The Harn Guide to Cow Hunting

I been asked where are the rules on Cow Hunting are?

For new reader he is referring to an ignoble refereeing moment which I recount in this post titled Cow in the Attic and Tim gives his version in this post titled The Cow in the Attic - the players POV.

I will show everybody exactly where to find the rules to hunt cows in Harn. Yes I know this is a geeky topic even for geeks like us. But hey some time you just got to dive in.

First you need to know about Cows, this is found in the Cattle Article. In my own binders I placed this in the bestiary section of the Harnmaster Rules. In this six page article are Domestic Bull, Domestic Cow, Domestic Ox, the Auroch (which is very nasty), and the Wisen (bison). There are notes about breeds like the Themeson Dryder, and the Orbalese Longhair.

Second you need to know how to hunt them. In the original incident I used the hunting rules for Harnmaster 1st edition which was found in Harnlore #4. The culprit for culmination of the cow hunt, aside from my poor judgment, was result 48-55 Moose/Cattle on the quarry table. I feel the system itself is quite good, although my judgement in applying it was questionable.

When a character needed to hunt they cast for a trail by rolling against their tracking skill. If they find one, you roll to see how many hours old is it which determines how long it is. Then for each hour traveling you roll against tracking. Good results shorten the trail. Get enough good results you wind up within sight of the quarry. Which of course in this case was a cow.

However these rules have been superseded by a new article on hunting. The new article is now 22 pages and far more comprehensive. There are character info, adventure seeds as well as rules on well... hunting. The old rules pretty revolved around tracking. Now there are straight forward options on ambush hunting, stalking quarry (like the old rules), quarry drives, and pitfall traps. If you don't want that level of details then there is section that abstracts foraging into a single table that yields the number of mandays of rations you find.

With these rules you can setup an ambush for cows, drive cows, trap cows, and of course stalking cows. Or you could say to hell with cows and string up your referee.

You could easily use these rules with classic editions of DnD even without a skill system. Just roll against the appropriate attribute. If you like to roll high add your attribute to a d20 roll and if you roll a 20 or higher you succeed. Harnmaster skill rolls generate four results. Critical Success, Marginal Success, Marginal Failure,  Critical Failure. Harnmaster uses percentile and a roll under skill level system. Any roll ending a 0 or 5 is a critical. Success or failure depends whenever you are under the skill level or over. For d20 roll any roll divisible by 5 is a critical.

So that how you hunt a cow in DnD or Harn.