Harn enthusiasm
Since I'm new to the board - a short credential may be in order.
I've been RPGing for over 20 years; not the best player around, certainly not the worst. Becoming one of the older ones, though. Mostly played a homebrew variation on the D&D Collector's Edition rules (the original 3-booklet set, with expansions). Never interested in 3e. Tried 2e as a player, dumped the campaign (lousy DM). Used 1e as a reference source, rarely actively played it.
Designed at least one homegrown world, refereed it for several years off and on.
Given the above, please understand that I'm not denigrating ANYone when I say that I'm having more fun running a campaign in the Harn setting than I ever did in ANY other setting.
Much of this thread has been about the HarnMaster rules, and how they compare to D&D, or d20, etc. I'm not going to enter much into that cavern of ogres, just tiptoe around the opening and note that in my experience the rulesystem is far less important than the people involved.
Personally, I use our homebrew D&D rules. However, since the SETTING is deliberately not gamesystem-specific, it doesn't matter. I did spend a lot of time before starting the campign wmodifying the rules for the setting and generating background material for the players, but that was my conscious choice - I adapted the rulesystem to better match the feel of the setting, rather than adapting material for the setting to reflect the rules.
But the setting is superbly put together.
The maps are excellent -- and often look like professionally-done exploratory maps of our own world. I've used several of those maps in other settings, with excellent results. Indeed, if you just buy Harn modules for the maps and discard the historical data, you're still getting quite the product. Prices do run on the high side, but that's one of the problems with being published by a small company; no economy of scale.
The places are detailed nicely, generally concentrating on why a place is there and what it adds to the land rather than how you can come in a kick the snot out of the inhabitants. there is a lot of political and economic data there, allowing you to run a rich knight with his manor, and know that you're getting richer -- or why you're not. You can work your way up in court, knowing who else is an important noble and having a fair idea what their motivations are like. Or you can run a peasants' campaign, spending your time planting crops and trying to save enough money to give your kids a better life. Different options out of the same setting.
I have consistently gotten the feeling that this places has a life of its' own, that if the PCs weren't present, the place would still continue to exist, and that things would still get done. The place just has the kind of 'solid' feel that suggests the underpinnings are done right. When I have to stop and ask 'why the heck did they do THAT', it's disruptive. With HarnWorld, I find that the reasonably-logical choices I'd make designing a world are a fair match to the choices that Harn's designer already made. It's easier for me to accept the logic of this setting than any other I've run across. To me, that's a huge help towards being able to immerse myself in the setting.
I've never been interested in gaming in one of the published d20-style settings, although I certainly have a few dozen modules. Nice background material, but they didn't grab my attention and interest the way Harn did. I saw a copy of an early module in a gameshop, flipped through it, and bought it on the spot.
Just about every page has a dozen different adventure ideas if you think about it; I've never had trouble providing details I didn't think I'd expect.
When a player decides to take a left turn down a street, the map is already waiting and I can give him an idea what he sees and what businesses are there. If he throws a dart at a map, I can pull out data on the place he just marked and start looking up obstacles he'll have to face getting there. And they're real, understandable obstacles; mountains and rivers, roving hostile natives and bad weather and mechanical breakdowns. The characters have traveled hundreds of miles, and the route has always made sense. I can't say that about some of the maps I've seen from D&D-published settings.
If D&D/3E works for you, great. If it doesn't and you're looking for something with a more realistic feel but a lot of fantasy tucked away in the less-visible corners of the tapestry, I highly recommend checking out the system.
Someone earlier posted a link to a site with a guide to adapting d20 rules for Harn. It's a nifty document, and I recommend checking out that as well.
Oh, and while you're at the site:
www.nine.addr.com
you might also have a look at the logs of the campaign I'm running. Go to the "campaigns" section and look under "Nolomar Rising". Maybe it will interest you; maybe it won't.
I've tried to stay pretty strictly within the setting as published, but I admit the plotline I'm building goes in a direction I haven't seen in other people's postings. We've been playing the campaign for nearly a year, most weekends, and the tale is far from finished...
I'm also a member of the Harn forum, and while I applaud Kaptain Kantrip's sincere attempts to publicize this set of products for a wider market, I thought that people here at ENWorld might appreciate a different perspective on the subject.
And now back to your regularly-scheduled thread --
I meant dept not debt.
