#harnmaster

[mrfrunky]

At the moment im reading a new tabletop game book as if im eating a fucking 5 star dinner. Oug…

[mortalmab]

A little bit of Background

A prologue of sorts. The War of the Gods ended about 500 years ago. According to the bards, this was a war between the Gods of Sedonia and all of demon kind. The Gods had the mortal help of six Great Heroes that modern bards love telling stories about: Avir, the Thief of Time. Ember Stone-Speaker. Rikia the Way Finder/aka Rikia the Hearth Seeker. Sabar, the Keeper of Secrets. Carfax the Clear-Sighted. In all of these stories they owe deference to some great unnamed king. Imagine the Arthurian legends telling stories about all the knights of the round table but never once mention Arthur, just kind of reference a king that these knights owe fealty to.

Now imagine you found a book - something that belonged in a museum, it's so old - that gives that king a name. Tells stories about him! Even alludes to how he finally died and what happened to the most sacred artifact in your country's history. This is where Terran, a master of the Scribal Guild and our current protagonist, finds themself. Cracking open that mystery of History would make them the most famous scholar of all fucking time!

However, that path they must take to get there leads to adventuring and adventuring sometimes leads to...heroism.

In Sedonia we have a culture of Heroes and Bards. Yes there are the Great Heroes of legend, but most of the time when you hear a bard sing or tell a story, it's about a more recent hero. "Hero" is almost like its own social class and just about anybody can become one. They have a semi-symbiotic relationship with the bards of Sedonia: A hero does a thing and the bards turn it into a tavern tale which increases the hero's renown as well as the bard's reputation. Therefore it is in the bard's best interest to make the hero look as good as possible, which can lead to some glossing over of facts, changing of facts or even downright hyperbole! For the Heroes it is in their best interest to treat the bards well and never get on their bad side, because when a bard gets pissed at you they might write a 27 verse song about how you romanced a donkey and after the act was completed the donkey flung itself off a cliff because you were so bad at it. In Sedonia, a bard's word carries the weight of a herald so whatever they say happened will be taken as truth by the populace. This causes a lot of consternation amongst scholars like Terran who would REALLY like a little more critical thinking to be done thank you very much. Truth, people! Plus, it gives space for unsavory characters to become very well respected and beloved by the populace, no matter what they are ACTUALLY like. So some members of the party have feelings about THAT as well.

Sedonia is surrounded on all sides by tall mountain ranges. We are completely land locked. Normally we have a robust trade with our nearest neighbors, Ravinia and Neban, but recently that trade seems to have dried up quite a bit and at the moment nobody knows why...

Any place names or character names that you recognize from other fiction or from real life will end up getting changed; it's just easier to keep up with the game if the names are the same between the game notes and the novel rough draft. I think that's about it, that's all the information we the players had going into the game and we seem to be figuring it out okay. but feel free to ask questions as the story progresses. It might get answered in the text or it might be something I don't realize needs clarification.

The game is a home brew based on the Harnmaster system rather than actual DND, so monsters, races, abilities, etc. will not be a one-for-one translation

Catch you at the next update!

[sharpenn-art]

Eydis

[arcanelore]

One of the things I enjoy about Harn compared to D&D and the general murder-hoboness of some ttrpg is the inclusion of such mundane considerations as birthdays and families.

In the most recent “Mrs Tathelsen’s Device” we talk about Padern’s family, the Fletchers and the rift between him and his brother, Edern.

Spell of the week

Pocket full of Posey

Fyvrian (Level I)

Effect: Allows the caster to produce a bouquet of flowers. The exact type of blossom depends on the emotion you are feeling and, if created as a gift, the emotion the recipient feels towards the caster.

CS: creates a large bouquet of flowers, this gives a bonus of +25 to any Rhetoric or Oratory check

MS:creates a small bouquet of flowers (less than 5 blooms) +10 to any Rhetoric or Oratory check

MF: produces a single bloom. No bonus

CF: produces a single dead bloom. -10 penalty to Rhetoric or Oratory

+70 Bonus applies to charm spells

[piruett-se]

Peter Bergting, character portrait for a Harnmaster campaign (commission).

[digital-meat]

Why is it the biggest champions of indie RPGs here only offer the most low-t, rules-lite, cutsey games. What happened to the GURPS and Harnmaster stans? Give me games that will make me cry from weight of rules and from the ecstasy of doing far more violence in far more detail than 5e could ever promise. I want indie tabletop RPGs where every roll uses college mathematics and the setting gives you a heart attack

[gm-lankira]

Pinned post? Pinned post!

This blog is intended to be the repository for all things ttrpg that I'd usually post on my main blog @lankira.

I've been playing ttrpgs since 2002, and running them since a few months later. I like to think I've learned a thing or two in that time.

