High Seas Adventures!

I'm looking for your help.

I'd like to look at some stand-alone adventures that place the PCs in missions at sea on ships: rum-running, piracy, salvage, using letters of marque, battles between navies, undersea treasures, yacht races, legitimate shipping... Basically, anything that a party of PCs would leave a port for. But the goal is to have a neat ship or sea-centered adventure, not travel and fight aquatic random encounters on the way to a land-based one.

Any suggestions?

roguerouge said:

Any suggestions?

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Look for a different system. Sea-faring has been notoriously ignored in D&D adventures across all editions of the game. In fact, aside from 50 Fathoms and the new Pirates RPG from Wizkids, there haven't been too many RPGs that deal with nautical adventure in depth (no pun intended). As the son of a Marine and the grandson of a sailor, I'd love a nautical adventure RPG but so few games (even those ostensibly designed for it) seem to do the tradition justice.

No adventures come to mind, you'll probably have to come up with one on your own.

I will suggest picking up Stormwrack, however.

jdrakeh said:

Look for a different system.

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I disagree. There isn't much in the main WoTC books, but you can find plenty of material out there from third party publishers. I am currently running a sea-based campaign where the party has decided they aren't taking any more adventures that takes them more than a day inland because their last one went so badly.

I have not run across much in the way of modules for heavy ship adventure. Most of them involve more land-based with some ship interactions. These are things like while dealing with a land-based situation, you find out it relates to a smuggler's ship and then later to undersea dwellers (the U-series of old modules) or adventures where there are pirates operating, but you do most of your adventuring actually fighting the pirates at their lair or something similar.

Right now, I have my part involved in an island chain nation where they do "odd jobs" for the lords, which involves a lot of traveling to other islands to track down things or people and then facing the. (Such as the goblin raiders who were based on an island in an area, but no one knew which one.) They are also involved with trying to hunt pirates.

There were a couple of more sea-based adventures in 2nd Ed modules. I remember there was one that had orc pirates whose home base was built on the back of a giant sea turtle or similar creature. I don't remember the module.

You can also do that whole "Odyssey" routine. I had a party that ended up completely lost in an uncharted region of islands. They spent years game time trying to find their way home and had a multitude of adventures along the way.

I have been having fun with sea-based stuff in my own campaigns, but it's been difficult getting something solid down to use as a module of sorts. I finished drafts of about 48 pages of sea-based creatures, classes, etc., and then got side tracked. We've tested some of the concepts, mostly thruogh random encounters, but I have an idea for a small 2-3 game module that would involve high seas adventure, and another that involves exploring an island. If I can just get the time, I could get a rough version of the modules down.

SiderisAnon said:

I disagree. There isn't much in the main WoTC books, but you can find plenty of material out there from third party publishers.

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There is a little bit of third-party material out there (e.g., Skull & Bones, Seas of Blood, etc) but not an overwhelming amount of it. As I said, though, actual nautical lore is poorly represented acrss all of RPGdom. That said, the OP was specifically speaking of adventures, and so was I.

Maiden Voyage from Atlas Games takes place aboard a ship.

Also, I don't know offhand, but I wonder if there's anything in an old Dungeon magazine.

I think there was one called Salvage Operation, by Mike Mearls.

I recall one with a Paladin infected with lycanthropy who took the PCs out to do a wreck dive as well? Don't recall the exact issue though. I'll post again if I find it.

Sea Wyvern's Wake in Dungeon. It covers a 3 month voyage, not all of the adventure takes place on the seas, but you can cut out the land parts I guess, though they are pretty fun so far, (haven't finished it).

The main problem with doing ship based encounters in D&D is the rather large numbers you have to work with. Depending on the ship, you could easily have forty or fifty combatants on a side. That makes for some seriously long fights. Also, magic tends to make naval fights very, very short. A wand of extended fireball reaches out to about 1400 feet or so. Makes obliterating your enemies from range ridiculously easy.

50 fathoms is gold. I'd take that, and Savage Worlds, and play from there.