drnuncheon
Explorer
(I'm going to post this in the reviews section but the cursed thing is hanging when I try to log in. So, here's my first review, and it's a doozy.)
If you pay attention to what's coming out for d20, you no doubt have noted that there are a lot of naval adventuring rules coming out. The first two offerings so far are both by companies about as well-established as they come in the d20 field: Seas of Blood by Mongoose Publishing and Seafarer's Handbook from Fantasy Flight Games. These two books cover a lot of similar ground, and a lot of people are wondering which one to buy. This review is not so much for the purpose of telling you which is better as it is for telling you the similarities and differences between the two, to let you make up your mind who gets your gaming dollar. As such, it's going to be extremely long.
Before I get into the meat, let me say that this is not a playtest review - all opinions are based on readings of the rules only. I'd also like to say that both Mongoose and FFG have my respect for turning out some great stuff for d20, including these sets of rules. I don't regret 'double-spending' on these naval rules, because large parts of them can be used to complement each other.
Lastly, the organization of this review does not mirror the structure of either of the books. Since they are so vastly different in organization, mine mirrors neither of them.
Physical Appearance
Seas of Blood is a 128-page softbound with a color cover and B&W interior art, and has a cover price of $19.95. Seafarer's Handbook is 176 pages, sporting a tomelike color hardcover reminiscent of the Core Rulebooks (and the other entries in the Legends & Lairs series) and B&W interior art. Both products use fairly standard 2-column text with artsy borders, although Mongoose's seem to take up more of the page. Fonts and layout for both are very clean and easily readable, with Mongoose's being slightly smaller and lighter.
Races and Classes
Seafarer's Handbook provides us with three new races: merfolk (the undersea equivalent of humanity, down to the versatility bonuses that humans get), aquatic elves, and half-merrow (a crossbreed between merrow - aquatic ogres - and merfolk). None of the races have an ECL, and all recieve tremendous bonuses to swim and improved low-light vision (although merfolk have the tiny rules bobble of having 'low-light vision out to 60 feet', which makes no sense given how the ability works.)
There is also a single new prestige class, effectively limited to aquatic elf NPCs, called the Reef Warrior. Members of the class gain abilities that help them protect their home reefs and other aquatic elves, but suffer alienation from them as they become more and more a part of the reef than a part of elven society.
Seas of Blood has no new PC races, but it does have a discussion of the roles of existing character classes in a nautical or undersea campaign, which Seafarer's Handbook leaves out. Rules for an alternate type of druid - the Sea Druid - are presented, along with rules for normal druis learning their abilities. They also include a new 5-level NPC class (the sailor), which I thought was rather pointless when given the inclusion of the Expert in the core rules. (In addition, I disagree with the implication that all sailors are as well-trained in combat as warriors.)
Mongoose gives us three new 10-level prestige classes as well, all of which are far more applicable to PCs than the Reef Warrior. They are the Buccaneer (focused on shipboard swashbuckling and acrobatics), the Reaver (specializing in boarding actions and combat leadership), and the Navigator-Wizard (whose arcane knowledge increases his naval skill).
Skills
Seas of Blood introduces a couple of new skills: Knowledge (Seamanship) and Profession (navigator). I'm not sure why they chose these classifications, especially when Profession (sailor) already exists in the Player's Handbook. There is a brief note discussing the fact that the DM may make them equivalent, but aside from that it seems to be forgotten.
Seafarer's Handbook, on the other hand, sticks a lot closer to the Core Rules, providing one new skill variant: Underwater Alchemy. It also has an excellent discussion of how current skills are changed when used underwater. (I never would have thought of the difficulties inherent in using the Disguise skill underwater, myself.)
Feats
Ahh, the bread and meat of many new books. Most gamers love new toys, and I am no exception. 32 new feats in the Seafarer's Handbook, and 13 in Seas of Blood.
Seafarer's Handbook has a discussion of how existing feats work underwater - another plus. Its feats are also more varied than those in Seas of Blood, with feats for the aquatic races like Tail Slam (an underwater Bull Rush), new magical feats like Create Manikin (the classic 'voodoo doll', allowing the user to create a doll which will transfer the effects of spells cast on it to the person it represents), and of course general sailor's feats like Sea Dog (+2 to Profession (sailor) and Use Rope) and Swing-by Attack (swashbucklers take note!)
