"Cyre Manor", written by Dan Bell is a location/adventure article for Columbia Games Harn generic fantasy roleplaying setting.
For those not familiar with the setting, Harn is a Madagascar sized island, loosely based on 11th/12th century Britain. It is a place of mystery and strange happenings, on the island are nine states, seven human (Chybisa, Kaldor, Kanday, Melderyn, Orbaal, Rethem & Tharda) and two non-human (Azadmere & Evael). To the east lies Ivinia, homeland of the rulers of Orbaal, and the great continent of Lythia.
The article is available for download from both Harnmaster.Net and Lythia.com.
HARNWORLD: CYRE, OVERVIEW.
"Cyre Manor" covers a settlement located in the Nelefayn Hundred, a region in the northwest of the Kingdom of Kaldor. While a quiet location, it is steeped in history, the village, located at the foot of a small hill, predates Kaldor and the manor atop the hill is the fourth structure to occupy that position.
The family that rules the manor also have an interesting history, being the descendants of a bandit whose cunning and ruthlessness won his successors a title and himself an early grave. The current lord shares some of his ancestors anti-authoritarian tendencies, as he allows his villagers to grind their own flour in defiance of his feudal obligations.
This material plus thumbnail descriptions of the villagers and maps of both the settlement and the manor are contained in the articles first twelve pages. The remaining four pages comprise an adventure outline entitled "Trial and Error".
The adventure is a murder mystery in which the PCs must discover who is responsible for murdering a child and using his severed head to desecrate the village shrine.
HARNWORLD: CYRE, COMMENTS.
Beginning with an impressive Richard Luschek illustration of the manor house "Cyre Manor" commands attention, the settlements long history and well written character summaries providing the GM with inspiration for adventures other than the one included with the article.
Furthermore, the article forms part of the Nelefayn Hundred Project an attempt by a group of HarnFans to detail all of the settlements located in the region west of Castle Olokand, a settlement detailed by Columbia Games. Another article in this series is J Patrick McDonalds Iversen Manor (See my review).
As a result the author has made an attempt to integrate the material in this article with other articles published to date in this series. As an example, thanks to his habit of shaving (badly), one of the inhabitants of Cyre Manor now shares his name with that of the notorious bandit 'Tellin the Red' introduced in "Iversen Manor", a situation which provides a perfect means of getting the PCs to visit Cyre.
The adventure outline which concludes the article, "Trial and Error", is a clearly written and laid out murder mystery. The four page outline covers everything needed to run the adventure including adventure hooks, a timeline of events, how to run the various NPCs and advice on where to take the PCs after they have completed the adventure. The adventure itself is a low-magic scenario that emphasizes deductive reasoning over combat and provided the players pay attention they should have no problems in completing it.
The text appears to be error free, the various illustrations by Richard Luschek and Matthias Janssen (Author of "Carved in Stone") are of a high quality, as are the maps prepared by the author and Neil Thompson (Author of "The Silver Way Inn").
HARNWORLD: CYRE, VERDICT.
Well written and presented, this article takes on a difficult task, making a quiet rural setting interesting, and succeeds.