Over the last 20-something years, I've played and/or run the following:

13th Age

Aces & Eights

Albedo Anthropomorphic

Burning Wheel

Call of Cthulhu (Pulp)

D&D (3/3.5*, 4*, and 5*)

Dark Eye

FATE*

HarnMaster

Honey Heist**

Iron Kingdoms (d20/OGL, 2d6/2012 Standalone*, Unleashed*)

Kids on Bikes

Legend of the Five Rings (4th Edition)*

Long Rest */**

Masks

Orpheus/World of Darkness

Pathfinder (1 and 2)

Pendragon (6)

Savage Worlds

Shadowrun (4 and 5)

Star Wars (Fantasy Flight)

Starfinder

Thousand Year Old Vampire***

Traveler

Year Zero Engine (ALIEN*, Blade Runner*)

A single asterisk (*) denotes that I've run the system, two asterisks (**) indicate that it's a 1-page RPG, and three asterisks (***) indicate a solo or journaling RPG.

I have a running list of "shit I want to run". I also am in the process of getting a discord server ready for anyone interested in my online one-shots.

[vintagerpg]

So the whole Panaga series of adventures is meant to be slotted in to a bigger campaign, which is a good thing since there is a gap of four years between Kiraz and Curse of Hlen (1993). The result is a big swerve in terms of both tone and substance. Staff of Fanon is pretty standard fetch quest, Kiraz is a dungeon crawl. Hlen, meanwhile is a lot of things.

It starts with a curse situation not unlike Staff of Fanon and leads the party to a nexus between worlds. To proceed after their quarry — an evil mage with ambitions to found a multi-dimensional empire — they find themselves in a dreamland where they have to pass seven mystical trials that are likely to kill most of them off (only to be resurrected at the end, should at least one character survive). After that, they journey to an entirely different place, a strange city under siege by many factions, several of them straight up demonic. There they have to navigate those factions and the morality of their intervention (attaining their goals is likely going to hurt innocents in this world) in order to kick the bad guy’s butt.

It is pretty ambitious and honestly rather Planescape-y a year before Planescape — different realities, factions, moral decisions. The really interesting thing for me is the contrast between the high weirdness of the magic and the reality hopping compared to the nitty gritty medieval existence of Harn. There is a bit of this in the relationship between, say, Forgotten Realms and Planescape that makes Planescape’s weirdness feel all the weirder, but here, the weirdness seems to almost glow white hot, if that makes sense. I don’t know if it really works for me. It is such a wild swerve! But I definitely appreciate the attempt.

[oldschoolfrp]

“The mysterious pit of Ilvir is reputed to be the home of Harn’s most bizarre inhabitant, the deity Ilvir.”  Eric Hotz’s art for Hârnmaster added to the setting’s consistent historical feel, borrowing from Norman, Saxon, and Viking material culture (Araka-Kalai, Columbia Games, 1987)

[rpgcovers]

HârnMaster: Melderyn ~ Columbia Games (1987)

[chaotic-hypnotic-erotic]

This is new. It combines three titles - Araka-Kalai, Misyn Wilderness Area and Ochrynn Abbey - into one megamodule, adds 12 new pages, and reduces the cost.

[zoethehead]

My D&D and other tabletop oc's as subreddits

(yeah, i know reddit is shitty, but i just thought i would do the oc's as subreddits thing with my d&d characters)

(Harnmaster)Zelestra Thyrdult: r/Skyrim

(D&D)Ivellios Amakiir: r/GardenGnomes

(D&D)Arcaadius Umaris: r/TrollCoping

(D&D)Eddie Stone: r/Pyromania

(D&D)Usagi Remali: r/Stories or r/Mspaint

(D&D)Sakura Garessi: r/AskReddit

(D&D)Samedi Thorne: r/Corvids

(Shadowrun)Ryuto Danne/Rozzark: r/Badass

(D&D)Ronnie Taylor: r/BlackSabbath

(D&D)Eddie Walsh: r/Djent

(D&D)Elias Ed: r/UncannyValley

Edit- (d&d) Darius Mirelle: r/kickboxing or r/werewolves

[gamingandbs]

159 Re-Energizing Your RPG

159 Re-Energizing Your RPG

The rpg you’re running is starting to get stale. Maybe it’s the same ole tropes, story and routine. Brought on by a conversation Brett had with Tom Flanigan from Knights of the Night and Streets of Avalon, we talk about some things to consider to re-energize your role-playing game. (more…)

[arcanelore]

Well, happy new year!

I’m collaborating on a few projects, one of which has a “magic tree”. I don’t know that it’s an overdone trope, but I can think of a few in fantasy literature, and literature in general.

So here are my favourite “magic trees” from literature, mythology and pop culture. This list is certainly not exhaustive or comprehensive, just ones that I could think of..

Yggdrasill

The world tree of Norse Mythology.