Seas of Blood's feats focus on the sailors. Again Mongoose has a tiny rules gaffe - the Amazing Agility feat allows you to Take 20 on any balance check, which doesn't make sense given what Take 20 is. (I would be leery of a feat that gave an average of +10 to a skill anyway!) The rest of the feats are quite good, including Duck & Weave (lets you instinctively gain the benefits of cover while fighting shipboard) and Master Helmsman. Many of the feats (Bargain, Inspire Loyalty) tie very tightly with the rest of the naval rules presented in Seas of Blood, and so are of much less use if you are picking & choosing.
Equipment and Magic Items
More toys! Seas of Blood has a small section on shipboard equipment, including the aquatic crossbow, the navigator's toolkit, and tarred armor. The magic items section is much more interesting, with magic figureheads that provide bonuses to the ships they are attached to, magic shipboard weapons, and even intelligent ships!
Seafarer's Handbook, with its stronger section on undersea adventuring, provides lots more equipment, including new types of aquatic armor (kelp, shell, bone, and scale) and new alchemical devices. The magic items section gives a new weapon enchantment (waterbane, making it much easier to use underwater as well as doing extra damage to creatures of the Water subtype) and several wondrous items. The ship construction section also has a brief paragraph each on magical armor and weaponry for ships. It's good, but compared to the coolness of Mongoose's offering (what's cooler for a naval campaign than an intelligent ship?) it seems a little lacking.
This is such a long review, I'm going to grab some lunch. Mmm...pizza.
Magic Spells
Both books contain a section on new magical spells of use to PCs at - or under - sea. There's also a brief section in each on how to handle other spells cast underwater.
Seafarer's Handbook gives us the new Underwater domain and 27 new spells total, ranging from aquatic form (gives the character the Aquatic template, permanently) to whirlpool (no, it doesn't create a hot tub). Some of the spells are very clever - message in a bottle, for instance, lets you send a brief message to someone near water, while wisdom of the watery grave is a naval version of speak with dead that does not require you to possess the corpse of the target creature. Some are not very nautical at all - iron fists lets you do normal damage and be treated as if you were armed when using unarmed strikes.
Seas of Blood has 22 new spells, from control currents to whirlpool (yes, again! It's a different varient though). The spells are more focused (just like the rest of the book) on sailors and ships, and include the wonderful skyship spell (turns your ship into a flying ship for 1 hour/level) and raise death hulk from their Necromancy: Beyond the Grave supplement. The spells in Seas of Blood seem more powerful, with teleport ship and tsunami among the possibilities.
Brief OGL digression: The beginning text of FFG's whirlpool spell is identical to Mongoose's. I originally thought it was a bit rude of FFG not to credit Mongoose or Matthew Sprange, but then I discovered that they had both nabbed the text from the whirlwind spell in the PHB. I thought I'd point that out so nobody else made the same mistake I did.
Naval Adventuring
Seas of Blood features extensive rules on sea travel and trading - weather, length of travel, what kind and what quantity of goods are available in a particular port, and how much you can sell them for when you reach your destination. If you want to earn your character's fortune through commerce rather than combat, these rules are exactly what you want - and they can be adapted to overland caravans as well. The book also features two pages of detailed rules on fishing (both line and net). I'm not sure I know what to say about that, although they could be useful after you've wrecked your ship and are floating in a lifeboat searching for land.
Oddly, the Seafarer's Handbook doesn't focus nearly as much on the actual seafaring - at least, not in a crunchy rules-sense like the Mongoose book does. Instead it provides an extensive chapter on the atmosphere and feel of seafaring adventures, which is quite welcome. The section on the varied functions of the ship's crew will be especially helpful to DMs. There's also an extensive section on life in a port city, and an example city has been provided.
Underwater Adventuring
Seas of Blood has a brief (~4 pages) section on underwater combat and adventuring, with harsh penalties for the poor surface-dwellers who decide to fight below the waves (-4 to initiative, attack, damage, and Dexterity-based checks!)
