Saturday, October 19, 2024

Hârn Orcs are Wee Rascals

So I've been revisiting N. Robin Crossby's Hârn setting, a cool sorta low-magic medieval world that been around since the 80's. Hârn has its own system, HârnMaster, but no mechanics appear in the setting book. I know Jimbo Eddy Raga-ma-tazz numero 4 thinks early modern Europe is the ideal setting for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but I think lowkey gritty Hârn would work pretty well. So much so that I am currently converting many of the weird spells in HârnMaster to LotFP.

You can hardly do a medieval fantasy setting without some sort of kneejerk self-differentiation from Tolkien and one of the ways Crossby does this is with the orcs. Orcs are also called Gargun in Hârn and they are so, like, totally different from Jirrty Wirrty's bad boys. I will not give most of the details here, but one way they differ from D&D and Games Workshop orcs is that they are tiny little bastards. Here's the five subraces of Orc/Gargun in scale with (mostly) normal adventurers.


The second guy from the left is a Gargun Kyani, the second smallest of the five subraces. They are noted as perhaps slightly less malevolent and slightly more civilized than their cousins. So in my hypothetical LotFP/Hârn mash-up they replace the halflings, which Hârn lacks.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:02 PM

    I take it the citizens of Sosaria are simply there for convenience's sake, not because their setting is also Harn-like.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, that's just my favorite "here's everyone in the party" illo.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10:01 AM

    Loved Harn in the day but I never liked the Gargun and swapped out Warhammer greenskins which were way more fun (and their drunken giants and a few others I knicked from White Dwarf).

    ReplyDelete
  4. From what I remember, Tolkien's orcs were defeated by the hobbit army in that one great battle that hobbits won't stop reminding you about, also about the fact that they invented golf which coincidentally happened in the course of the same great battle, ANYWAYS. What I was going to say... yeah, Tolkien's orcs rode wolves and had battles with hobbits, and a big strong guy like Boromir hacked and slashed through them like it was no big deal. I think these guys are not THAT much shorter. Smaller than the Uruk-hai, certainly.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Harn Orcs are wee fellows. The musclebound green hulks of warcraft and warhammer just aren't the same blokes. Goblin and Orc did seem to be virtually interchangeable in Tolkien's works to me and it makes even more sense with the little fellows. They should likely be shoulder high to the average man.

    ReplyDelete