[Targan]

I've played Harnmaster for decades and, while that game setting does contain magic and monsters they are rare and your average peasant may live out their entire lifetime never seeing either. I love the realistic setting and I love the brutality of the realistic combat system.

In all campaigns that I run I like to give each PC a pre-game session or two by themselves (or perhaps two PCs together if they know each other as part of char-gen). I recall one promising PC who was a Kuboran warrior-hunter (culturally very similar to a pre-Christian Celt or Germanic tribesman). During his pre-game he was travelling from one tribal forest settlement to another. He'd decided to travel alone and was stalked by a pack of hungry wolves during the night in his campsite. Long story short, after a helluva fight he was taken down and eaten. His last conscious sensation was feeling a wolf tearing off his face.

Another PC was a heavy horse mercenary (Hundred Years War level of tech approximately). His player had rolled very well for his family background (most Harmaster PCs are some variety of peasant or mediaeval town dweller/commonfolk). He went out hunting by himself after the party had made camp in a woodland area and snuck up on a fairly large male brown bear. The player didn't know much about bears and his character had never hunted one before, so he put an arrow from his longbow into it from about 50 yards away. It was not a killing shot and the bear came at him, fast. Both the player and the PC learned a valuable lesson in how fast and how dangerous bears can be. There ensued a "Legends of the Fall"-type combat with the PC having to go toe-to-toe with an enraged bear and only having time to pull his heavy dagger. The PC won the fight (he was a pretty impressive specimen of a man with much better combat skills than the average Harnmaster PC) but he was grievously injured and literally had to crawl back to camp. The scars and impairments from those injuries stayed with that character for life.

So yes, standard, Earth-type wild animals can be just as scary as fantastic monsters if the system and the GM are realistic.