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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6025159" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Yes, years of them, set mostly in FR's 'Sea of Fallen Stars' (which is like the Mediterranean only with the Carribean in the middle of it). However, I don't know enough about your campaign to really be able to help you beyond the general guidelines above, so tell me what you want in a campaign:</p><p></p><p>1) What is your groups primary RP focus - hack n' slash, simulation, political, wargaming, melodrama, etc.? What do you want your campaign to be about? A campaign that is about running a business (including playing pirate) is going to look different than a campaign that is about political and military intrigue or one that is about hack n' slash. What do you want your game to be about? Me telling you a bunch of stories about fleet actions and ships of the line burning won't be much helpful to you if your group isn't heavy into wargaming.</p><p>2) Tell me more about your setting. A campaign intending to be historical simulation is going to be very different than one that is sprawling fantasy. Are you inspired by some historical period, or just copying over the map because it is convienent? Are you going more for the Odyssey/Voyage of the Argonauts here, or are the PC's taking the role of Venetian traders in the time period leading up to Lepanto, or are you inspired by say the Anglo-Dutch wars or England's great naval rivalry with France? </p><p></p><p>The campaign I was in went through several stages - ships as means of transport, ships as means of exploration of the unknown, ships as economic resources, and finally ships as means of political and military power. At first we saw ships primarily as a means to get where the adventure was - as in 'We have to go to Egypt, let's take a boat'. Then we went through a period were we were playing Star Trek the D&D generation, where every session was about moving from one mysterious uncharted island to the next, killing the monsters and taking their treasure while fighting off pirates who would take it from us. At this point, the game, while at sea still wasn't mostly about ships. For one thing, we hadn't really developed the rules yet or done the library research to make the game deeply about sailing. If you don't really know about something, you can't make it part of your game because you are blind to it. For another, it was still at a scale where the PC's abilities were paramount, even when some level of ship to ship combat was occurring. Partly that was because we were still somewhat using small vessels with few 'guns' and not that many crew, somewhat still locked in Gygaxian medievalism (though more and more moving to the swashbuckling model of pirate movies) and partly because we hadn't really considered how spells would change the game or that if ships had been in use for a while, chances are people would make them at least somewhat magical. Then, after a while we realized that we now effectively owned the islands and could claim them as our own and get people to settle them, we went through a period where the role of ships in trade was paramount. By that point, ships were a resource that we wanted to acquire and build for ourselves, and it began to matter more what the NPC's and their vessels were capable of. From that, we started getting into bigger and bigger classes of vessels carrying veritible armies aboard them and more and more true great age of sail as our model, and then those ships start to be at least as relevant than what the PC's do. Then, when the other nations started noticing that we now effectively straddled and controlled the major trade routes and that we'd become rich enough and had enough boats/guns to matter, the role of ships as weapons of war became paramount and the game became very heavy on war gaming, political intrigue and so forth.</p><p></p><p>Sometime after I left the game, I think it morphed into full on sci-fi inspired Babylon 5/Star Wars/John Carter/Spelljammer, with fleets of flying magical ships of the line and other superweapons duking it out for interplanetary stakes.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6025159, member: 4937"] Yes, years of them, set mostly in FR's 'Sea of Fallen Stars' (which is like the Mediterranean only with the Carribean in the middle of it). However, I don't know enough about your campaign to really be able to help you beyond the general guidelines above, so tell me what you want in a campaign: 1) What is your groups primary RP focus - hack n' slash, simulation, political, wargaming, melodrama, etc.? What do you want your campaign to be about? A campaign that is about running a business (including playing pirate) is going to look different than a campaign that is about political and military intrigue or one that is about hack n' slash. What do you want your game to be about? Me telling you a bunch of stories about fleet actions and ships of the line burning won't be much helpful to you if your group isn't heavy into wargaming. 2) Tell me more about your setting. A campaign intending to be historical simulation is going to be very different than one that is sprawling fantasy. Are you inspired by some historical period, or just copying over the map because it is convienent? Are you going more for the Odyssey/Voyage of the Argonauts here, or are the PC's taking the role of Venetian traders in the time period leading up to Lepanto, or are you inspired by say the Anglo-Dutch wars or England's great naval rivalry with France? The campaign I was in went through several stages - ships as means of transport, ships as means of exploration of the unknown, ships as economic resources, and finally ships as means of political and military power. At first we saw ships primarily as a means to get where the adventure was - as in 'We have to go to Egypt, let's take a boat'. Then we went through a period were we were playing Star Trek the D&D generation, where every session was about moving from one mysterious uncharted island to the next, killing the monsters and taking their treasure while fighting off pirates who would take it from us. At this point, the game, while at sea still wasn't mostly about ships. For one thing, we hadn't really developed the rules yet or done the library research to make the game deeply about sailing. If you don't really know about something, you can't make it part of your game because you are blind to it. For another, it was still at a scale where the PC's abilities were paramount, even when some level of ship to ship combat was occurring. Partly that was because we were still somewhat using small vessels with few 'guns' and not that many crew, somewhat still locked in Gygaxian medievalism (though more and more moving to the swashbuckling model of pirate movies) and partly because we hadn't really considered how spells would change the game or that if ships had been in use for a while, chances are people would make them at least somewhat magical. Then, after a while we realized that we now effectively owned the islands and could claim them as our own and get people to settle them, we went through a period where the role of ships in trade was paramount. By that point, ships were a resource that we wanted to acquire and build for ourselves, and it began to matter more what the NPC's and their vessels were capable of. From that, we started getting into bigger and bigger classes of vessels carrying veritible armies aboard them and more and more true great age of sail as our model, and then those ships start to be at least as relevant than what the PC's do. Then, when the other nations started noticing that we now effectively straddled and controlled the major trade routes and that we'd become rich enough and had enough boats/guns to matter, the role of ships as weapons of war became paramount and the game became very heavy on war gaming, political intrigue and so forth. Sometime after I left the game, I think it morphed into full on sci-fi inspired Babylon 5/Star Wars/John Carter/Spelljammer, with fleets of flying magical ships of the line and other superweapons duking it out for interplanetary stakes. [/QUOTE]
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