into the game. The designed managed to boil down a rather complex equation of various basic stats into easy to use percentages. I still don’t quite understand how the leveling is supposed to work and it seems like it just requires the players to track their use of abilities carefully. Might be a good way to get players to use singing or foreign languages or jewelrycrafting more actively, but I’m not entirely sold on it.
The combat mechanics are more advanced in that it’s 11 steps to resolve a melee or ranged attack by my count with special modifiers, conditions and tables thrown in at most of them. However the logic and results are as far as I could see during play very sound. There’s some merit to how it works, it’s a shame that you as a player probably want to do everything in your power to avoid combat as one good hit can be enough to kill you.
The healing and related endurance mechanics also seemed very interesting in theory, but in actual play the risk of actually dying of infection or shock was seemingly low. Maybe more play and injuries to characters that didn’t have outlier stats would have put this more into play.
The proudly advertised lack of hit points was very good I think. It felt very real that characters died because they fell unconscious due to pain and were dispatched with a coup de grace or simply bled out rather than having an very abstract and gameable health resource.
While mostly a game master concern the watch system of time tracking is also interesting in theory and probably something that needs to be used in conjunction with skill checks to make the aforementioned leveling more intuitive (“I spend this watch cutting gems, meaning I will eventually get a chance to increase my jewerlycrafting”). In practice it seemed to be a bit too slow and complicated for periods when you need to get time flowing however.
Narratively speaking I think the setting is interesting. There’s a ton of detail if you go looking (the soil fertility of the Weseda fiefdom is 1.02 compared to the Harnic average of 1.00). I think Ron built the narrative structure of the game right in that the world was adapted to fit the game and some interpretations had to be made since despite the world having incredible detail in many parts it also lacks information on how things work “on the ground”.
The sourcebooks I’ve read offer a top-down view of the world, and are very well written and fun to read, but somewhat missing the person on the ground view. Something that would be very welcome in a game where you play as rather ordinary people. Sure we know the soil fertility of Weseda, but what’s in it for the people running and playing the game?
I found the handling of the major religions in our game to be fun and a good example of something that required careful reading of supplementary material and game master interpretations. As I believe has been mentioned in an earlier blog post the “evil” religions really do seem evil reading the basic descriptions. But they’re still lasting and well established religious communities so logically they have to be more nuanced (otherwise how would they become so successful?). Morgoth cults being murder entrepreneurs is a fun take and of course the Agrik cult reward ambition and power which would be appealing to a warrior elite such as the rulers of Rethem. Supposedly neither religion enjoys that much popular support among the peasantry, but peasant uprisings were usually pretty easy for mounted knights to put down historically. At least the peasants get to enjoy the Agrik pro wrestling/ritual gladiatorial combat/ritual sacrifice every now and again if they’re nice.
Another thing to add to the intersection of game mechanics and narrative is that the game setting provides a detailed framework and expects the gamemaster to create entire family trees for the major characters. This adds a considerable amount of work that most games I dare say do not expect, but it also leads to a living world where the players ostensibly have a reason to care about their environment. Not to say you can’t play wandering mercenaries, but I don’t think that would be as fun as playing as a character that has a family and is part of the community, seeing as this was extremely important in a medieval society. In retrospect leaving her family was probably the most socially and morally questionable thing Oscwen did, even if it was with implied blessing.
This does of course add to the considerable logistics for the game master to actually run the game. Perhaps our game was a bit too exciting for all the moving parts that resulted from following the rules as written. I think playing harnmaster with the mindset that it’s going to be slow-burn is a good thing to do. This might differ depending on the type of game, but the fatigue and injury recovery rules seem to force a slow pace in a “natural” (written into the rules) way.
Another way that the mechanics and narrative clicked in very fun and satisfying ways were a few critical random encounter and skill check rolls that developed into great plot twists.
Oscwen surviving is purely down to the Agrik priest Orthas having a few incredibly unfortunate rolls (for him) and the success both Fergal and Artur enjoyed at points made the plot turn in incredibly chaotic but fun ways. Following the thread from these player decisions and rolls made the game very fun even when Oscwen did her level best to appeal to authority to avoid taking personal responsibility and trying to avoid being the main event at the next Agrik barbeque.
I for one is satisfied that she made it out of Weseda alive without having to fight anyone. Shame about her mom, (not) dad and (half-)sister though.
The game definitely fulfills the promise that so many titles of that era attempted. Erik and I often comment to one another during our shared walk after play upon the way that many almost-obsessive variables do come together into play at the table in rather usable, sensible ways, for a lot of different actions or events. I’ve been impressed several times that the “block” for an opponent is very easy to make and use, even when I have to invent it during play, far more so than one might expect given how elaborate the creation process is for a fully-developed character.
Although the “funneling every realistic thing imaginable into usable playable chunks” is impressive, and although it was truly a high ideal of 1980s design, it’s still no more than a stupid pet trick … unless the situational context of any action is itself systemic, i.e., organized in any way and understood by everyone playing, so they can interact with it. That’s why I worked so hard to learn and honor the time and encounter rolls as best as I could, and why I punched so hard into every Awareness, Stealth, Prescience, Rhetoric, Ritual, and Oratory roll, as well as Intelligence checks – these created extraordinary moments of critical decision-making. Or rather, also intersected with less-constrained play, e.g., when Ymr made his choice that despite being “forgiven” by Agrik (i.e., tortured into obedience), he’s be loyal to Oscwen no matter what, perhaps not even realizing that he’d fallen in love with her.
Does that make sense? That he overcame both his fear of the monster and of Orthas in order to get her away from the room in the keep, and that any such effort on his part would have been futile for both characters unless, as it happened, we had been landed with (i) the monster’s attack on Oscwen [my role-playing], (ii) Orthas’ arrival to gloat and attempt to dominate her [encounter roll], and (iii) its badly failed Stealth check upon arrival. So it’s system in action, completely intersectional between probabilistic dice checks and our role-playing.