Stats for Ship-Board Cannon?

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Guess the title says most of it.

I'm currently looking for some d20 stats on cannon, stuff that could be found on sailing ships. Large, small, medium cannon, scatterguns, chain shot for breaking spars, stuff like that. Anything would be useful, somewhere to start, anyway. I'm going to be working it into a Grim Tales based game, so d20Modern style stats would probably be of the most utility.

--fje

 

[scourger]

Skull & bones

Here is a link to Skull & Bones:

http://www.greenronin.com/catalog/grr1018

It is a good book. I didn't care for the new crunchy character stuff (which is, unfortunately, a lot of the book), but it does present the rules you seek. It has a nice feature detailing some real pirates' exploits, so those parts are fun to read.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Hrm. S&B looks interesting. Might check into it. I"ve already got a stats system in place for ships, though, along with weapons and fighting and character generation. 30 bucks for ideas on cannon and some additional stuff on ships may be a bit much.

If I see it in a LGS I may check it out, but we've got a dearth of LGS around here so it may be after I need it before I see that product.

--fje

 

[ledded]

Been looking for the same thing myself Heap. I have a couple documents from different sources that you might be interested in that I can send you, contact me offline (jimi at hiwaay dot net) if you want. Neither are perfect, but give a decent starting place.If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for ships? Did you find something or is a homebrew? We are working on a d20 Modern-based campaign that will feature sailing ships as well as dirigibles/airships and other similar goodies ourselves.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Currently using a bit of a home brew system. The core of it is from RPGO's "Blood and Circuits", which has some data on building vehicles and sail-powered vehicles, along with some stuff on dirgibles, etc etc.

After reading around it seems like 11-12 Knotts per Hour was a good clip for a sailing ship of the aprox time. BnC would let you get up to something like 30 KtH pretty easy, with BIGGER ships getting better speeds. Has a static accel for sails, as well. It's sort of stripped down for sailing, but that's to be expected, as how many modern games are going to deal extensively with sailing ships?

For my use, however, close enough is close enough, as I have AIRship sailing ships ... the physics is already way beyond the realm of possiblity or even plausibility but is so darn cool as to have been done before and will no doubt be done again (once by me). I wanted to keep my ships somewhere in line with other ships, though, so I'm capping speeds at 1.5x what a similar real-world 16th century ship could do.

I've also instituted some easy house rules for speed and accel. Top Speed is capped at the top speed of the ship, and a percentage of the current wind speed set by a Navigate skill check. The DCs are in common increments of 5, but the actual percentage is unique to each ship (I may detail some BnC style rules for it later) with better/faster ships getting up to 1.25x the actual wind speed (the physics of sailing makes my head hurt). Accel is, likewise, in DC steps set by the particular ship and the current wind speed.

Sort of complex, I guess, but I wanted there to be some element of excitement and skill/chance for the group as they help crew/captain the ship, outrunning pirates, out maneuvering the enemy, eeking out a little more from the wind than the next guy, etc. etc.

What I DON'T have is tonnage/volume of cargo storage for ships. I can't really find any data on it in BnC, maybe I'm missing it ... there's some options for increasing cargo storage, and some stuff on trading passengers for cargo, but not stock cargo loads. I'm guesstimating them based on some random data I found online, but I'm sure it's so far from factual as to be laughable.

Next up is armament, as I'm sure they'll get into some scraps. Wouldn't be much fun if they didn't.

--fje