Since Harn's combat system is deadly you have to play smart. Any combat could leave your PC crippled or dead. The setting is also closer to the real middle ages, where there were slaves, serfs, etc all the way up to the nobles.
A while ago, on one of the main Harn sites, I stumbled over a file with 101 story seeds. (Note - I went looking for it when I was writing this post and found it at:
http://www.lythia.com/2007/12/101-encounters/ - but I typed the examples below from memory and hope that they match up with what's really in that file.)
They aren't "Orcs come to town and..." type adventure seeds.
Here's one that stuck in my mind...
The party is going somewhere and they stumble on this young (12 -13 year old) girl who's on the verge of panic. Her dad took her out into the woods, got her lost, then pointed her to the next village and vanished. She has a couple of days worth of food - and that's it. And she really wants to go home.
If the PCs return her to her village her parents are relieved to see that she's all right, but not happy that she came home. See, the local lord has a thing for girls around her age so they smuggled her out of the village. Everyone in the area knows about the lord, but since he only bothers peasant girls and is otherwise a good lord the rest of the gentry ignore how he treats young girls because, well, they are just serfs.
If the PCs smuggle the girl back out of the village then they are stealing a serf from his lands. If they turn her over to him they will be rewarded for returning a runaway serf. What will the PCs do?
(Note - since Harn is close to the real middle ages in some ways, killing the Lord is not an option. No, killing nobles (even with a good reason) will get the PCs hunted down and killed.)
Another encounter - you stumble across some escaped serfs living in the woods - what do you do? Leave them alone (for no reward) or turn them into their lord (they'll be flogged but you'll get a minor reward).
While near a beach you stumble across the shipwrecked son of a noble; pirates are in the area hunting for him - what do you do?
The ale served at a rustic inn is making people sick - but since they don't know there's a dead rat in the ale barrel they think it's a warlock laying curses. They burned "the warlock" before the PCs arrive in the village, but since people are still getting sick the local lord is now looking for his apprentices. Do the PCs investigate enough to find that it's the ale making people sick? And if so, do they try to convince the locals that there's no warlocks (after they already burned one) - and everyone knows that only a warlock would define warlocks so the PCs must be warlocks... Or do they set up someone as the Warlock? Or...
Well, you get the idea. Since the combat system is realistic most players prefer to think over fighting.
Richard