I've played through two halves of a 50 fathoms campaign now, playing the campaign from the book and starting with the first adventure, which I think is Maiden Voyage or something like that.
Unfortunately, most of my players in this game dislike the system.
A couple notes:
1: Magic seems really powerful, the bolt power in particular. This may be in large part because the Kraken start with 10 bonus power points, doubling the number that a Kraken mage starts with to 20. On top of that, the player took Wizard, so any time he gets a raise he lowers the cost of his power by 1. Given that he's got a d12 for casting, that's pretty often. So basically for 5 points he gets to make three 3d6 attacks with bolt.
Of course, even then, that's still a quarter of his total spell points and would be one half to one third of any other character's.
2: I find I enjoy the game a lot more when the players have a few cohorts/hirelings/etc. In the necropolis game I ran, 2 sergeants per PC was standard issue. In this 50 fathom game, each player started out with just their own character, and I think that is part of the reason that the game doesn't seem as good. The combats seem to take longer, and they're also less epic since instead of a dozen PCs vs. a few dozen enemies, there's 4-6 PCs vs. 8-9 enemies. It still goes faster than a similar D&D combat, though.
One thing I really love about the system is its lethality. I dislike the fact that in D&D, you don't often end up taking lasting damage, but in the last game of 50 fathoms the Kraken lost an eye.