It’s probably the grand dad of the Tolkien mythical trees. Yggdrasil is attested in the Poetic Edda compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and in the Prose Edda compiled in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. In both sources, Yggdrasil is an immense ash tree that is central to the cosmos and considered very holy. The gods go to Yggdrasil daily to assemble at their traditional governing assemblies. The branches of Yggdrasil extend far into the heavens, and the tree is supported by three roots that extend far away into other locations; one to the well Urðarbrunnr in the heavens, one to the spring Hvergelmir, and another to the well Mímisbrunnr. Creatures live within Yggdrasil, including the dragon Níðhöggr, an unnamed eagle, and the stags Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór. For the record it is an Ash tree.

White Tree of Gondor

First White Tree

The first White Tree of Gondor came from a fruit that Isildur stole from Nimloth the Fair, before it was was destroyed. Isildur brought the sapling to Middle-earth and eventually planted it in Minas Ithil before his house. But when Sauron returned to Middle-earth, he attacked and captured Minas Ithil in SA 3429, destroying the White Tree. Isildur escaped, again taking a sapling with him.

Second White Tree

In TA 2 while in Minas Anor instructing his nephew Meneldil in rulership, Isildur planted the sapling of the White Tree in memory of his brother, Anárion. This White Tree stood until TA 1636, when the Great Plague spread across Gondor and the tree died.

Third White Tree

A third sapling was planted in TA 1640 by King Tarondor. After the line of the Kings failed the tree never bore fruit and seldom flowered and finally withered and died in TA 2872 at the death of the Ruling Steward Belecthor II. At this time no seedling of the tree was found, and the dead tree was left standing "until the King returns.”

Fourth White Tree

Following his coronation as King of Gondor, Aragorn was taken by Gandalf to a hallow on the slopes of Mindolluin. There, Aragorn found a sapling of the White Tree. The dead tree was removed from the court and placed in the Houses of the Dead, and Aragorn planted the sapling in its place. In June of TA 3019, the tree bloomed.

The Christian Tree of Forbidden Knowledge

Whether you consider it sacred or mythical, the Tree in the center of the Garden of Eden has to be considered on your list of important trees.

In Judaism and Christianity, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is one of two specific trees in the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2–3, along with the tree of life. Alternatively, some scholars have argued that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is just another name for the tree of life.

Spell: Tree Merge

Fyvrian Level VI

Author: Dennis

Caster is able to physically merge his body and consciousness into a tree of at least his body size or greater.

While merged caster can cast spells, use Psionic abilities IF he is of high enough ability to maintain consciousness

CS: Duration until actively ended by caster. Maintains consciousness

MS:Duration up to SI: days Maintains consciousness

MF: duration SI ROUNDS. Does NOT maintain consciousness

CF: duration indeterminate. Douse NOT maintain consciousness.

SI:30+ maintains consciousness, even with MF

SI:55+ can extend perception through tree body.

SI:85+can extend perception through root network. Maintains consciousness, even with CF

Speed:15-SB

[kayawagner]

The Primal Order: Pawns

Publisher: Hostile Work Environment

"Slowly but surely withal moveth the might of the gods." — Euripides

Even in divine games of chess, the action begins with a clash of pawns. In Pawns: The Opening Move, the first supporting product for The Primal Order, you will find a collection of powerful minions, monsters, and other entitles waiting to help you add some extra excitement and challenge to your game world. Whether you're searching for divine servants to intercede between your PCs and their distant deities, mighty beasts to defy even your strongest party, or just a few fascinating creatures for your adventurers to glimpse and wonder about, you need look no further.

--

This supplement must be used with an existing roleplaying game system, such as those listed below. These rules should not be considered as official rules for those products and are not endorsed by the respective companies except where specifically stated ln the text.

The Primal Order is what we call a "capsystem": a system of rules designed to enhance and extend any game system on the market. To eliminate guesswork, we have included specific conversion rules for integrating The Primal Order with the following popular game systems:

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

Ars Magica

GURPS

Harnmaster

Hero System

Palladium

RoleMaster

RuneQuest

Shadowrun

Talislanta

Torg

Warhammer FRP

WarpWorld

Price: $9.99 The Primal Order: Pawns published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

[vintagerpg]

Dead of Winter (1998) is essentially a Harnic riff on Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. There is a monastery, there are murders. There is a prophecy. There is maybe a secret library. There is no grand religious doctrine debate, but there is a diplomatic meeting between envoys of two local political factions. As the title states, it is winter, and the snows have essentially trapped everyone at the monastery.

There are plenty of red herrings (one that cleverly plays on the events of 100 Bushels of Rye, even) and complications and changes and such. If you’ve read Name of the Rose, you’ll know enough to recognize the references but not enough to unravel the plot. It’s the best kind of homage.

And I don’t have much else to say about it! If you like Name of the Rose, you’ll dig this, and it is system and setting neutral enough that you can plug it into whatever game you are playing and have it work pretty good without too much trouble.