D&D 5E More Ships of the Sea

77IM · Jun 1, 2019

I have just uploaded More Ships of the Sea to the downloads area.

Hi!
I decided that a sailing-oriented campaign should have more ships available than just "sailing ship" and "keelboat but with no oars," so I made a document that introduces 5 new categories: caravel, cog, galleon, schooner, and sloop.

1. Feedback kindly requested! (Also, I kind of threw this together in a hurry, so if you notice any errors, please let me know.)

2. This is NOT meant to be historically accurate -- I read some stuff on Wikipedia, and set values relative to the existing ship statistics, even if those values don't match the historical record very well. For example, I'm under the impression that many cogs were shorter than 80 feet, and that most caravels had 2 or more masts, and the "cargo capacity" numbers are just totally made up. Also, "sloop" technically refers to a ship's sail pattern, and a small sailboat could really be a sloop, catboat, dinghy, gaffer, kvetch, yawn, etc., but I just went with "sloop" because it sounds nautical and won't cause information overload. (I'm considering changing this to "sailboat" though.)

Please take a look! Errr, I mean: Ahoy! Ships ho!

You can find the file here in the downloads section. Please use this thread for comments.

doctorbadwolf · Jun 3, 2019

I’d make the sloop faster, and consider a “cutter”, or change “sloop” to “pilot ship”, and use sloop for small crewed very fast sailing vessels.

Azzy · Jun 3, 2019

doctorbadwolf said:
I’d make the sloop faster, and consider a “cutter”, or change “sloop” to “pilot ship”, and use sloop for small crewed very fast sailing vessels.

Just as long as I can name a sloop the "John B".

robus · Jun 3, 2019

It seems unfortunate that WotC didn't rescale vessels from tiny to huge. Having a 20x10 ft sloop described as gargantuan seems very strange.

These seem like more reasonable categories for vessels:

Dingy: Tiny (fits within 10'x10')

Boat: Small (fits within 30'x30')

Yacht: Medium (fits within 50'x50')

Ship: Large/Huge (large fits within 100'x100'/huge fits within 200'x200')

Not sure any vessel in this genre really fits the gargantuan category? And only Huge/Gargantuan monsters are a threat to vessels themselves anyway.

Remathilis · Jun 3, 2019

Just stopping in to say this is wonderful and was the missing info I was looking for to bridge the gap between Stormwrack and Saltmarsh. The stats you used for the schooner is very close to what I was calling a caravel, but I was just trying to convert the 3e stuff over. I'll be using this and look forward to updates.

That said, I noticed a typo; in the carrack sidebar, you have "us" not "use".