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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galfridus" data-source="post: 158041" data-attributes="member: 119">I've finished my first reading of Broadsides, and I'm impressed.The ship rules are the best of the three d20 nautical supplements. They are simple enough to be runnable, but do by far the best job of giving a nautical "feel" to sea travel and combat. They take into account things like wind direction (Seafarers Handbook doesn't!), sail type, etc., and seem to be the only book that actually thought about handling tacking as a tactical maneuver. They establish three scales for handling combat, so you can (for example) do the Sea of Shrieking Eels chase scene from Princess Bride without resolving movement on a round by round basis. There are simple rules for resolving journeys, which easily slide into large, medium, and tactical scale combat. The range of technologies goes from early medieval to Age of Exploration: I would have liked to see Roman/Greek ships as well, but I'll live. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> There are rules for cannon and gunpowder which I won't be using, but they're there.Of course, there are a couple things that could be better. I would have liked to see deck plans, but I can make those myself (or wait for a web supplement <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />). The writing/layout is not ideal; it took me a couple reads of the ship rules to "get it", but once I did, the rules made perfect sense. The rest of the book holds up as well, but handling ships is the clear focus of the book and where it really shines. I had been planning to use Seafarer's Handbook rules, but had to modify them extensively to get them to a level I was happy with. I don't think that will be necessary with Broadsides.If you're looking for ship-to-ship rules, get Broadsides.</blockquote>

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