By Oliver Kapp & Frank Bohnsack
Columbia Games Inc.
Hârnmaster
Premise: A stormy day in early winter. Gusts of wind whip up the powdery snow cloaking Ternu Heath in a mantle of white. A lone group of travelers hurries to a remote Laranian abbey to escape the merciless weather. The powers of fate have chosen them to become involved with a series of violent murders at the abbey.
What do we get here?
Like many Harn products this is a mix of adventure and location gazetteer spread over 37 pages. The set up for the adventure has some stuff I really love, politics, espionage, a restricted location with evocative weather all of which is very reminiscent Alistair MacLean film adaptations I grew up on.
Usability/Formatting
Unfortunately exhaustive information comes at the cost of any sort of usability. To actually run this adventure you have to wade through so many pillars of text this is going to feel very much like a homework assignment rather than fun. You get 32 pages in before you find out who is the actual murderer and then you have to 7 paragraphs of character back story and another 6 paragraphs of recent history. It is just infuriating how an interesting adventure is buried away in the most annoying formatting.
Compared to modern adventure writing this is pretty terrible, even the Seattle company does it better in its large adventures.
Portability
Because of the political and espionage web underpinning this adventure it will take some serious work to move it to another setting. There are a lot of characters and historic elements that will need massaging to fit whatever setting you might be running in.
Recommendation
Despite my massive reservations about this adventure there are still things I love about it and the somewhat unique style of adventure you get compared to the usual d&d fare. I did run this as a one shot in 5E and took maybe 20-30% of the adventure and just junked the rest in favour of my own nonsense.
Given that this is a $20 adventure unless you are running a Harn game in one of the harn systems I would never recommend it and even then you are not getting a lot of adventure for your $20 compared to what you would in other systems.
I would love to see someone take the framework of this adventure and make something useable out of it, may be one day I will get round to polishing up and sharing my own much abbreviated verison of this adventure.
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