Seafarer's Handbook devotes almost twice as many pages to the subject, with simple rules for three-dimensional maneuvering and buoyancy. Penalties for surface dwellers are far less harsh, at least on some weapons, which might make underwater adventuring a little more playable for your PCs.
There's also 19 pages devoted to the undersea envionment, from undersea terrain and environments (kelp forests, coral reefs) to undersea "dungeons" (like shipwrecks and lost cities) to the Underdeep, an aquatic version of the classic Underdark. The Underdeep has a wide variety of interesting things contained within it, including a dwarven version of Atlantis (the Sunken Mountain), the "deep drow", and Silentdark, a trade city and safe haven for all undersea dwellers.
Monsters
Finally - toys for the DM! Both books supply a variety of new beasties to torment one's players with.
Seafarer's Handbook offers only a few: the Abyssal Shark (an outsider with a ranged bite!), Coral Golem, Drowned Dead (sailors who died by accident and hate the living), and Hippocampus (a literal sea-horse. I guess that merfolk knights have to ride sidesaddle?).
Seas of Blood presents almost three times as many creatures: the Fideal (a monstrous humanoid that haunts shorelines and small islands), the fisherman (a giant outsider who fishes for the spirits of the drowned), Sea Giants, Gnarled Eels, Grey Lady (undead spirit of a woman who died pining for a love lost at sea), Jastra Root (carniverous seaweed), Killer Wave (aquatic ooze), Leviathan, Sea Drake (classic sea-serpent), Talorani (humanoid water-dwellers), and Undine (water fey).
Ships
OK, I've left this and Ship Combat to the last, simply because I know that it's what you've really been waiting for.
First off, the Seafarer's Handbook has it all over Seas of Blood in terms of ship construction. That's because it actually contains rules that go beyond "look at the sample ships and make something up". That was probably the most disappointing thing about Seas of Blood. The construction rules are fairly simple (pick a hull, pick propulsion types, pick weaponry, and there you are) but include some nice stuff like 'ship qualities' to individualize your ship - things like Built to Last (more hull hit points), Tough Old Girl (increases the hull's Hardness), and Wave Rider (the ship is faster than others of its size).
As for designs, the Seafarer's Handbook gives us 19 different designs (many with variants) as well as a template for a 'ghost ship' - really an actual ship crewed by the undead. These designs range from the mundane (cogs, caravels and barges) to the esoteric (triton chariot, wizard's towership and the dwarven ironback, an iron-clad warship strongly resembling the USS Monitor of American Civil War fame.) The descriptions are very detailed, with deck plans for all decks of the ships and discussions of how each are used. A 'Ships in Service' section provides names and ideas for famous (or notorious) examples of the ship type.
Seas of Blood has 21 new ships and 4 templates - the cursed ship, the death hulk (akin to FFG's 'ghost ship'), a ghost ship template of their own (the literal ghost of a ship), and skyship (for those who would rather brave air currents than ocean ones). Their designs cover a similar range but focus more on warships than any other kind. The ships are not presented in nearly as much detail - only the top decks are shown on the deck plans, and each ship gets only a paragraph or two.
Both books feature submersible craft created by gnomes. I don't know about the rest of you, but given the apparent invasion of other settings by Krynn's tinker gnomes, I'm not sure I'd want to trust them to build me a ship to go underwater.
Ship Combat
The naval combat system in Seas of Blood is one of the book's strongest points. Using a stripped-down version of their Open Mass Combat System (OMCS), it is both easy to learn (basically treating ships and crew as single creatures) and compatible with the OMCS presented in The Quintessential Fighter. At least one other publisher has also decided to use Mongoose's rules for their games.
Ship combat in the Seafarer's Handbook has slightly more complex maneuvering and control rolls that depart a bit more from the d20 standard - only the captain's Profession (sailor) is directly taken into account, although the quality of his crew as a group is also measured. Maneuvers are handled by spending 'command points' which are based on the captain's skill and Charisma, the crew's quality and numbers, and the conditions at the time. There is a very sketchy squad-level resolution mechanic for boarding actions (which doesn't even take the crew's armament into consideration), but a nice section on swashbuckling actions and swinging from ropes.
