MarauderX
Explorer
One thing I liked about chapter one, was talking about naval combat. “Most ship-to-ship battles are resolved in one of two ways; by devastating battle magic, or by grappling and boarding.” Quickly followed by “the faster you can get to this decisive (boarding action) stage of the encounter, the better.”
This is the one thing that bothers me most about the book. Not included by Joe was the piece of advice to DMs to start out with a short stint of long range battle magic and skip directly to the boarding (melee) part of a battle. I was looking for a lot more from the book than a hand wave on this. To me the writers have lost their sense of scale when dealing with the high seas.
The absence of trade and the effect on any game world left a void that is hard to fill with yet another DM hand wave. I would have liked to see the book take a different course, but we are given plenty of information, irrelevant as some of it is, to make the book interesting enough to skim through and borrow from your friend's collection between game sessions.