Greetings!

Naval expeditions and sea-based adventures can be very interesting and fun for a campaign. Of course, such can form the basis for the campaign to revolve entirely around such type of adventures, or as a temporary campaign "episode" or a series of episodes. Have you considered different kinds of ship designs? Have your players considered the impact and importance of different ship designs and naval technology?

Strategically, have naval adventures, ships, and naval technology had an important or interesting effect on your campaigns?

For example, in the ancient Song Empire of China, they had developed a Paddle-Powered warship, equipped with flame-throwers and torsion-powered catapults. The powerful armament and traditions of having well-trained professional Marines fighting and serving on board these warships were often decisive in many naval campaigns. A particularly salient advantage was the Paddle Warships enormous superiority in mobility. In a particular campaign, a small number of around a hundred or so such warships were able to defeat 500 or 800 traditional warships deployed by the enemy, resulting not only in a huge naval victory for the Song Empire, but became the foundation for an enormous professional navy, all developed before 1200 AD by the Song Empire, and which also secured their prominence as the strongest naval power in the region for many generations.

I thought such developments in naval warfare and technology immensly interesting, and such has also provided a solid framework of ideas for developing scnarios for the campaign dealing with naval expeditions and sea-based adventures, as well as wars, exploration, espionage, trade, and technological secrets within my own campaign. Have you been inspired by such history? Have you worked on different levels of technology, magic, and details for ships and such in your own campaigns?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Planning to have some naval adventuring coming up in my Thule campaign soon - one of my players developed these details  https://simonsprimevalthule.blogspot.com/2019/03/ships-of-kalayan-sea-by-judith.html
I think though I've tended to be like many authors and treat ships more as a means of getting to the adventure site rather than interesting in their own right. Bit of an exception when I ran Mentzer Classic D&D, with its harshly realistic rules for getting lost whenever out of sight of land - applying the rules strictly, it's nearly impossible to actually get from Karameikos to the Isle of Dread!

In the late Bronze age, the triakonter ("thirty-oared") and pentekonter ("fifty-oared") were the vessels of choice for the Mediterranean commerce-raider and a maritime nation's navy. Each oarsman was also a marine, expected to fight in boarding actions and raids against coastal settlements. You can see Egyptians marines fighting Sea Peoples in what is known as the battle of the Delta:



That small ship with its crew of oarsmen could make a natural "PC group" - an extended one with retainers and other hench-folk, rather than the more modern 4-5 PCs as the whole party. Not dissimilar to the way Viking longships were comprised of oarsman-warriors who all took part in what went on.

It's a subject that has been of interest to me since I starting as a GM.  It's surprisingly difficult for a person without practical experience to find accessible information.  I did find Naval Warfare Under Oars useful in at least grounding the fantasy ideas in some approximation of reality.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1084354It's a subject that has been of interest to me since I starting as a GM.  It's surprisingly difficult for a person without practical experience to find accessible information.  I did find Naval Warfare Under Oars useful in at least grounding the fantasy ideas in some approximation of reality.

It's even harder to find stuff on antiquity, misconceptions (like what the numbers of a polyreme classification actually mean) are rife. Lionel Casson is a good source on ships and travel in antiquity, (he wrote on other topics too), I borrowed several of his books from my local library network.

Sometimes its even just basic stuff, like getting away from the idea that like vessels in the Age of Sail, a galley would be moored in a harbour. In reality, the hulls needed to be dragged out of the water as frequently as possible to dry out, and they were left on beaches or slipways out of use.

There was an awful lot of useful stuff, particularly focused around the RPG-ing of galleys, in this thread.

Quote from: S'mon;1084329Planning to have some naval adventuring coming up in my Thule campaign soon - one of my players developed these details  https://simonsprimevalthule.blogspot.com/2019/03/ships-of-kalayan-sea-by-judith.html
I think though I've tended to be like many authors and treat ships more as a means of getting to the adventure site rather than interesting in their own right. Bit of an exception when I ran Mentzer Classic D&D, with its harshly realistic rules for getting lost whenever out of sight of land - applying the rules strictly, it's nearly impossible to actually get from Karameikos to the Isle of Dread!

Greetings!

My friend, that's some very sweet goodness that Judith wrote up. Nice details on so many cool little things! S'mon, hell with the ship just being a taxi, man! Imagine all the cool series of adventures you can have while serving on board a large and powerful warship! Such is the time to get the party on board, with Charles Laughton commanding as the ship's Captain. I also fondly remember reading the book, "The Sea Wolf" by author, Jack London. Captain Wolf Larsen, of the Schooner, the Ghost, is a great example of a ship-captain that is harsh, professional, and utterly ruthless. "The Sea Wolf" also provides lots of awesome details on the daily routines of life on board a sailing ship. Splendid portraits of the different men's relationships to other crew members, and also Captain Larsen.

