Harn Weapons And Armour

In the 1990's, I was briefly in love with Harn. For those who have been smitten, you'll know what I mean. Gorgeous maps. Intricate world-building. Complex character generation. Detailed combat. Harn seemingly promised those two holy grails of game design, granularity and verisimilitude.

My Harn materials are mostly gone now: lost in a garage fire. But a couple of items remain. The amazing maps, from Cities of Harn and Son of Cities, survived, as they were placed in a binder that followed me on several moves. I also have one or two Encyclopedia Harnica folios.

Some Harn-related notes and characters also survived, in the same binder as the Cities of Harn materials. Among the notes are lists of melee weapons and armor.

Melee weapons in Harn had three potential damage aspects. Every weapon is rated on how much damage it inflicts, if used to do blunt, edge or point damage. This system is not unlike the three weapon types in 2nd Edition AD&D: bludgeoning, slashing and piercing.

But while the AD&D 2E system gave each weapon only one (or at most, two) damage options, many weapons in Harn allow you to do damage with any of the three weapon aspects.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

The Handaxe is rated as Blunt 4, Edge 6, and Point 3. The Shortsword: Blunt 2, Edge 4, Point 4. The Glaive: Blunt 6, Edge 7, Point 7. The Falchion: Blunt 4, Edge 6, Point 1.

However, some weapons only do damage in one or two aspects. The Mace is only rated as Blunt 5. The Warhammer: Blunt 6, Point 4. The Throwing Dagger: Point 4.

Obviously, the benefit of having a weapon that can do damage in any of the three aspects is that the weapon is more versatile. All of the swords fit in that category, as do the Handaxe and Battleaxe. The flails and clubs do significant damage as well, but are limited to blunt damage only.

Armour, at least in the version of Harnmaster that I possessed, was needlessly complicated. Every type of armor was broken down into the types of armor pieces available for each of the 16 locations of the body. I might buy a short chain hauberk, combine it with some plate greaves, a ringmail half-helm, hardened leather vambraces, and quilt gambeson, and then need to figure out my coverage, for each of the 16 hit locations. What you gained in realism you lost in endless record-keeping.

I did like the Harn shield rules though. Different shields were more effective against different classes of weapons. Light shields were better against light weapons, while heavy shields provided more protection against heavy weapons.

Coming back to my favorite out-of-print boardgame, Avalon Hill's Magic Realm, the three weapon aspects of Harn combat (Blunt, Edge and Point) nicely line up with Magic Realm's three attack directions (Smash, Swing and Thrust). Like most of my half-formed ideas, i've long wanted to find a way to combine the Harn weapon aspects and Magic Realm matrix into a diceless or near-diceless combat system. My quixotic quest continues.