Any advice for running a seaborne/sea-based campaign?

[CarlZog]

Last session was absolutely awesome.

Flattery, sir, will get you everywhere!


As you may tell from GlassJaw's comments, I think sea-based campaigns offer just as much variety and perhaps even more opportunities than land-based campaigns.

Since you didn’t indicate otherwise, I assume you’re looking at running a D&D sea-based campaign. If you’re running this in a home-brew world and you haven’t considered the sea much before, take a look at the seas in your world and the role they play. Land-based races go to sea to explore, gather food, transport goods, or steal goods others are transporting. Sea-based creatures treat the sea just like others treat land: a source of life, sustenance, territory, etc. Give these ideas some thought as you look at your maps and determine who in your world is involved in the seas.


How will your PCs fit into this? Do they all come from the same land? Why are they going to sea? Are some or all of them members of sea-based races?

I disagree with the advice to keep your campaign land-based or to avoid underwater adventuring. A ship-based campaign offers a LOT of opportunities. The ship is your base of operations and it moves with you! It can go anywhere, visit new places, etc. Heck, this is the basis of the original Star Trek series. Or people come to the ship, like Love Boat…OK, enough TV examples.


Give them and their ship a purpose, or let them choose it: Are they explorers? Traders? Pirates? Their choices will drive the nature of your adventures.

About DM tactics: Avoid the usual clichés of “the party is hired by …” A lot of their experiences should be more open-ended opportunities that they choose to pursue: As explorers, they’ve heard of tales of a magical archipelago worth finding. As pirates, they’ve acquired knowledge of a lucrative trade routes ripe for the plucking. As traders, they’re negotiating with a couple different Kings to create a new shipping trade between countries that they will run.

As for pirates, a lot of pirate games tend to default to D&D clichés: the party is hired or had a feud with another pirate. Pirates in RPGs seem to never be actually involved in the business of pirating. If they want to be pirates, they’ll have to go take some ships – a bloody, opportunistic business. Perhaps, they’d rather be pirate fighters, commissioned by the King to protect shipping interests by clearing the sea of the pirate scourge. Or privateers, authorized by the king to capture enemy shipping. Of course, there’s always a slippery slope toward becoming corrupt cops.



Underwater adventures depend on you not letting the underwater realm become just like air. Even with breathing spells, et al., there should still be an element of risk and danger associated with going underwater. Otherwise there’s little point to it.

There are a variety of d20 rules supplements for sea-based campaigns and adventures. Which one makes the most sense for you will depend partly on the kind of campaign you envision. Some are better for underwater stuff, some are better for piracy, some are better for swashbuckling type stuff, some are particularly good at ship-to-ship battles.


Like others said, give us a little more detail and we can give better input.


Carl

 

[Kunimatyu]

But the water breathing spell can be dispelled by a dispel magic from an enemy spellcaster. So the PCs are always in danger.

Good point. Then again, it only takes one bad experience for your spellcasters to learn that having multiple castings of water breathing available while traveling underwater is...prudent. Personally, if the PCs are actually wandering around on the bottom of the ocean(and want to, for that matter), I'd find some way to give them some flavor of magic item that keeps the spell up at all times.

I'm really thinking that by "sea-based", the original poster actually meant "ship-based"; care to elaborate, Mr. Lubber?

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I have run three ship based D20 minicampaigns, and will likely do a fourth some time in the future.

There are an awful lot of good third party offerings out there, most of which are worth a good long look.

In particular:
Swashbuckling Adventures by AEG is fun, though I would recommend using it as the basis for a campaign rather than adding it to an existing one. (This was one that I used f

Classic Play Book of the Sea by Mongoose, again very good, and better for mixing into an existing campaign world than SA. This has become my default supplement for sea going adventures, largely because the rules are compatible with the mass combat rules in CPB Strongholds & Dynasties.

Skull & Bones by Green Ronin and Adamant Entertainment - another game that is best used in its own campaign, though I used it in conjunction with Call of Cthulhu D20...

Corsair - The ship combat rules from S&B, good for adding sea adventuring to an existing campaign.

Old, but not bad - Seas of Blood by Mongoose, some of the creatures can be found updated for 3.5 on DnDChick's webpage (specifically, the ones that she wrote).

I will be going over Maelwrack, err Stormstrom, err... you know, that book, carefully when it shows up at Borders.

In the S&B game we had a character who refused to take the swim skill - he was playing an Irish fisherman who had turned to piracy, and like many he refused to learn to swim so that he would drown quickly rather than suffer. In the end he got his wish, sinking straight to the bottom while others ended up shark food. (So long, chum!) They all ended up luckier than the one who had the Innsmouth look...

The Auld Grump

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I am thinking of putting together my first campaign in a bazillion years, and it so happens I was thinking along similar lines.

First of all, water is not so deadly if (1) you do not simply use the RAW with no amendments -- you can add new Feats, magic items, and aquatic races to the mix of PC options to aid survivability, and (2) the players all understand that it is impractical to not be prepared for dealing with water.

Look a the potential positives:
(1) Pirates! Arrr!
(2) Ship to ship combat. With magic this could be like Mad Max on water. Or something else in feel.
(3) A wide vareity of environmental hazards.
(4) A new look at magic. Some magic becomes more powerful, some less. Keeps the players off balance.
(5) A natural route to add and expand elemental and nature themed magics.
(6) New monsters to play with. New races.
(7) Weird new tactical 3D combat to play with.

