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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5195898" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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