Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2010153" data-attributes="member: 172">AirshipsAirships is a rulebook is Bastion Press' line of d20 System fantasy supplements, providing details for designing and using floating ship-like vehicles in a campaign. Airships is written by Sam Witt, who also wrote Bastion's Spells & Magic, as well as a number of titles by Mongoose.A First LookAirships follows the format typical of Bastion rules supplements: a full color 96-page perfect-bound softcover book priced at $24.95. As with all books in this line, the color makes it pricier than books of comparable size with black-and-white interiors, which are typically under $20.The cover of the book is illustrated by Todd Morasch, and depicts a number of flying ships and winged creatures.The interior is color, and features art by Alexander Leonard, Andrew Baker, Christopher Pickrell, Jason Walton, Michael Erickson, and Todd Morash. The art varies in quality from mediocre to good, and includes a few full page paintings. The art is generally not up to the quality of Bastion books such as Spells & Magic and Plains of Pennance. The best art in the book is, perhaps, the deckplans and ship perspectives of the pre-made ships.The interior body text is dense and the paragraphs are single spaced, making up for some of the high price per page of the book. The book uses a fancy calligraphy-style font for headers, which can sometimes be hard to read.A Deeper LookThe book is split into ten sections and a glossary (or lexicon).The first major section dives right into the subject of the book with Airship construction. The book defines ships in terms of tons; these tons don't seem to correspond to any real-world measure of weight. Rather, it seems to reflect (very roughly) a 10' x 10' x 10' cube. Ships are also classified into size conventions from "Fine" to "Colossal+." These size conventions have the advantage of familiarity to those familiar with the d20 System, but do not directly correspond to d20 System sizes. A "Fine" airship, for example, includes airships up to 2 tons, which would be Huge on the standard d20 scale.Airships are built by selecting the size, building materials, engines, and other features. The features selected determine the characteristics of the ship. For example, adamantium is much more durable than wood, but is also more costly and requires more skilled craftsmen. The skill of craftsmen is important in these rules. Unlike more typical cut-and-dried magic item creation rules, the rules for shipbuilding are detailed with skill DCs and workmen requirements and hearken back more to the normal item crafting rules than the magic item creation rules. This level of detail may be more than some want or need for their games, but is not too difficult to bypass if you assume a "used model" or that the shipbuilder takes care of all of the details.Like hull materials, the selection of engines is important to ship design. A number of different methods are available for moving such a craft through the air, much reminiscent of the "helms" in the old 2e Spelljammer setting. Arcane and divine engines are powered by expending spell slots to power the engine; this is similar to the concept of a basic Spelljamming helm except much less debilitating. Other concepts include wood or oil burning engines, energy or fiendish engines that draw powers from another plane, elemental engines that draw powers from elementals, and necromantic or vampiric engines which uses corpses or living creatures as a resource. This provides the DM with a variety of angles of how to handle airships in a campaign.All engines have power factors. The ship must have more power factors than its size (in tons) to even fly; this is a reasonable assumption. However, to determine the acceleration of the airship, you directly subtract the size of the ship from the power factors. This creates the odd situation that rather large airships have the potential to be faster than small ships, since they can afford larger or more engines.Airships may be further defined by selecting templates. Templates reflect finer design considerations that affect the capabilities of the ship. Some templates, like armored, can be added after the initial design. As with the choice of engine and materials, there are advantage and disadvantages to each template.Other ship components let you add things like sails, propellers, and weapons, among others. The design sequence also has detailed considerations for crew requirements and their living space.While the first third of the book is dedicated to how to build airships, the next third covers how to use them, with details like movement, combat, overland travel and navigation, equipment, and trade.The movement and combat rules, similar to vehicle rules by other d20 System publishers, is basically an adaptation of the basic d20 System combat rules, with necessary additions such as turn limitations, ramming rules, combat damage, and vehicle damage rules. The last of these, the vehicle damage rules, is different from standard damage rules in that critical hits are randomly applied to specific components of the ship, which makes ship-to-ship combat a bit more detailed than the rather abstract person-to-person d20 System combat rules.I was (pleasantly) surprised to see the trade rules. The idea of monetary systems in d20 System fantasy games that bypasses levels and creatures may fly in the face of basic d20 System assumptions, but with the right DM and right sort of campaign this can work as a compelling basis for a campaign.The trade rules bear a great resemblance to the classic Traveller commerce rules. Each town is assigned a number of needs which they are willing to buy, and the players hope to buy low at the source of a good and sell high at the destination. The section provides a number of trade goods and classifies them according accrding to the unit size and cost, buy and sell DCs, price variance, and availability.Most of the remainder of the book introduces new character options necessary to integrate airships into d20 System fantasy games.New profession and craft skills are introduced. Notably, none of the airship profession skills (Airship Sailor, Airship Navigator, Airship Pilot, and Engineer) overlap with sea ship skills; it is not safe to assume a sea crew could perform all the tasks needed on an airship. While I can see this point to some extent, it seems that some tasks like rigging sails (in ships so equipped) would be able to use either skill, and perhaps a synergy bonus is appropriate.Similarly, a number of new feats are provided for characters who master the building and operation of airships.There are airship oriented prestige classes for each of the four cardinal d20 system fantasy character types. The Airship Saboteur, most appropriate for rogues, is specialized in sneaking aboard airships and disrupting their operations or crew. The Ship Mage has impugned spellcasting ability, but moderate combat advancement and class abilities that allow the mage to assist in ship operations; the Ship Theurge is a divine version of the Ship Mage. Finally, the Sky Slayer is a warrior type that is "in his element" while fighting aboard an airship.The magic section is split into two parts. The first part provides a reference for effects of a number of core d20 System spells on an airship. Some of these rulings provide specific rules for handling specific spells in an airship environment, while others are only commentaries on how a clever spellcaster might use such a spell.The remainder is a section on new magic items and spells. As you might expect, these spells are particularly effective in an airship environment. Some like summon thermal assist operations of the ship, while others like earthen conversion are particularly dangerous when used against an airship. Many of the spells fall into the trap of being mentioned as part of pre-existing clerical domains with no guideance on how to adjudicate such a situation.The last section of the book includes a number of pre-designed airships and blank forms. The pre-designed airships each have two facing pages. The left hand side shows deck plans and side or perspective views of the ship, while the right hand page has all of the ship statistics and components.ConclusionExisting products with airships (like Goodman Games' Ariel Adventures Guide) take a more setting oriented approach. Airships on the other hand, is a more toolkit-style approach. This may make the book of less use to you if you don't know what to do with it, but it should make it much more useful if you know where you want to go with the concept of airships and/or do not want to tack on a bunch of new setting assumptions to your setting of choice.Overall, I was rather impressed by the thorough approach of Airships, and consider it (along with Oathbound and Spells & Magic) to be one of Bastion's more worthwhile products.-Alan D. Kohler</blockquote>

Verification