Cities of Hârn

We have an English saying, which is in the same sort of vein as Murphy’s Law ( Anything that can go wrong will go wrong ) and Finagle’s Law ( hope for the best, expect the worst ). This one is to describe something as ‘just like busses, you wait for hours for one and then three come along at once.’

I know I have already posted today but I just got an email about the Hârn kickstarter and it fired two thoughts.

The first was that plenty of people seemed to like Hârn as a rolemaster setting. The whole thing being d100 based made adopting material fairly easy and the harsh realities of Hârn fits well with those that like their Rolemaster gritty and dangerous.

The second was the way that people, even to this day still reuse the Pete Fenlon maps and floor plans from the old MERP books as they have never found anything better.

Keep those floor plans in mind when you see some of the images below.

So I had an email from James Eisbert at Columbia Games, the publisher of Hârn promoting their kickstarter, Cities of Hârn.

You can check it out yourself here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/columbiagames/cities-of-harn?ref=ekv5oe

But it is this sequence of images that got me…

If we look at that last panel in detail you can see how they have atomised every possible common form of door, ladder, stairs and surfaces. That is going make setting difficulty mods pretty easy.

I also liked the whole zooming in from city to building to interior scope.

If you world need maps and cities then I think one could do a lot worse. If you buy in at the $1 level you get the first PDF immediately which I think is fair. For a dollar you get to see what you would be buying into.

It looks good value to me.

11 Replies to “Cities of Hârn”

  1. If I ever get around to making a gameworld, I’m probably going to take a fair bit of inspiration from how Harn is put together.

    1. I agree. If you support the KS for $1 you get the City of Sin which I think is a good deal if you have a game to run. You can just transpose it into your own world if you are not using Harn.

      1. Just checked to see if I had that supplement. I have Cherafir, not Shiran, and $1 is cheap for a Harn city supplement.

            1. I bought a CoC module yesterday Alone in the Dark just because it was described as the best of its kind. No idea when I will get to read it.

              1. I have Pagan Press’s Alone on Halloween (decades old now) but I’ve heard of Alone in the Dark. I also picked up Alone Against the Tide because it was PWYW.

                Currently I’m considering getting the current Deal of the Day, Mazes & Perils Deluxe Edition, purely because it has a compatibility license. There’s also a free version.

                1. I have a smattering of free and PWYW miskatonic repository titles, all unread.

                  I have the free M&P core rules, that has the Compatibility license and the OGL in the back. For what I need that is more than sufficient.

                  1. I’ve read a notable chunk of my Miskatonic free and PWYW titles, although it looks like I have picked up a few new ones.

                    I did get the free version of M&P but the full version is only a couple of dollars. So I may get it. It’s been a good month.

                    1. For my needs I tend to need the core mechanics and a sample adventure and I have everything I need.

  2. I only ever got to play Harn once or twice, a long time ago, but I have always liked the setting and the way they handled armor. In fact, I have such a soft spot, that Harn was one of the main games I wanted to play at Gencon this week, and I hope I will be able to fit it into my schedule. (By the way, I hope to Blog from Indianapolis later this week; my RMu session is on Saturday afternoon).

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