Stormwrack - Mastering the Perils of Wind and Wave

[MarauderX]

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.

 

[styrix]

More errata?

We've been playing a stormwrack based campaign for a while now, and we love this book. For now, my two major problems with the book have been with visibility and the harpoon.

There are very few rules for begining distance for encounters. They recomend 2d6+2 x 100 feet for starting distance, but it is very hard to find, and fairly arbitrary. They don't talk about at all how far off on the ocean you can sea various objects. For example, give optimal weather, a mountainous island might be seen at 20 miles? How far can a ship of varying size be seen? The only rules mentioned for this kind of thing are in feet, but at sea you can see for miles, especially with a great spot check, eyes of the eagle, on a 40 foot mast, yada yada.

On the harpoon. Lillikakooet is wielding a harpoon, which is an exotic range weapon. He doesn't have proficiency in it, so should have a -4 to his attacks. He is also using it as melee weapon, which might be possible, but strictly speaking, is not by the rules. Looking at the harpoon in the equipement chapter, there is nothing saying it can be used as a melee weapon. I'd guess it is like a really big javelin, so should be listed as an exotic 2-handed weapon, not an exotic range weapon, and then have in the entry that it can be thrown with one hand, but used in melee with 2 hands, with a 10 foot reach, and a -4 to attacks. Or they should just redesign it altogether. I'm playing a Leviathan hunter (non Darfellan) and I'd love to use a harpoon, but as it's listed, it is too confusing to be useful.

As a finaly positive note, for non sea-farers, the Leviathan Hunter is a great PrC even for non sea-faring campaigns. There is absolutely nothing in the PrC that is restricted to water, so it'd be great for anyone that likes to play a hunter of huge aberrations, animals, magical beasts, and dragons.