Zardnaar
Legend
I've done a poison sea in the abyss. Think it was type E in 2E.
D&D General What's your view on a pirate-driven campaign?
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I've done a poison sea in the abyss. Think it was type E in 2E.
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
Heres a Level 0 Funnel for a Caribbean Adventure
ESCAPE THE BOILING HOUSE
Barbados, 1655.
Each of you was transported in chains — a prisoner, a debtor, a loser in the war, an unlucky victim of the press-gangs.
Your labour was purchased for the plantations, a living hell of sugar cane, whips and sweat. But you are not without hope: old Healer Ama whispers that there are free Maroons in the hills and smugglers in the bay who have no love for the slavers.
You’ve spent the day labouring in the Boiling House, hauling carts and feeding the boiling vats of sugar cane syrup. Heat blasts your skin as you sweat from the toil and dodge Overseer Cribb’s whip.
Suddenly, the bells ring and shouting erupts outside — the sugar fields glow orange beneath the thick smoke and the guards rush to save the Big House before it burns.
Old Ama grabs your arm: “Now is your chance. Go! Escape the fire and this place. Become who you are meant to be…”
FUNNEL 0 Escape the Boiling House
The Boiling House
The boiling house is a long, low stone building with thatched roof, 60 ft long and 25 wide. Six large Iron vats, full of bubbling sugar syrup line the sides, roaring furnaces beneath them. Workers toil along the central aisle, pushing carts, cutting cane and hauling barrels and buckets of Molases. The air is thick with smoke, sweat, and the tang of burnt sugar. The floor is sticky and treacherous, the heat suffocating....
ADVENTURE 1 Escape from Barbados (Levels 1 -2) The PCs escape the Plantation and have a choice of raiding the Big House First, fleeing through the fields, then choosing to go up into the Hills (joining the Maroons) or Down to the Bay (Joining the Smugglers)
ESCAPE THE BOILING HOUSE
Barbados, 1655.
Each of you was transported in chains — a prisoner, a debtor, a loser in the war, an unlucky victim of the press-gangs.
Your labour was purchased for the plantations, a living hell of sugar cane, whips and sweat. But you are not without hope: old Healer Ama whispers that there are free Maroons in the hills and smugglers in the bay who have no love for the slavers.
You’ve spent the day labouring in the Boiling House, hauling carts and feeding the boiling vats of sugar cane syrup. Heat blasts your skin as you sweat from the toil and dodge Overseer Cribb’s whip.
Suddenly, the bells ring and shouting erupts outside — the sugar fields glow orange beneath the thick smoke and the guards rush to save the Big House before it burns.
Old Ama grabs your arm: “Now is your chance. Go! Escape the fire and this place. Become who you are meant to be…”
FUNNEL 0 Escape the Boiling House
The Boiling House
The boiling house is a long, low stone building with thatched roof, 60 ft long and 25 wide. Six large Iron vats, full of bubbling sugar syrup line the sides, roaring furnaces beneath them. Workers toil along the central aisle, pushing carts, cutting cane and hauling barrels and buckets of Molases. The air is thick with smoke, sweat, and the tang of burnt sugar. The floor is sticky and treacherous, the heat suffocating....
ADVENTURE 1 Escape from Barbados (Levels 1 -2) The PCs escape the Plantation and have a choice of raiding the Big House First, fleeing through the fields, then choosing to go up into the Hills (joining the Maroons) or Down to the Bay (Joining the Smugglers)
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Audiomancer
Adventurer
Seems to me that if you’re doing a pirate campaign, at some point it’s mandatory to have an exceptionally strong storm blow the ship off course to an undiscovered island, and then run “Isle of Dread.”
EDIT: Also… kraken.
EDIT: Also… kraken.
Pale Violet Light
Adventurer
You can take a few tips from cRPGs. Carefully study the system from Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and then do exactly the opposite.
Hussar
Legend
Heh. Just to echo a few of the problems I've had with this sort of campaign:
1. The players will NOT be willing to help you here. While you might think the day to day running of a ship is interesting and fun, they will do everything in their power to not engage in it. Trade? Nope. Counting barrels of salted pork to ship? Nope. All that stuff that is the day to day running of a ship? Nope. Good luck with that.
2. As @Celebrim rightly pointed out, D&D does not do this scale of combat. it just doesn't. It's FAR too fiddly when you have fifteen or twenty combatants to a side, let alone 30 or 40. It just does not work.
3. The cinematic rules for ship combat are fine, so long as you make it abundantly clear to the players that they are not going to get any advantages (or disadvantages) for running things this way. You narrate that the ships come together and you start boarding action. You don't bother with anything remotely resembling ship combat because it just doesn't work.