Besides the tribulations and trials of learning to live and work on board a ship with rough sailors from a variety of backgrounds, all while navigating a relationship with a ruthless Captain, you then have all kinds of adventures the party can be drawn into from being on board the ship as part of its crew. Discovering islands, ala Odyseus's journeys meeting siren women, giants, cyclops, minotaurs, the zoo of opportunities from a Greek and Sword and Sorcery palette await! Then add Viking raiders, sea monsters, perhaps a friendly race of fish people living by an ncharted and unexplored island; some other island with weird, alien ruins on it; mysterious paradise-like islands with beautiful native people living there. I recall Captain Cook, or Magellan, I forgot, said the naked, hedonistic native women were entirely corrupting his entire crew!:D

The possibilities are endless!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I do want to run "Skull & Shackles" the Paizo Pirate Adventure Path one day! And there will likely be a lot of sea voyaging coming up in my Thule game shortly - a quest though, so the PCs will be seeking to minimise distractions on the journey.

Quote from: S'mon;1084503I do want to run "Skull & Shackles" the Paizo Pirate Adventure Path one day! And there will likely be a lot of sea voyaging coming up in my Thule game shortly - a quest though, so the PCs will be seeking to minimise distractions on the journey.

Greetings!

Yeah, S'mon! That sounds like a lot of fun! There's so many different kinds of adventure's that you can orchestrate with the party being crew members on board a warship for example. There's always tensions and drama potential with the captain and members of the crew as well, besides drama and aventures encountered in places that the ship actually visits. Great stuff!:D

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Never been much of a fan of naval adventuring.

My indispensable reference for naval adventuring - http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html

Quote from: S'mon;1085929My indispensable reference for naval adventuring - http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/TAPA/82/Speed_under_Sail_of_Ancient_Ships*.html

You can never go wrong with Casson.

Age of Sail is my jam. I've been into ship-to-ship combat for as long as I've been gaming.

Teddy Roosevelt's "The Naval War of 1812" is probably my favorite book related to the era.

Which is probably my biggest gripe in terms of D&Ds default settings and it's abject rejection of cannons, despite their first recorded use in European naval battles being 1338 and accounts of cannons in general date as far back as the 1100s... smack in the middle of the High Medieval period. Their inclusion wouldn't even mean having to introduce viable personal firearms (touch hole fired hand cannons was the extent of what would be available in the High Medieval period and are far too cumbersome for the typical adventurer... archers were the norm for armies well into the Late Medieval period).

But their inclusion would have done wonders for making naval combat feel like what most people think of thanks to all the Pirate and Age of Sail era stories in popular culture. Ballista and Catapults aren't good replacements for that feel (particularly not the handful D&D ships could carry).

Personally, my settings generally have the carrack and caravel as the mainstays of naval power with 1300s era cannon as armaments. Battles typically involve one side disabling the other's vessel (generally its masts) then approaching from an advantageous angle for boarding actions (basically a really nice set piece battle with interesting terrain and plenty of mooks).

To the winner goes the other's ship as a prize with the surviving crew being either taken prisoner, set adrift in their lifeboats, marooned on the closest shore or just executed depending on the temperament of the victors (the first three being opportunities for new adventures if the PCs find themselves in that situation).

I wrote this for a campaign last year that had the character owning a ship in the Majestic Wilderlands.

Merchant Adventures

I ran a Pirate campaign using WEG D6, which was a pretty good fit. I had to bodge together a set of stats for ships, and I made a bunch of maps of the Caribbean by tracing islands in Google Maps.

I tried making a spreadsheet to generate ship stats based on length, beam, number of decks, etc., but in the end I just had to make up the stats for ships.

Finding a good Age of Sail equipment list was another big hurdle. I was able to find records of estate sales, and use them to rough out some basic costs.

I cheated on currency and adopted a decimalized standard currency based on "pieces of silver," rather than having to deal with half a dozen different currencies in different metals.

Lastly, I avoided the topic of slavery entirely, lest it derail the campaign. Rape was also officially off limits, as the campaign was explicitly PG-13.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1085914Never been much of a fan of naval adventuring.

Neither was I, until I transformed elves in a setting into pirates. Suddenly everybody liked elves again, and I had to make sunken dungeons and buried treasure and sea monsters and palm-treemen.

No regrets, except the generally uninteresting ship rules for the system I'd been using.