Organization
I love books with indices. Without them I am left to flounder - "Um, i think that rule was in the chapter on characters...no, maybe it was in underwater combat." Fortunately, both products seem to have a good index - Mongoose even goes so far as to include the terms from their nautical glossary. The true test will come when I need to looks omething up during play, of course, but both books are logically organized enough that I think I will be fine.
The one problem I have with the organization in Seafarer's Handbook is that there are rules for underwater adventuring scattered all throughout the book. The effect of being underwater on skills is in with the new skills, underwater combat is in a separate section, and discussion of underwater campaigns in a third. I can see the logic behind the organization they chose, but it wouldn't have been my first choice.
Other Stuff that Didn't get Mentioned Before
Seas of Blood has a short naval glossary which can be very helpful to DMs not familiar with oceangoing terminology.
Seas of Blood also has some ongoing support in the form of the Ships of the... series. These include details of the different races as sailors as well as many new ship designs.
Summary/Wrapup:
Seas of Blood (Mongoose):
* trading and travel rules
* ship combat uses Open Mass Combat System - easy to learn,
used in products by Mongoose and others.
* intelligent ships. How cool is that?
* grittier, more realistic feel
Seafarer's Handbook (FFG):
* stronger focus on underwater adventuring
* more detailed ship-to-ship combat (but less detailed crew combat)
* more discussion of campaign settings - port cities, underwater
* detailed ship construction rules
* more fantastic/looser feel overall
Look, these are both great books. Together, they're even better. But what if you only want one? Well, it depends on why you want it.
If you're going to stay above the water, Seas of Blood is probably what you want - especially if the campaign is going to revolve around the ship and sea travel. The travelling and trading rules could be the focus of a campaign or mini-game in themselves.
If you want fantastical adventuring, though, I have to recommend the Seafarer's Handbook. It's much stronger underwater focus opens up whole new vistas to explore, and if you're not going to focus on travel and trading than Mongoose's detailed rules won't be nearly as much use.
If you pay attention to what's coming out for d20, you no doubt have noted that there are a lot of naval adventuring rules coming out. The first two offerings so far are both by companies about as well-established as they come in the d20 field: Seas of Blood by Mongoose Publishing and Seafarer's Handbook from Fantasy Flight Games. These two books cover a lot of similar ground, and a lot of people are wondering which one to buy. This review is not so much for the purpose of telling you which is better as it is for telling you the similarities and differences between the two, to let you make up your mind who gets your gaming dollar. As such, it's going to be extremely long.
Before I get into the meat, let me say that this is not a playtest review - all opinions are based on readings of the rules only. I'd also like to say that both Mongoose and FFG have my respect for turning out some great stuff for d20, including these sets of rules. I don't regret 'double-spending' on these naval rules, because large parts of them can be used to complement each other.
Lastly, the organization of this review does not mirror the structure of either of the books. Since they are so vastly different in organization, mine mirrors neither of them.
Physical Appearance
Seas of Blood is a 128-page softbound with a color cover and B&W interior art, and has a cover price of $19.95. Seafarer's Handbook is 176 pages, sporting a tomelike color hardcover reminiscent of the Core Rulebooks (and the other entries in the Legends & Lairs series) and B&W interior art. Both products use fairly standard 2-column text with artsy borders, although Mongoose's seem to take up more of the page. Fonts and layout for both are very clean and easily readable, with Mongoose's being slightly smaller and lighter.
Races and Classes
Seafarer's Handbook provides us with three new races: merfolk (the undersea equivalent of humanity, down to the versatility bonuses that humans get), aquatic elves, and half-merrow (a crossbreed between merrow - aquatic ogres - and merfolk). None of the races have an ECL, and all recieve tremendous bonuses to swim and improved low-light vision (although merfolk have the tiny rules bobble of having 'low-light vision out to 60 feet', which makes no sense given how the ability works.)