4. Roles on ships do not work. Players sit down to play their character. They aren't interested in being the Quartermaster or the Bosun. They want to be Father Generic the cleric or Erac's Cousin. I've tried it repeatedly with multiple groups and it does not work.
Playing a nautical (or spelljammer) campaign is my white whale of D&D gaming. I've tried making it work since 2nd edition, many, many groups, many, many campaigns, and my honest to goodness advice is to not do it. It will be endlessly frustrating and zero fun.
1. The players will NOT be willing to help you here. While you might think the day to day running of a ship is interesting and fun, they will do everything in their power to not engage in it. Trade? Nope. Counting barrels of salted pork to ship? Nope. All that stuff that is the day to day running of a ship? Nope. Good luck with that.
2. As @Celebrim rightly pointed out, D&D does not do this scale of combat. it just doesn't. It's FAR too fiddly when you have fifteen or twenty combatants to a side, let alone 30 or 40. It just does not work.
3. The cinematic rules for ship combat are fine, so long as you make it abundantly clear to the players that they are not going to get any advantages (or disadvantages) for running things this way. You narrate that the ships come together and you start boarding action. You don't bother with anything remotely resembling ship combat because it just doesn't work.
4. Roles on ships do not work. Players sit down to play their character. They aren't interested in being the Quartermaster or the Bosun. They want to be Father Generic the cleric or Erac's Cousin. I've tried it repeatedly with multiple groups and it does not work.
Playing a nautical (or spelljammer) campaign is my white whale of D&D gaming. I've tried making it work since 2nd edition, many, many groups, many, many campaigns, and my honest to goodness advice is to not do it. It will be endlessly frustrating and zero fun.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
It's going to depend on the players, but I have had players interested in this in a Traveller campaign. Traveller is just much better at this kind of thing than D&D though.
Zardnaar
Legend
cRPGs tend to do tbe work for you. And the boat parts a mini game.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
Deadfire is good, apart from the central plot, which is terrible.
M_Natas
Hero
So, I'm running a spelljammer-campaign right now - so "Pirates in Space"? Basically.
The structure of my campaign is the following:
The Players started at level 1 and had no ship at all (woke up with no memories on an asteroid) - acquired a Space Hopper when they got to Level 2 (a small raft with which they can fly trough the asteroid belt, but not spelljam, so they were bound to very slow speeds and the local asteroid field).
From Level 2 to 4, they flew trough the asteroid fiel and had adventures there. Fighting off pirate attacks, visiting other settlements - helping out in their new Homebase in Planktown (a bunch of asteroid bound together by planks), looking for treasure, going fishing, getting killed by scavvers. The usual.
Then at Level 4 they got a mission that allowed them to salvage a spelljamming capable ship with a broken spelljammer helm (goes just half as fast as normal spelljammer helms and they can't go into the astral sea - so they can only explore the Wildspace-System they are currently in). Now, after using their new ship to destroy the pirate base in the asteroid field with the help of the Navy of Flumphaven, the asteroid field now slowly gets a little to small for their level (that's the point we are right now), now they will explore the whole system and find new places to explore and new pirates to fight and stuff. And when they have enough money, they can fix the spelljammer helm and go into the astral sea and visit other wildspace systems - like clown space (which they want to the destroy after the Circus was in Town ...).
So what, the campaign structure is, that I limit the players to certain areas by the ships they can use in that campaign. So at first they are limited to the asteroid they woke up on, than, when they have an asteroid hopper to the asteroid field, than with a broken ship the wild space system and after that the astral sea and other systems.
This helps the players getting used to the rules of spelljamming and the spelljamming/sci-fantasy quirks of the setting and also gives the players a sense of progress, it also helps me as a DM that at first I only had to really prepare the small area of space that they can traverse.
Like, getting your first small raft, and then you get a big ship and can spelljam (to your favourite Sci-Fi/SynthWave- Music?).
A non-spelljamming themed pirate adventure I would structure similarly.
Maybe they are shipwrecked on a seemingly uninhabited island, or they start in Prision on one of the non-pirate settlements and need to break out. They have to escape on a small raft/row boat or similiar and get to a pirate settlement, where they now can start their pirate careers. Maybe get a small ship that only can travel near the coast but not the high seas, have some adventures, get some loot and then they can maybe capture a bigger ship and now can travel the high seas.
For ship to ship combat - either do it cinematic or make sure that the ships can close quickly. With the 5E Spelljammer-RAW-Rules of Shipcombat, if one Ship would try to flee from the other, if would take like at leastt 40 to 50 rounds of Ship Combat to destroy the other ship, because they ship speeds are to samy and the damage the board weapons do, is too minuscle to damage the other ship. And there is also nothing in the rules to slow the other ship by shooting its sails. I homebrewed some stuff (magic sails to make you faster, Damage to a ship will slow it down at 75, 50 and 25% of total HP). And I let the PCs fire the ballistaes, so they can roll something during the chase.