 

[S'mon]

Here's a tip for inspiration - do a Google and find online copies of William Hope Hodgson's nautical fantasy-horror stories "The Ghost Pirates" and (especially) "The Boats of the Glen Carrig" - the latter especially is a brilliant, classic monster-bash, written ca 1905.

Edit: Many of DND Chick's monsters at http://members.aol.com/CountryGrrlHere/seas.html would be suitable for this kind of survival-horror scenario.

 

[STARP_JVP]

Advice? My only advice is to not to what I did.

My seafaring campaign crashed and burned just recently. Half the players quit, and they were the ones the campaign couldn't live without. This was in itself a mistake but it wasn't my big one. My advice to you, sir or madam, is as follows:

The PCs MUST, MUST, MUST have control. They must be the ones who control the campaign. This is true in all campaigns but it's especially true in seafaring ones. Why? Because if the PCs have a ship they have total freedom to do whatever they want. On land they have national laws, roads, borders, and so forth to curb their freedom. Not so at sea.

In a seafaring campaign there will be a great temptation to decide where the PCs go and what they do. With me it turned into what my players described as a 'rail-road fest'. If PCs have total freedom their expectation will be to exercise it, and it is absolutely vital they are able to do this.

That's what I think, anyway.

 

[Zappo]

Whatever you want to do, get a supplement dealing with seafaring and naval combat. Ship rules in the core books are inadequate for a normal campaign, let alone a primarily sea-based campaign.

 

[Pinotage]

Underwater adventures depend on you not letting the underwater realm become just like air. Even with breathing spells, et al., there should still be an element of risk and danger associated with going underwater. Otherwise there’s little point to it.

Carl

It's rather unavoidable to a certain extent. With Freedom of Movement, Water Breathing, Darkvision, and Endure Elements, you're almost as effective underwater as you are on land. All the penalties go away - you can use shields, you can slash away with slashing weapons, you can swim to your heart's content, etc. So it becomes like fighting a flying battle. The only thing that's generally not covered for is pressure effects for going really deep, but then you start dying really quickly as well, so that's no fun for a long-term underwater campaign such as mine that's finishing within the next two months.

Dispel Magic is always a threat, but then you carry backups, and most permanent magic items allow at least survivability under water - Pearl of the Sirines, Plate Armor of the Deep, Necklace of Adaptation etc. My players are very handy with a Ring of Counterspells (Dispel Magic) which is almost a must have.

For me the joy of the underwater campaign was not that it changed combat or what could be done, but the pleasure of describing an underwater world in all its glory, which for those of you who have SCUBA dived, is frankly magical.

Pinotage

 

[foehammerx]

I have run 2 pirate campaigns and a viking campaign, all sea based.

The problem that eventually occurs is the same with any one dimensional camapaign. You eventually have had countless encoutners with "Ship to Ship combat", been attacked by countless "Sea monsters", and have done everything you could do at sea. It can still be done very welll but you have to multifacet the campaign with the sea-going portion being only a single facet. The best way to accomplish this is with a Home Port City. Flesh out your city and the nearby enviroments. So essentially you still have 3 settings, the land, the sea, and the city. Freeport is a publsihed independant setting centered arround a pirate city. Everything that says Freeport on it is Quality and i highly recommend.

More on Freeport:
Theres an awesome city sourcebook aswell as a Monsters of Freeeport book,
Theres an introductory trilogy of modules which are really fantastic and start at 1st level. (Death in Freeeport is the first)
Then theres a super huge mini campaign module called Pirates of Freeport which centers arround the characters following many missions to eventually find the booty of the lost pirate god. COOOOLLLL

Some other good stuff from older editions is
Pirates of the Fallen Stars
Sea of the Fallen Stars
Wyrmskull throne adventure

I opted to use freeport set in the pirate isles of Forgotten Realms sea of the fallen stars. The you can add yet another facet by pulling in all teh forgotten realms stuff.

Other things to take into account is refreshing yourself on the seldom used rules that your will use all the time.
1)Underwater combat including how long charcters can hold their breath. The effects of armor in water, How swim checks actually work, and the effects of spells underwater. Verbal somatics all that. And line of sight underwater. So on an so fourth.
2)Ship to ship combat. How many HP do ships have? Its all out there.
3)Swashbuckling, ropeuse, swinging from the mast.
4)Sea travel. What kindof ships do what. Some ships need to be rowed, some have sails, some are magically driven. Some ships are for rivers, others are coastal only, many cant survive at sea. Its trickery then it would first appear.

Good luck

 

[DarrenGMiller]

I have tried the "sea-based campaign" twice. Neither time was very successful, but both times were fun. I echo what another poster said in that a sea-based campaign has to be PC driver and to a large extent player driven.

I love AEG's "Swashbuckling Adventures" but I would build a homebrew world and use their classes and rules, just change the names. "Freeport" is also pretty good, but there are a good number of running jokes there, so it has to suit your humor level. There is also a Cthulhu-esque element present.

"Seas of Blood" is usable, but "Broadside!" is better.

I have used a converted U series for those campaigns, as well as X1 and the Dungeon adventure based on it and want so badly to convert the Sea Devils trilogy to 3.5, but my seafaring campaigns have not made it to that level.

More advice (FWIW): Make it highly heroic and cinematic, with lots of intrigue. Use action points, or some other system.

DM