The Harn Experience

Realism and Immersion in a Fantasy Role-Play System. 

We can experience our hobby from more than one approach. Sometimes we are looking for a skirmish wargame experience, sometimes we seek more of a story to emerge through our game play, and sometimes we desire an immersive experience where for a moment we can suspend our real day-to-day life existence and mentally imagine being in some exotic place, where fictional events can seem almost real. Anyone who has turned down the lights and shared a ghost story may know exactly how much fun this experience can be.

In my youth, we used to talk about simulation games. Basically we were exploring the use of data, technical and historical and often complex game mechanics to suggest to us players that what we were  engaged in was something a little more real than playing at a game of make-believe. No matter how much data a game has baked into its design, it is important to remember that it is first and foremost just a game.

Columbia Games is a respected publisher of wargames - many utilize their signature wooden block playing pieces that contribute to a "fog of war" feeling. As a publisher, Columbia Games leverages historical facts and technical data in producing many of their games, balancing fun and competitive play against known facts and historical outcomes. Columbia Games brings this same approach to game design to their fantasy role-play game product line of Harn and Harnmaster. From an original setting created by N. Robin Crossby, the staff at Columbia Games has developed an extensive catalog of some of the most detailed and flavorful materials in our hobby. (Kelestia Productions was founded by Harn creator N. Robin Crossby after he left Columbia Games and they publish their own line of game material based on the same world, and the two lines are mostly cross-compatible.)

Harn and Harnmaster have been hobby favorites of mine since I first discovered the setting in the late 1980s. This setting and the role-playing system developed for it appeals to the lingering wargamer in me. Although I prefer using Harnmaster when gaming in Harn, the setting predates the rule system and is usable with The World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game or any other system. 

The depth of logical detail and the superb maps make Harn feel more "real" than most game products which are centered around a fantasy or science fiction theme. Only the RPG Call of Cthulhu, with its own emphasis on an historical setting, can compete with Harn/Harnmaster when it comes to providing an easy means for me to lose myself in the fiction of the game. The occasional fantastic creature in Harn seems so much more believable when it makes its appearance in the setting that is logically familiar and easily relatable. 

There is an old hobby joke (perhaps connected to a cartoon found in the advanced DMG) about a game called Paychecks & Term Papers which of course seems like fun to no one precisely because it is too close to the mundane aspects of real life. Presumably, most people play role-playing games to have fantastic and imaginary adventures, to role-play an heroic character, to challenge their problem solving skills, or even to be safely frightened a bit (and likely for many other reasons as well), but mostly the RPG, much like cinema and literature, is a form of escapist entertainment. 

Harn has been and is an occasional and recurring passion for me. One that never fails to reward the time (and $$) I spend with it. It probably isn't for everyone (and often isn't exactly what I am in the mood to play), but for the gamer who is inclined to appreciate/desire a dark-age or early medieval setting with a high degree of realism hard-wired into it, Harn, and by extension the Harnmaster RPG rule system, has no equal. I firmly believe that system does matter when it comes to a game's ability to give us the play experience we seek and Harn/Harnmaster is a superb vehicle to (for a brief time) experience a real feeling through role-playing for what it could be like to live as part of a fictional culture; to become engaged with and immersed into the fictional setting that feels both fantastic and real; to have adventures and face challenges; and ultimately to learn about my character's story as it develops through play. Sometimes even a relatively mundane PC's existence spent managing the daily affairs of a castle can be entertainingly different from our own real life.