Posted on

HârnWorld

As I mentioned last week in my settings post  I have been given a selection of HârnWorld materials to look at by Columbia Games Inc.

As always I am a bit late to the party as it appears that most of you are already familiar to some extent with Hârn whereas I am rather new to it as a setting.

So Hârn is a long established, system neutral game setting that attempts to be realistically medieval in its approach. There is a lot of fantasy here as there is an ancient disappeared race of Ancients or Earthmasters. You get orcs, Gargun on Hârn, and 12′, two ton lizards where the female is definitely more deadlier than the male.

The gods of Hârn are presented but it is left to each GM to decide if the actual gods exist or not. There are definitely hints at wizards and magic but this is rarely mentioned. I think it was mentioned in that previous post how Hârn is a low magic setting.

From a physical point of view each Hârn book I have looked at has been 60 to 70 pages. So each is tightly focused on a specific region or place and there are a great many books. I think this is a great plus. The Shadow World master atlas  I have looked at is 358 pages and then you need the regional books and they run into another 200 to 300 pages each. I simply cannot assimilate a thousand pages of material before I even start play.  65 page booklet I can read in an evening.

Rather neatly when any Hârn book references another work it puts the reference in the margin. In the sample below there are references to the Kindom or Kaldor region book and individual cities. These add on modules can are priced from as little as $3.99 to up to $20 depending on how substantial a city it is. The biggest module I have seen so far is the City of Tashal at 70 pages including a lot of floor plans for $36.

The second big plus is the way that Columbia Games Inc. respects the GM. Every book is based on play starting at the beginning of the year 720. At no time will they publish beyond that date. Your adventures start here and the publisher will never contradict you. Bearing in mind that I play a lot in the Forgotten Realms; not having your campaign setting ripped to pieces just so they can sell a new version is a major plus to my mind!

So what are the negatives?

The one thing that really stands out is the quality of the art. Hârn was first published in 1983 and it looks like the art has not progressed much since that time. I fully accept that you do not buy a setting for its artwork, it is the content that counts but when you compare the presentation of the Hârn  materials to other system neutral settings and Hârn feels ‘old’ or should that be ‘old fashioned’.

Great art can make you go ‘Wow! I want to play in that world.’ The first impression created by the Hârn books I have seen do not have that wow factor.

Hârn Freebies!

You do not have to take my word for it. Columbia Games Inc have a section on RPGnow of promotional materials. These you can download for free to get a first hand experience of what the materials are like. You can get them here.

So how about Rolemaster in Hârn?

As someone pointed out, Rolemaster is not a low magic system. That is the only modification that would challenge a GM in my opinion. Someone last week said that some of the professions would need tweaking but you all know I am an advocate of the no profession set up anyway. If you are one of those people that imported all the companions pretty much wholesale then you could have a problem. I never saw the companions that way. The companions to me were books of suggestions to be considered and then used or put aside.

So could you run a high magic game in Hârn? Certainly! There is rumoured to be an entire Earthmaster city buried somewhere and who knows what mysteries it holds.

I like low magic so I don’t have a problem with this. I have more of a problem with the Rolemaster Monty Haul approach to spell lists and the deluge of spells available to each caster, but that is just me!

 

 

Posted on

Rebel Without a Chance

In Rebel Without a Chance, the characters come across a halfling village where many of the residents have been mentally dominated by a half-orc that they rescued. The remainder are trying to free themselves. The dominated residents will try to get the characters to leave the village; if they stay, the characters will not know for certain which halflings are affected, and therefore potential enemies.

This was one of the earliest adventures I wrote for this series.

The villain in this one is quite clearly an evil mentalist, if not by profession then by deed. You can set the level to create a suitable challenge for your players.

Referring back to the recent post on Murder Hobo PCs this adventure hook has the nice twist in that almost everyone thrown against the party is a completely innocent halfling controlled against their will.

 

Posted on

Thrown Weapons in Arms Law. A critical component of combat.

A recent thread over at the RMU Arms Law Beta Forums discussed the viability of thrown weapons. The general impression is that thrown weapons aren’t used regularly by most players; according to the poll over 60% of player use thrown weapons 0-20% of the time. There are a number of reasons stated or implied for the low use of thrown weapons:

  1. Limited damage.
  2. Limited range.
  3. Limited “ammo”; once you throw it, it’s gone for the remainder of combat usually.

But there might be a systemic problem within Rolemaster combat that minimizes the use of thrown weapons–I’ll get to that in a bit.

First, let’s distinguish between larger thrown weapons like spears and war hammers and smaller less potent weapons like daggers, darts, shurikens, needles or even ball bearings. All of these smaller weapons are cool, add personality to players and NPC’s and are portrayed as being quite deadly in popular fiction. But in many RPG’s, small thrown weapons aren’t that potent; or as seen in the forum thread, rarely used.

Terry includes a lot of thrown weapons in his NPC’s. Wrist dart guns, axes and  shurikens are frequently used, but they are often magical (return via long door) or have other bonus properties (exploding flame cartridges or sleep powder). These “add-ons” overcome some of the real or perceived  limitations of thrown weapons, but also reinforce the idea that mundane small thrown weapons aren’t that usable.

So solution 1 is to enhance thrown weapons with Weapon Runes, poisons, or powders/pastes. I like this solution as it adds even more utility to the Herb/Poison skill and can be a accessible solution for lower level players.

Where and when does one throw a weapon? The base 50′ movement rate/rnd allows players to shift from long distance ranged weapon use to melee in a single round. 50′ is usually too far for effective thrown weapon use, and within 10′ it’s basically melee engagement. Throwing while moving incurs fairly high penalties and basically removes the ability of the player to use a more effective melee attack at the end of the movement phase. It feels like a small window of opportunity and combined with low damage, makes thrown skill less important when allocating scarce development points. Certainly everyone modifies or house rules their combat rounds, so ask yourself how your methodology encourages or discourages thrown weapons.

Therefore, Solution 2 addresses issues that might be arising from the RM combat rules itself by allowing for thrown weapon use in melee. If we consider normal melee engagement distance to be between 5′ to 10′ then allowing small thrown weapons at the outer limits of that range, as an extra attack, to be advantageous. We’ve worked this into our system with the “combat sphere” in our initiative rules and our individual weapon modifiers. With this system, if the “thrower” wins the initiative they’ve created a small space/distance to effectively throw (similar to the combat sphere of a polearm wielder). That means an opponent with a shorter weapon will be at a disadvantage against the thrower.

However, you don’t need to add those extra rules –just permit  thrown small size weapon use in melee with the understanding that the small give and take positioning of combat allows for gaps needed to throw. Allowing more flexibility with thrown weapons and adding some enhancements can make these small, even innocuous, weapons quite deadly!