Ship Building, Sea Life, and Naval Warfare

[Jack7]

For this setting, Ĩoħarml, I've decided to make Naval Life and Naval Warfare (small, tactical, ship to ship encounters) a big part of the game.

Characters will be able to buy, trade, serve aboard, fight, and even design their own vessels and ships much as people used to routinely build keeps and fortifications.

Ships in this setting will serve as home, transportation, exploration and combat platform, and so forth. Long periods of time will be spent at sea and on-board. Naval combat will be mostly limited ship to ship engagements, rather than fleet fights. And a lot of enemy or at least adversarial ships will be fast frigates, Viking type longboats (with shallow drafts), sloops, quick boats, merchant vessels, and pirate ships.

I also want people to be able to build, repair, upgrade, buy and sell, and design their vessels.

Anybody ever done this before in a fantasy/D&D game?
How did you go about it?

Anything you'd like to suggest to make the setting better, or naval life more exciting or unusual?

I'm thinking of making it sort of Sinbad-like in this respect.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There is a thread here that has a whole bunch of info on the campaign aquatic...and a link to it is in my sig.

A lot of the heavy lifting was done by Aeolius , who, from what I gather, has run more than one aquatic campaign.

 

[ExploderWizard]

This sounds like a very cool idea for a campaign. Will the campaign be exploration/discovery focused or are the PC's serving as agents to a power heavily engaged in naval warfare?

I have been playing with the idea of something like this for a future campaign. The PC's are handed a blank sheet of parchment, given a heading, and hired to fill up the map.

 

[Jack7]

Danke Danny.

That link was useful.

I'm gonna look into some of those supplement books too.

Anyone know of a good book, supplement, or source on ship building/design, trading? I don't know if any of you have played Traveler (I'll bet some have) but I want a system to trade/buy, sell, design, create and build your own river and sea vessels in the same basic way as Traveler did for spaceships. So ship specification and individualization will be very important in this milieu.

I've also pretty much decided that I' gonna replace the Ranger (we play a variant Ranger who is more Frontiersman, Manhunter, Frontier's Lawman than regular) with a Marine (Marine-Ranger) I'm gonna create myself.

Any other class variations you might wanna suggest I might consider using?

 

[ExploderWizard]

Danke Danny.

That link was useful.

I'm gonna look into some of those supplement books too.

Anyone know of a good book, supplement, or source on ship building/design, trading? I don't know if any of you have played Traveler (I'll bet some have) but I want a system to trade/buy, sell, design, create and build your own river and sea vessels in the same basic way as Traveler did for spaceships. So ship specification and individualization will be very important in this milieu.

I've also pretty much decided that I' gonna replace the Ranger (we play a variant Ranger who is more Frontiersman, Manhunter, Frontier's Lawman than regular) with a Marine (Marine-Ranger) I'm gonna create myself.

Any other class variations you might wanna suggest I might consider using?

GURPS Vehicles is a very crunchy system for building anything that moves. You would still need to translate the vehicle stats into your game system.
Which edition is this for?

 

[Azgulor]

Naval adventuring, naval combat, & shipbuilding:

Admanat's Corsair
Green Ronin's Skull-n-Bones
Mongoose's Book of the Sea
FF's: _____ - Legends & Lairs series but the name escapes me.

Buying/selling/trading - Expeditious Retreat's Silk Road & Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe

 

[Azgulor]

GURPS Vehicles is a very crunchy system for building anything that moves. You would still need to translate the vehicle stats into your game system.
Which edition is this for?

While the above statement is true, unless spending hours working up a single vessel via a spreadsheet is your cup of tea, I'd avoid this one. And I'm a GURPS fan...

 

[Jack7]

In this particular setting it would be basically for AD&D.

 

[Celebrim]

Anybody ever done this before in a fantasy/D&D game?
How did you go about it?

One of the best campaigns I was ever in had a strong nautical focus.

We started under some rules in a Dragon magazine article, but we quickly found out that they hadn't been well play tested and started modifying them almost immediately. We also ended up needing and wanting a lot more rules than were in the article. But that's ok, as I can rules smith pretty well.

My ultimate v2.0 rules set was sophisticated enough based on what I'd learned from play that I can't really recommend any setting books except as starting points. I think if you run a true nautical campaign you'll outgrow most of the rules sets I've seen. Likewise, I can't directly help you both because my old rules were 1e centric and because even if I could find them, they are hand written in pencil/typed on a typewriter.

However, I will say that in good ship rules the ship ought to be able to take a heck of a pounding, and that ships really need to have 'hardness'. This might seem an obvious statement for 3e, but it took us a while to realize it building rules for 1e. Also, if you really want a good tactical ship simulation, you can't really do it on a grid because the subtleties of the angles and points of sail just don't play out well on a grid. You'll have to get out a protractor a ruler and a compass and play old school Little Wars style.

One other thing to note is that if you aren't careful, you'll find magic basically obseleting ships as fighting platforms. Wall of Fire on the deck of a ship is just game over assuming that ships are mundane articles. I would strongly suggest expanding the normal spell list to make ready access to strong defensive/location/object based magic. The spells should be fairly cheap, fairly low level, permanent, and address the basic problem most especially of magical fire. In particular, unless you intend to confine yourself to galley warfare, sails need to have magical fire resistance to balance the strategy of attacking rigging vs. attacking hull. No one is going to spend alot of money building a sailing ship and equiping it as a fighting platform if a low level mage can decapitate one easily. Of course, I would argue that these sorts of adjustments have far ranging positive enhancements on your game balance and you should do them anyway, but its particularly important for a nautical game.

Suffice to say that no one in my game world would think of putting a mundane sail on anything other than a small fishing boat. Magically fire resistant sails (and to a lesser exent hulls) are the norm. There are generally lots of tinker and hedge mages in port cities devoted to producing low level magic goods for the sailing industry. With some care, you can do this without getting too steampunk, though the tecnology you are emmulating is actually as modern as early 19th century.

One thing you also should consider is whether you'll stick to a medieval flavor or go full rein/early modern. In the campaign I mentioned, we stuck to mangonels as the main ship armament. This has the advantage of keeping a sword and sorcery flavor, but is unrealistic in terms of how much damage a mangonel would actually do to a Ship of the Line. Basically, we hand waved the fact that mangonels were doing cannon level damage to a SOL, when realistically they'd be quite inefficient against 24" thick oak armor belts. The other thing here is that it limits engagment distances to a few hundred yards, were real world cannon engagements often began at a mile or more. I think its more than possible to bring gunpowder into your game and keep a medieval high fantasy flavor, but for some players its creates problems and it does have sideeffects if you try to use realistic firearms. For example, a unit of goblin musketeers becomes quite potent which may or may not be considered a positive side effective.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Privateers And Gentlemen by FGU:

Privateers and Gentlemen Fantasy Games Unlimited