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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6433090" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, the time has come in my campaign for about a 3000 mile ocean voyage - largely going the wrong way against the wind, so slow going indeed.  In general, I plan to make use of a lot of 'days pass, nothing' happens, since we're dealing with a between 1-2 month voyage game time depending on how things go and how well the PC's protect their ship, with an occasional encounter thrown in just to set the mood and feed the PCs some XP.   But I also don't want to just handwave the whole thing, because the PC's are still of a level where making a huge voyage like this constitutes considerable challenge and adventure - and its certainly nothing the players are bored with by long exposure since for 4 years we've been doing mostly urban murder investigations with occasional dungeon crawling.What I'm looking for is non-obvious ideas for making the adventure interesting - either as planned encounters, ship board intrigue, or things to add to my wandering encounter idea spawner.  I'm sure we can have storms (we will have storms, one of the PCs has cheesed off the God of Storms), fight sea serpents, and the usual.   But I'm curious what else I could throw in.  I'm hoping for a voyage that is Jason and the Argonauts worthy, but obviously, not just those particular tropes.   Anything you've done that worked for you, I'd like to hear about.  Non-combat encounters, monsters you wouldn't think about on an ocean voyage, weird stuff.  Pretty much anything that helps create the impression that this is a more serious undertaking than walking across town.The basic set up is the PC's are minority shareholders in a ship, a privateer.  The majority investor is a noble family in the nation the PC's are nominally loyal to (rank roughly equivalent to a Count), and the ship's captain is the son in law of the family patriarch.  The crew is cutthroats, but they are mostly patriotic clean-cut cutthroats drawn from the noble families estates, kindred and bondsmen, so loyalty is pretty high.  Morale is also pretty high, as with the PC's help they've just captured and sold 3 ships during a short naval war with a neighboring nation and slain a sea dragon (sent by the aforementioned cheesed off storm lord), all of which involved healthy profits.  As far as pirates go, these are pretty respectable types.  In fact, the some of the PC's may be bringing down the overall virtue level of the ship.  And the ship is a fairly significant warship in game world terms, so really anything less than a warship from a major naval power is not a threat and won't be looking at the ship as prey.  The size of the ship means I can throw some pretty serious sea monsters at it without fear of sinking it, but the PC's themselves are only 7th level so I have to be careful about anything that can do big damage spikes.They have taken on a few new crew, and they might be willing to transport passengers or cargo if it doesn't lead to a long delay.  However, they are more or less racing or chasing another ship to the destination.   The voyage begins in temperate waters, but ends up deep in the tropics.</blockquote>

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