There is also a single new prestige class, effectively limited to aquatic elf NPCs, called the Reef Warrior. Members of the class gain abilities that help them protect their home reefs and other aquatic elves, but suffer alienation from them as they become more and more a part of the reef than a part of elven society.
Seas of Blood has no new PC races, but it does have a discussion of the roles of existing character classes in a nautical or undersea campaign, which Seafarer's Handbook leaves out. Rules for an alternate type of druid - the Sea Druid - are presented, along with rules for normal druis learning their abilities. They also include a new 5-level NPC class (the sailor), which I thought was rather pointless when given the inclusion of the Expert in the core rules. (In addition, I disagree with the implication that all sailors are as well-trained in combat as warriors.)
Mongoose gives us three new 10-level prestige classes as well, all of which are far more applicable to PCs than the Reef Warrior. They are the Buccaneer (focused on shipboard swashbuckling and acrobatics), the Reaver (specializing in boarding actions and combat leadership), and the Navigator-Wizard (whose arcane knowledge increases his naval skill).
Skills
Seas of Blood introduces a couple of new skills: Knowledge (Seamanship) and Profession (navigator). I'm not sure why they chose these classifications, especially when Profession (sailor) already exists in the Player's Handbook. There is a brief note discussing the fact that the DM may make them equivalent, but aside from that it seems to be forgotten.
Seafarer's Handbook, on the other hand, sticks a lot closer to the Core Rules, providing one new skill variant: Underwater Alchemy. It also has an excellent discussion of how current skills are changed when used underwater. (I never would have thought of the difficulties inherent in using the Disguise skill underwater, myself.)
Feats
Ahh, the bread and meat of many new books. Most gamers love new toys, and I am no exception. 32 new feats in the Seafarer's Handbook, and 13 in Seas of Blood.
Seafarer's Handbook has a discussion of how existing feats work underwater - another plus. Its feats are also more varied than those in Seas of Blood, with feats for the aquatic races like Tail Slam (an underwater Bull Rush), new magical feats like Create Manikin (the classic 'voodoo doll', allowing the user to create a doll which will transfer the effects of spells cast on it to the person it represents), and of course general sailor's feats like Sea Dog (+2 to Profession (sailor) and Use Rope) and Swing-by Attack (swashbucklers take note!)
Seas of Blood's feats focus on the sailors. Again Mongoose has a tiny rules gaffe - the Amazing Agility feat allows you to Take 20 on any balance check, which doesn't make sense given what Take 20 is. (I would be leery of a feat that gave an average of +10 to a skill anyway!) The rest of the feats are quite good, including Duck & Weave (lets you instinctively gain the benefits of cover while fighting shipboard) and Master Helmsman. Many of the feats (Bargain, Inspire Loyalty) tie very tightly with the rest of the naval rules presented in Seas of Blood, and so are of much less use if you are picking & choosing.
Equipment and Magic Items
More toys! Seas of Blood has a small section on shipboard equipment, including the aquatic crossbow, the navigator's toolkit, and tarred armor. The magic items section is much more interesting, with magic figureheads that provide bonuses to the ships they are attached to, magic shipboard weapons, and even intelligent ships!
Seafarer's Handbook, with its stronger section on undersea adventuring, provides lots more equipment, including new types of aquatic armor (kelp, shell, bone, and scale) and new alchemical devices. The magic items section gives a new weapon enchantment (waterbane, making it much easier to use underwater as well as doing extra damage to creatures of the Water subtype) and several wondrous items. The ship construction section also has a brief paragraph each on magical armor and weaponry for ships. It's good, but compared to the coolness of Mongoose's offering (what's cooler for a naval campaign than an intelligent ship?) it seems a little lacking.
This is such a long review, I'm going to grab some lunch. Mmm...pizza.
Magic Spells
Both books contain a section on new magical spells of use to PCs at - or under - sea. There's also a brief section in each on how to handle other spells cast underwater.
Seafarer's Handbook gives us the new Underwater domain and 27 new spells total, ranging from aquatic form (gives the character the Aquatic template, permanently) to whirlpool (no, it doesn't create a hot tub). Some of the spells are very clever - message in a bottle, for instance, lets you send a brief message to someone near water, while wisdom of the watery grave is a naval version of speak with dead that does not require you to possess the corpse of the target creature. Some are not very nautical at all - iron fists lets you do normal damage and be treated as if you were armed when using unarmed strikes.
