Why you should be playing Hârnmaster 3.5 - Religion

Yeah, I fell off the posting wagon; it's been a rough start to summer. But back to HârnMaster! We've covered character generation, how skills work, and the sheer joy of the combat system. Today, religion.

Designed as a deliberately low-magic, skill-focused system and setting, the gods of Hârn are real but distant. They do provide rituals to their priests, which can be quite powerful, but for the most part, the various churches are more shepherds and institutions. The Gods of Hârn are:

• Agrik: the god of bloody war and fire. He believes that might makes right, only the strongest should rule, and that the uncertainty of conflict brings necessary improvement. War and tumult are the great threshing floor that separates the worthy from the unworthy. Agrik is in direct opposition to Larani and her rigid adherence to order. His worship is proscribed through much of Hârn, except in Rethem where it is the state religion.
• Halea: the Maker of Bargains, the immoral goddess of beauty, wealth, and hedonistic pleasures. Halea usually appears to humans as a beautiful youth. For Halea, greed is good; power is better. There is no sin, only pleasure matters. She shrewdly maintains her position in the courts of the gods and wishes stability, so she may continue to enjoy her pleasures. She has temples in most trading cities but is most worshiped in the Thardic Republic.
• Ilvir: known as the “Ochre Womb" and the “Brooder in the Blasted Plains”, Ilivir creates strange beings known as Ivashu. The purpose of the Ivashu are a mystery known only to Ilvir. Ilvir’s adherents are drawn to him by the promise that after death their souls will be reincarnated into Ivashu, which they believe is a higher form of life.
• Larani: the Lady of Paladins, the good goddess who represents order and the chivalric ideals of faith, piety, honor, righteousness, truth, justice, courage, and strength. She teaches perfection through order and faith. Larani directly opposes Agrik and his followers in their savage and chaotic attempts to achieve perfection through strength, mean survival, and brutal and unnecessary conflict. Larani is most popular amongst the nobility. Being found to be an adherent of Larani in Rethem gets you a spot at the next heretic burning.
• Morgath: the god of death, retribution, and revenge. Lord of the undead, suffering, and chaos. Morgath gathers souls to feed the Shadow of Bukrai and upend the order of the universe; he offers those in service to him eternal life, of a sort, with the offer to become Amorvis (free-willed undead). Proscribed almost everywhere but Rethem (sigh).
• Naveh: the god of nightmares, thieves, and assassins. He rules the night and is the silent death. Seemingly Nihilistic, Naveh's purposes are obscured in shadow, seemingly with no discernable aims. Every state on Hârn suppresses this religion. Or so they think.
• Peoni: the good goddess of peace forgiveness, love, life, and healing. She believes in achieving perfection through teaching peace and forgiveness. She nurtures with love, feeding the hungry, bringing hope to the hopeless, healing the sick, and forgiving sinners. She rewards patience, virtue, chastity, temperance, and forgiveness. She is the most popular 'goddess', especially amongst the lower classes. (Except in Rethem, of course.) Peonian clerics seeking martyrdom often sneak into Rethm to establish covert churches.
• Sarajin: the god of courage, strength, prowess in combat, fame, clever tactics, battlelust, and the “sport” of war. He loves Kelestia as it is. His followers seek his favor by gaining fame with acts of bravery in combat, canny gambits, and martial skill. Sarajin is said to most often appear as a giant, yellow-haired warrior in leather and furs, carrying Fakang, his massive double-bladed axe. He is the god of the Invinians, the Viking analogs in the setting.
• Save-K'Nor: the god of intellect, learning, and true knowledge. Save-K'nor seeks to guide his adherents by perfecting their intellect and knowledge of moral philosophy so that they may understand the true nature of Kelestia and thereby select the righteous path of their own free will. The church of Save-K'nor has few adherents because of its focus on scholarship; however, their level of education puts many in place to be of singular influence on events.
• Siem: the benign god of magic, mysteries, and dreams. Siem is the oldest of the 'gods'. He chose to withdraw from the other ‘gods’ to his own idyllic domain within Kelestia, 'the Blessed Realm', where all remains preserved in a pristine state, and there is almost no passage of time. He is most associated with the Faerie folk, Elves, and Dwarves, though some Men worship him too.

HârnMaster allows a player to create a newly-consecrated priest of any of these faiths, subject to the character's place of birth and the campaign's focus. Clerics start with many skills, but they have obligations to their church and order.

A Laranian Matakea (Temple Priest) might be ordered by his Rekela (Bishop) to accompany a young noble on his journeys. (Yes, this is a campaign seed.) A Peonian Reslava (Mendicant Priest, similar to the wandering friars of the Franciscans) would be constantly nagging his companions to show mercy, stopping to help every hamlet and cotter hold and healing the enemy. In short, the system encourages you to roleplay a genuine representative of your deity, not just be a walking first-aid kit and backup combatant.

Then there are the Invocations. These are rituals or prayers the clerics can use. For example, Laranian priests have access to Bandage of St. Pereline, which can stop bloodloss and heal an injury level from a single wound. A critical success heals the wound entirely in one day, while a critical failure causes the wound to develop an infection.

Every religion has these, some in the HârnMaster rule book, with more in the HârnMaster - Religion tome. More about that: do you want to know where the Amansurif of the Agrikian church lives? Want more details on church politics? Planning a campaign based around a mostly Laranian party campaign against the vile Agrikians? This book is for you. But there is more than enough in the basic HârnMaster rulebook to get started.

One final thought. As in most settings, there is a compact that keeps the gods from meddling too much in the mortal world. So if you want to run a mini-campaign where the PCs have to expose and oust the evil Sulapyn (Peonian bishop) who has been embezzling funds, go for it.

Tomorrow, I swear, Magic.