First off: Sawbones, Moonie, Reeva or Mygg, if you’re reading this, DON’T!
I’m running a pirate-themed homebrew campaign set in a homebrewed place which I’ve plonked down in The Sea of Falling Stars. I call it The Southern Isles, and its rife with piracy. The de facto ‘government’ is The Southern Islands Company, who run the place for profit and starve the population with high taxes and tithes, and who brutally suppress any rebellion. I’ve used every pirate and maritime trope I can think of in planning the plot, creating encounters and filling it with characters.
I figured this will help me add flavour to the world, and could be a good resource for anyone planning a similar campaign, or one shot or whatever.
Edit: I should maybe note I already played quite a bit in this setting and after a long hiatus I am starting it back up for Season 2, so partly this is a way for me to get it all fresh in my head again.
How do pirates force other ships to stop? I always struggle with ship-to-ship combat in DnD. Obviously, we don’t want to give them easy access to cannons as that would lead to the question: Why aren’t cannons used elsewhere? But at the same time, the ancient form of naval warfare of ramming, arrows, and boarding has its own challenges. Mostly that it doesn’t translate well to the game mechanics.
First, the actual interesting part would be the outmaneuvering and positioning of ships. Something that just doesn’t work with DnD rules so it has to be simplified or even handwaved. But also that ship crews are rather big. So every fight has a ton of low-level fighters involved and would just take forever without being interesting.
With merchant ships, you can kinda solve it by having a few higher-level fighters, and the rest surrender once they are dead. So you just have a regular DnD experience but with warships, you would have a crew that easily could go into the hundreds.
So the question is:
Are mages on ships just way more common and do they take over the role of cannons?
Do ships just have lower crew requirements than real-life ships would have?
I have cannons in the setting, just cos I wanted the players to be able to use them, cos fun! I’ve developed a way of doing ship-to-ship combat that has been working quite well.
I balance the encounter with a manageable number of enemies to match the party, and maybe one or two named NPCs. They battle it out while the two crews fight around them. The crews go in with a set strength rating that translates to a modifier. At the start if each round, both crews roll a d20 and the loser takes one away from their modifier. I determines the starting mod for the players by assessing morale if the crew, how well fed and we’ll armed they are, etc. I use the results to add flavour to the battle. So it’s like the party are fighting some of the crew, but I’m simulating a larger battle around them. If their crew is losing, the PC cam use their actions to affect the larger battle and swing it back in their favour.
Each turn, each ship can move its movement speed and fire cannons/ballet’s on either side. The players can use their actions to do these things or, if they have enough crew left, they can give orders to have them do it.
Makes are still very useful aboard ships cos they can do stuff like create a gust of wind for a burst of speed, or create a fog cloud for visual cover. Also fireballs!
If you can, it might be worth looking into the old games workshop game “Battlefleet Gothic”. While it’s spaceships in space, a lot of the rules and ideas could easily be remapped onto sea battles. Some of the rules would actually make MORE sense for a sea navy rather than a space navy. It could help for things like getting caught in a multi fleet battle, without getting bogged down too much.
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