Ship Building, Sea Life, and Naval Warfare

[Bluenose]

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.

There are a few books covering ships, but most of those I'm familiar with have already been suggested.

For trading, if you can find them there were two GAZ-series D&D products from the late 80s, Republic of Darokin and Minrothad Guilds, which had rules for trade suited for D&D. Including, iirc, a trader class. It included a map of the region with indications of what sort of products areas exported and what they imported, rules for what ships and wagons could carry and how much they cost to operate, and most of the things you'd want for trading endeavours. My players never took an interest so I can't really tell you how they worked, and of course they're hard to obtain now.

 

[buddhafrog]

Glad to see this post as I'm also preparing a similar style campaign and am looking for advice. Good advice on the fire-resistant sails. The better the ship, the more fire-resistant in general. It makes perfect sense in a magic-filled world. As for as gun-powder/canons, I'm going without. Magic can more than replace the canon attack methods, although at much closer ranges, which will make for much better encounters.

 

[Khairn]

I found the Pilots Almanac from Columbia Games (Harn) to be an excellent resource for all my ocean based adventures. It includes details on various vessels, crews, sailing, weather and maritime merchants. The book is Harn-specific, but is easy to convert and use with any system.

 

[Jack7]

Thanks for all of the replies folks. I'm gonna be studying them in some more detail when I have the time.

Plus I'm still working on modifying some of the character classes (thinking of replacing the Fighter with a fighting-Sailor), and I'm still looking at different ship design systems.

I may invent my own based on something like Star Fleet Battles simple grid paper system. Then use ship illustrations to supplement. Because CB had a good point. I don't wanna use the grid paper designs to reflect actual appearance.

Plus BF made me think about some things I hadn't previously considered in ship design. Thanks BF.

 

[Lanefan]

Brilliant idea for a campaign - hope it goes well!

I seem to recall one of the various 2e splatbooks being all about ships and so forth - more about design, speed etc. than combat - but I can't remember what it was called. But if you're using 1e as your base you might find it useful.

A long time ago I dreamed up my own admittedly-very-primitive rules for ship-vs.-ship combat, based on Trafalgar-style ships of the line except using stacked ballistae instead of cannons and handwaving that the ballista bolts would do similar structural damage to other ships as cannon balls. I've rarely had a chance to use these rules, mostly because a) my campaigns haven't ended up with as much of a maritime flavour as I might have hoped for, and b) magic-users blow things up too quickly.

For a completely maritime campaign I'd suggest taking a hard look at (and by that I mean removing entirely) all the ranged mass-destruction spells e.g. Fireball, Flamestrike, Lightning Bolt, Call Lightning, Minute Meteors, etc. Also take a serious look at some of the weather-affecting spells e.g. Gust of Wind and a bunch of upper-level Druid stuff; you might want to tone that all down a bit though I generally suggest keeping it around.

Lan-"I used to be the terror of the seas when it pleased me"-efan

 

[Celebrim]

Plus I'm still working on modifying some of the character classes (thinking of replacing the Fighter with a fighting-Sailor), and I'm still looking at different ship design systems.

For 1e, Dragon introduced a Mariner class which was basically a fighting-sailor. For 3e, because I was used to treating Mariner's as at minimum an important NPC class, I created a generalized 'Explorer' class which was a full BAB skill monkey. I've been quite happy with it and it really fills a niche that isn't generally filled in most 3e games I've seen.

As far as ship designs go, I'd recommend a trip to your local college library (if you can get access) to research sailing ships. You'll likely to find a large number of well illustrated books on the great age of sail, replete with the sort of number rich information that gamers love so much. You'll also get deck plans and the like. For our ships, we basically ported real world designs directly into the game, replacing cannons of various weights with ballista and mangonels of various classes. Thus, for example, a 24 gun schooner or a 32 gun ship was translated pretty directly into a number of ballista and light mangonels while a 74 gun ship turned into a number of light, medium, and heavy mangonels.

Of course, this late era modern style navies need not be what you'd default to. We mainly chose it because it makes for more interesting naval tactics than anything in the 1500 or so years before it. From the Roman period to the end of the middle ages, the dominate naval tactic was the boarding plank, and battles were fought as basically land battles with marginally mobile land. If you don't take age of sail as your inspiration, you'll probably end up with alot smaller number of ship classes and functionally no naval tactics other than close and board. The second best era IMO would be Greek dominated galley warfare, because the Greeks at least had interesting ship-ship naval tactics. Generally speaking, D&D seems to default toward this as Gygax seemed happier to include anachronistic galley warfare in his psuedo-middle ages than he seemed including the more modern post-gunpower ships. Galley dominated sea travel however forces you to miss out on all the rich mythic tradition of the great age of sail that dominates our conception of and literature of sea travel - pirates, Moby Dick, etc.

 

[buddhafrog]

Plus I'm still working on modifying some of the character classes (thinking of replacing the Fighter with a fighting-Sailor), and I'm still looking at different ship design systems.

just my two copper:

In regards to your thoughts about re-classing the fighter and ranger, your ideas seems solid enough. However, if it were me I wouldn't put all the effort into this. Instead, I would let the players choose any class they'd like but let any PC tweak any power or skill to make it seafaring -- *with DM approval* of course.

This allows all players to be creative and build characters that fit this new world they are entering, giving them even more buy-in into the campaign. You'd have to know your players, of course. If you'd be banging heads all the time about whether their tweak is unbalanced, then it would be a terrible idea. But I think most groups wouldn't run into this problem.

 

[mach1.9pants]

I see that the HARN book is not available in PDF, which is a pity

As an aside can anyone recommend some good real world books which give you facts/dimensions/crew size/capacity/ etc about ships of all ages? The stuff you (normally) get in DnD is very loosely based on reality and I'd like to modify that.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I just found this online:

Ship - Brian Lavery - Dorling Kindersley

DK is a publisher of all kinds of stunning visual encyclopedias- the Eyewitness Guides- covering a variety of topics.

A little more digging found this:

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Encyclopedia-Ship-Boats/dp/0879519320/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275264188&sr=1-1"]Amazon.com: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ship and Boats (9780879519322): Graham Blackburn: Books[/ame]

Note that in the reader commentary, you'll find references to a B&N book of ships, as well as one of the Jane's guides (also excellent).

You might also be able to find something by Lorentz publishing, responsible for things like The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Knives.

 

[Jack7]

Ship - Brian Lavery - Dorling Kindersley

DK is a publisher of all kinds of stunning visual encyclopedias- the Eyewitness Guides- covering a variety of topics.

A little more digging found this:

Amazon.com: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ship...
Note that in the reader commentary, you'll find references to a B&N book of ships, as well as one of the Jane's guides (also excellent).

Yeah, I use DK books when homeschooling the kids and for writing research. They are usually easy to use, and chock full of solid information and nice illustrations. Good suggestions.