But to be fair, I also set up the battles so that it is not a chase. The first space battle they PCs ended by waking up an asteroid spider while the pirate ship passed it and the Spider did their dirty deed. The second big space battle was a night scavver and it was a short brutal melee fight (that the Wizard started and died by ...), the third space battle was 10 ships (1 player ship, a friendly adventure group ship, 8 ships of the Navy of Flumphaven vs 1 Pirate ship) which was short and brutal - and that was basically it - all other fights were on the asteroids.
The structure of my campaign is the following:
The Players started at level 1 and had no ship at all (woke up with no memories on an asteroid) - acquired a Space Hopper when they got to Level 2 (a small raft with which they can fly trough the asteroid belt, but not spelljam, so they were bound to very slow speeds and the local asteroid field).
From Level 2 to 4, they flew trough the asteroid fiel and had adventures there. Fighting off pirate attacks, visiting other settlements - helping out in their new Homebase in Planktown (a bunch of asteroid bound together by planks), looking for treasure, going fishing, getting killed by scavvers. The usual.
Then at Level 4 they got a mission that allowed them to salvage a spelljamming capable ship with a broken spelljammer helm (goes just half as fast as normal spelljammer helms and they can't go into the astral sea - so they can only explore the Wildspace-System they are currently in). Now, after using their new ship to destroy the pirate base in the asteroid field with the help of the Navy of Flumphaven, the asteroid field now slowly gets a little to small for their level (that's the point we are right now), now they will explore the whole system and find new places to explore and new pirates to fight and stuff. And when they have enough money, they can fix the spelljammer helm and go into the astral sea and visit other wildspace systems - like clown space (which they want to the destroy after the Circus was in Town ...).
So what, the campaign structure is, that I limit the players to certain areas by the ships they can use in that campaign. So at first they are limited to the asteroid they woke up on, than, when they have an asteroid hopper to the asteroid field, than with a broken ship the wild space system and after that the astral sea and other systems.
This helps the players getting used to the rules of spelljamming and the spelljamming/sci-fantasy quirks of the setting and also gives the players a sense of progress, it also helps me as a DM that at first I only had to really prepare the small area of space that they can traverse.
Like, getting your first small raft, and then you get a big ship and can spelljam (to your favourite Sci-Fi/SynthWave- Music?).
A non-spelljamming themed pirate adventure I would structure similarly.
Maybe they are shipwrecked on a seemingly uninhabited island, or they start in Prision on one of the non-pirate settlements and need to break out. They have to escape on a small raft/row boat or similiar and get to a pirate settlement, where they now can start their pirate careers. Maybe get a small ship that only can travel near the coast but not the high seas, have some adventures, get some loot and then they can maybe capture a bigger ship and now can travel the high seas.
For ship to ship combat - either do it cinematic or make sure that the ships can close quickly. With the 5E Spelljammer-RAW-Rules of Shipcombat, if one Ship would try to flee from the other, if would take like at leastt 40 to 50 rounds of Ship Combat to destroy the other ship, because they ship speeds are to samy and the damage the board weapons do, is too minuscle to damage the other ship. And there is also nothing in the rules to slow the other ship by shooting its sails. I homebrewed some stuff (magic sails to make you faster, Damage to a ship will slow it down at 75, 50 and 25% of total HP). And I let the PCs fire the ballistaes, so they can roll something during the chase.
But to be fair, I also set up the battles so that it is not a chase. The first space battle they PCs ended by waking up an asteroid spider while the pirate ship passed it and the Spider did their dirty deed. The second big space battle was a night scavver and it was a short brutal melee fight (that the Wizard started and died by ...), the third space battle was 10 ships (1 player ship, a friendly adventure group ship, 8 ships of the Navy of Flumphaven vs 1 Pirate ship) which was short and brutal - and that was basically it - all other fights were on the asteroids.
Kestrel
Explorer
Really surprised to see no mentions of One Piece. The Straw Hats are essentially all Chaotic Good and help anyone they consider their friends. The setting has a tyrannical world government which places them at odds with the government for wanting to be free.
As I watch the anime more (I'm around ep 100), it looks more and more like D&D, with over the top powers and many excursions away from the ship, fighting in what could be dungeons. Been thinking about a pirate themed game myself based on the show.
As I watch the anime more (I'm around ep 100), it looks more and more like D&D, with over the top powers and many excursions away from the ship, fighting in what could be dungeons. Been thinking about a pirate themed game myself based on the show.
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