Seas of Blood has 22 new spells, from control currents to whirlpool (yes, again! It's a different varient though). The spells are more focused (just like the rest of the book) on sailors and ships, and include the wonderful skyship spell (turns your ship into a flying ship for 1 hour/level) and raise death hulk from their Necromancy: Beyond the Grave supplement. The spells in Seas of Blood seem more powerful, with teleport ship and tsunami among the possibilities.
Brief OGL digression: The beginning text of FFG's whirlpool spell is identical to Mongoose's. I originally thought it was a bit rude of FFG not to credit Mongoose or Matthew Sprange, but then I discovered that they had both nabbed the text from the whirlwind spell in the PHB. I thought I'd point that out so nobody else made the same mistake I did.
Naval Adventuring
Seas of Blood features extensive rules on sea travel and trading - weather, length of travel, what kind and what quantity of goods are available in a particular port, and how much you can sell them for when you reach your destination. If you want to earn your character's fortune through commerce rather than combat, these rules are exactly what you want - and they can be adapted to overland caravans as well. The book also features two pages of detailed rules on fishing (both line and net). I'm not sure I know what to say about that, although they could be useful after you've wrecked your ship and are floating in a lifeboat searching for land.
Oddly, the Seafarer's Handbook doesn't focus nearly as much on the actual seafaring - at least, not in a crunchy rules-sense like the Mongoose book does. Instead it provides an extensive chapter on the atmosphere and feel of seafaring adventures, which is quite welcome. The section on the varied functions of the ship's crew will be especially helpful to DMs. There's also an extensive section on life in a port city, and an example city has been provided.
Underwater Adventuring
Seas of Blood has a brief (~4 pages) section on underwater combat and adventuring, with harsh penalties for the poor surface-dwellers who decide to fight below the waves (-4 to initiative, attack, damage, and Dexterity-based checks!)
Seafarer's Handbook devotes almost twice as many pages to the subject, with simple rules for three-dimensional maneuvering and buoyancy. Penalties for surface dwellers are far less harsh, at least on some weapons, which might make underwater adventuring a little more playable for your PCs.
There's also 19 pages devoted to the undersea envionment, from undersea terrain and environments (kelp forests, coral reefs) to undersea "dungeons" (like shipwrecks and lost cities) to the Underdeep, an aquatic version of the classic Underdark. The Underdeep has a wide variety of interesting things contained within it, including a dwarven version of Atlantis (the Sunken Mountain), the "deep drow", and Silentdark, a trade city and safe haven for all undersea dwellers.
Monsters
Finally - toys for the DM! Both books supply a variety of new beasties to torment one's players with.
Seafarer's Handbook offers only a few: the Abyssal Shark (an outsider with a ranged bite!), Coral Golem, Drowned Dead (sailors who died by accident and hate the living), and Hippocampus (a literal sea-horse. I guess that merfolk knights have to ride sidesaddle?).
Seas of Blood presents almost three times as many creatures: the Fideal (a monstrous humanoid that haunts shorelines and small islands), the fisherman (a giant outsider who fishes for the spirits of the drowned), Sea Giants, Gnarled Eels, Grey Lady (undead spirit of a woman who died pining for a love lost at sea), Jastra Root (carniverous seaweed), Killer Wave (aquatic ooze), Leviathan, Sea Drake (classic sea-serpent), Talorani (humanoid water-dwellers), and Undine (water fey).
Ships
OK, I've left this and Ship Combat to the last, simply because I know that it's what you've really been waiting for.
First off, the Seafarer's Handbook has it all over Seas of Blood in terms of ship construction. That's because it actually contains rules that go beyond "look at the sample ships and make something up". That was probably the most disappointing thing about Seas of Blood. The construction rules are fairly simple (pick a hull, pick propulsion types, pick weaponry, and there you are) but include some nice stuff like 'ship qualities' to individualize your ship - things like Built to Last (more hull hit points), Tough Old Girl (increases the hull's Hardness), and Wave Rider (the ship is faster than others of its size).
