The world of Harn is all about the creation of a richly detailed and plausible medieval fantasy world. Plausible, not realistic, though realism is often a driving design concern. And that’s the approach that was taken in Nasty, Brutish and Short: The Orcs of Harn (1997). This is a dicey proposition.

Orcs are not a product of the natural world of Harn. They were either created somehow, in an earlier age, by an evil sorcerer, or imported from a different dimension. They are alien in a couple key ways — somewhat hive like, they are born from eggs (ew) laid by a single queen and share an innate tribal memory. Thus, they inherit learned behavior from the generations before, which informs and reinforces their actions, sometimes irrationally. This seems to indicate both an awareness and wariness of the idea of a type of monster existing as monolith. These orcs are still sort of a monolith, but an attempt has been made to explain why, and it works well enough because they are surrounded by various other cultures that are, for game purposes, somewhat monolithic on the surface.

It’s maybe not ideal, but I also don’t really know how you handle orcs differently in the context of Harn, and for what this is, I think it’s rather well done (at one point, in an explanation for a scenario involving helping wounded orcs, the author suggests rolling up the module to “thrash them soundly about the ears” if the players seem inclined to meet requests for mercy with violence). Brutal as most orcs are, it’s the plotting of humans and dwarves that most often uses them as instruments of violence, usually for political gain. The scenarios, for the most part, put players in the way of those schemes.

As usual for Harn, the visuals of the book are in good hands with Eric Hotz, who did all the illustrations and maps. I think the maps are particularly sharp and the cover art stands as one of the line’s very best.