Harp: High Adventure Roleplaying
By:Tim Dugger & Heike A. Kubasch
Published By: Iron Crown Enterprises, $25.00
Review by: Jonathan Oliver
Finally, thought I, on seeing the title of this RPG, the roleplaying game of the shite Irish lager! Unfortunately it’s not. That was a cheap joke and I should be ashamed, yet strangely I’m not.
HARP is a new fantasy roleplay system from the creators of the exceedingly complex Rolemaster. It sells itself as a simple and flexible fantasy roleplaying system and I suppose that when you compare it to Rolemaster it is. Technically the game isn’t too bad, virtually every roll is worked out in terms of percentiles; so you roll two ten sided dice to work out a number between one and a hundred and then you add or subtract the necessary modifiers. It's reminiscent of Chaosium’s Basic Role Play System in this respect but there is definitely more than a smattering here of Dungeons & Dragons in the other game mechanics.
Character creation is fairly straightforward and pulls few surprises. The usual fantasy races are here to choose from, as are the professions. One nice element though is that you get to choose what kind of culture your character is from; be it a warrior from a nomadic tribe or a dwarf sorcerer from a subterranean city of warrens. It’s also nice to see that roleplaying is actively encouraged when it comes to players choosing their character talents. Experience works very much like Dungeons & Dragons with players “levelling up” when they reach a certain number of experience points.
From character creation HARP goes on to explain the mechanics of the system and everything seems to be worked out rather well. The combat system will certainly please fans of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay as there are tons of critical hit tables showing you the many ways in which you may batter your enemies senseless. Which is nice. The rest of the book goes on to detail items, equipment, magic and monsters. My only real gripe here is that the creature list is fairly sparse and pretty typical of a fantasy RPG. However, a monster compendium is to be released in June of 2004 so I imagine that this will solve that problem.
HARP does have web support and at the moment stuff at www.HARPHQ.com is fairly thin on the ground. There’s some character sheets and some rule revisions, also an index for the main rulebook which surely should have been in the book in the first place. It’s early days yet though and time will tell whether HARP gains a decent following and manages to extend its range of resources.
HARP is okay but generally unremarkable and it will be interesting to see whether it manages to measure up to the big boys of fantasy roleplaying games.
