GURPS: HarnWorld

GURPS and HarnWorld have to be my best chocolate-peanut butter fantasy gaming combos. This setting feels made for GURPS, either straight GURPS Fantasy or the dedicated catacomb-crawling Dungeon Fantasy fun. The books are pricy, but you can get in on Kickstarter campaigns, and the cost is a little more manageable.

HarnWorld, a Middle-Ages-based setting, is a refreshing change from the typical faux-modern-day planar Renaissance in anything 5E. If you're a fan of historical accuracy, you'll appreciate the attention to detail at the tech level of this fictional setting. You can even include later-age techs, such as crossbows and plate mail, for a more intellectually stimulating experience.

The setting defaults to the classic humans, elves, and dwarves mix, but you can choose other cultures and more fantastical races. I like the more grounded feeling, with the significant kingdoms feeling mostly human-settled; this is just how the place is. Of course, change it if you wish and make the world yours.

You get an overview setting guide and a series of gazetteers for the various kingdoms, which are still being worked on and released. The ones that are done are amazing; you can pick a spot on the map and get maps of the towns and cities, the current rulers, and snippets of the political situation and conflicts.

Does it list dungeons and adventure sites? No, not really. Though the locations of ruins are there, all of the adventure sites and dungeons can be placed anywhere. You can even put lost ruins anywhere, so the world is what you make of it, and even if players are familiar with the setting, they will not know any of the secrets you create to add to the world.

You can buy B/X adventures and put them all over the map. Or you can get those books on Amazon with "101 dungeon maps" and stock and place those. Or just do random generation. You could also forgo dungeon crawling and do "Game of Thrones" style battles and politics. Or thieves, guilds, and bandits in a rogue-style campaign. Or play paladins cleansing the land of evils. Or a military campaign in the various wars and sides laid out. Or a merchant trader game. Or just be a wandering bard and get into misadventures. Or be a wizard in training and wander between towns helping people out.

You could buy The Fantasy Trip and do your dungeons with the cardboard hex tiles from that game, as well as do a more tactical battle dungeon crawling game. These are excellent hex tiles for any GURPS game; from sci-fi to fantasy, they are helpful.

I can't see playing this with 5E, but I am sure some people do. 5E has this power curve that would blow out this setting once the characters reach level 10. It feels a lot like Brancalonia because the world feels like a low-level setting where characters should never attain world-changing levels of power. I love these settings; they are grounded, realistic, and intelligent play matters. Where the spaghetti-Italian Brancalonia covers pulp-fantasy, sometimes humorous, two-fisted adventure, HarnWorld does a real-feeling, politics-driven, Middle Ages setting right.

Any low-power-level 5E setting plays better with GURPS, and I would include Primeval Thule in that list, too. This setting is notorious for blowing up, delivering a "low magic" setting to 5e, and having 5E blow up the setting entirely with cantrip-blasting casters. A disaster spawned a genre of low-magic 5E games to fix the problem, such as Low Fantasy Gaming. A great setting, just let down by the 5E rules.

HarnWorld is one of the best, ultimate sandbox settings ever developed. This beats Faerun, Greyhawk, Mystara, and all the classic D&D settings for me. Yes, those have nostalgia, but they will never be as detailed and thorough as this setting. And they will always have that high magic smell to them, with the leveled monsters wandering about. In HarnWorld, you bring your own monsters, and the power level is tightly under your control.

And the gritty, realistic Middle Ages feeling is perfect for a game with the same focus.

GURPS and HarnWorld are some of the best combos in gaming right now.