Hârn

Hârn is a campaign setting for fantasy role-playing games, designed by N. Robin Crossby and published by Columbia Games since 1983.

In 1997 Crossby founded Kelestia Productions (KP), an electronic publishing e-company. KP and CGI now independently produce printed and online materials for use with Hârn-based role-playing campaigns and fiction.

The role-playing game HârnMaster was developed specifically for use with Hârn. It enables players, gamemasters, and writers to develop character descriptions that exploit the deep level of detail found in Hârn.

The world of Hârn first appeared in Hârn (1983) from Columbia Games, which presented the Hârn campaign world as a folio that offered a general overview of a campaign area, the island of Hârn, which was about three times the size of Great Britain. It included background, history, a look of religion and a small encyclopaedia called the Hârndex, and a map of Hârn drawn by N. Robin Crossby. Hârn was broadly based on Norman England, with some fantasy elements appearing through dwarves, elves and orcs. It was low magic and Hârn tried to create a genuinely real setting, based on careful research and consideration.

Properly speaking, Hârn is an island off the western coast of the region of Venârivè (the northwestern part of the continent of Lýthia) on the planet Kèthîra, but as Hârn has traditionally been the focus of the setting, many people refer to the world as Hârn or HârnWorld. Hârn is notable for several reasons:

The island of Hârn has seven human kingdoms and two kingdoms ruled by other species. In alphabetical order, these are:

The island is also home to over a dozen human "barbarian" tribal nations and many bands of Hârnic orcs, known as gârgún.

The planet Kèthîra, on which Hârn is situated, is one of seven linked parallel worlds collectively known as Keléstia. Among the other worlds in the family are Terra (or Earth); Yàsháin, a high-magic world which is the afterlife of Kèthîra; Midgaad, a parallel of Tolkien's Middle-earth; and the Blessed Realm, a parallel of the land of the same name in Tolkien's works. It is suggested that the ancestors of Kèthîra's elves and dwarves came from Midgaad to Kèthîra; in the case of the elves this is a stopping off point on a longer journey to the Blessed Realm. Kèthîra's Sinái retain the custom of building swan-shaped ships in which they sail to the Blessed Realm when they weary of their time on Hârn (in this case sailing through a periodically appearing interworld portal known as the Nimeliant off Hârn's northeastern coast).

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