As for designs, the Seafarer's Handbook gives us 19 different designs (many with variants) as well as a template for a 'ghost ship' - really an actual ship crewed by the undead. These designs range from the mundane (cogs, caravels and barges) to the esoteric (triton chariot, wizard's towership and the dwarven ironback, an iron-clad warship strongly resembling the USS Monitor of American Civil War fame.) The descriptions are very detailed, with deck plans for all decks of the ships and discussions of how each are used. A 'Ships in Service' section provides names and ideas for famous (or notorious) examples of the ship type.
Seas of Blood has 21 new ships and 4 templates - the cursed ship, the death hulk (akin to FFG's 'ghost ship'), a ghost ship template of their own (the literal ghost of a ship), and skyship (for those who would rather brave air currents than ocean ones). Their designs cover a similar range but focus more on warships than any other kind. The ships are not presented in nearly as much detail - only the top decks are shown on the deck plans, and each ship gets only a paragraph or two.
Both books feature submersible craft created by gnomes. I don't know about the rest of you, but given the apparent invasion of other settings by Krynn's tinker gnomes, I'm not sure I'd want to trust them to build me a ship to go underwater.
Ship Combat
The naval combat system in Seas of Blood is one of the book's strongest points. Using a stripped-down version of their Open Mass Combat System (OMCS), it is both easy to learn (basically treating ships and crew as single creatures) and compatible with the OMCS presented in The Quintessential Fighter. At least one other publisher has also decided to use Mongoose's rules for their games.
Ship combat in the Seafarer's Handbook has slightly more complex maneuvering and control rolls that depart a bit more from the d20 standard - only the captain's Profession (sailor) is directly taken into account, although the quality of his crew as a group is also measured. Maneuvers are handled by spending 'command points' which are based on the captain's skill and Charisma, the crew's quality and numbers, and the conditions at the time. There is a very sketchy squad-level resolution mechanic for boarding actions (which doesn't even take the crew's armament into consideration), but a nice section on swashbuckling actions and swinging from ropes.
Organization
I love books with indices. Without them I am left to flounder - "Um, i think that rule was in the chapter on characters...no, maybe it was in underwater combat." Fortunately, both products seem to have a good index - Mongoose even goes so far as to include the terms from their nautical glossary. The true test will come when I need to looks omething up during play, of course, but both books are logically organized enough that I think I will be fine.
The one problem I have with the organization in Seafarer's Handbook is that there are rules for underwater adventuring scattered all throughout the book. The effect of being underwater on skills is in with the new skills, underwater combat is in a separate section, and discussion of underwater campaigns in a third. I can see the logic behind the organization they chose, but it wouldn't have been my first choice.
Other Stuff that Didn't get Mentioned Before
Seas of Blood has a short naval glossary which can be very helpful to DMs not familiar with oceangoing terminology.
Seas of Blood also has some ongoing support in the form of the Ships of the... series. These include details of the different races as sailors as well as many new ship designs.
Summary/Wrapup:
Seas of Blood (Mongoose):
* trading and travel rules
* ship combat uses Open Mass Combat System - easy to learn,
used in products by Mongoose and others.
* intelligent ships. How cool is that?
* grittier, more realistic feel
Seafarer's Handbook (FFG):
* stronger focus on underwater adventuring
* more detailed ship-to-ship combat (but less detailed crew combat)
* more discussion of campaign settings - port cities, underwater
* detailed ship construction rules
* more fantastic/looser feel overall
Look, these are both great books. Together, they're even better. But what if you only want one? Well, it depends on why you want it.
If you're going to stay above the water, Seas of Blood is probably what you want - especially if the campaign is going to revolve around the ship and sea travel. The travelling and trading rules could be the focus of a campaign or mini-game in themselves.
If you want fantastical adventuring, though, I have to recommend the Seafarer's Handbook. It's much stronger underwater focus opens up whole new vistas to explore, and if you're not going to focus on travel and trading than Mongoose's detailed rules won't be nearly as much use.
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