Fifteen Men on a Dead Men's Chest

D&D and Pirates.  I can't quit you.   The weather is warming up and a (not young) man's thoughts turn to horror.  Horror and rum and pieces of eight.  Yo ho ho and the middle school band even played "The Legend of Pirate's Cove" for their competition piece.  Clearly the universe is flashing me a sign, a blinking neon sign, that D&D and Pirates needs to happen.

Last week was good, it was my first time visiting San Francisco.   I was traveling for a technology conference, and had plenty of time in between sessions and whatnot to fill my notebook with scribblings on Xibalba, a Mesoamerican portal to the underworld.  The Greek megadungeon campaign is going swimmingly well, the family gamers love it and the regular gamers are putting up with it, but I need a bit of horror.  For myself.  The regular game is high fantasy and whimsy and adventure, but at I least I can write some horror adventures on the side, right?  It's a necessary outlet.  In this way, the steaming jungles of Isla Mysteriosa and the shade-haunted ruins of Xibalba are taking shape.  It looks like we're going to Gencon this year and I'll probably run some games instead of playing wall-to-wall Magic like last year, so maybe I'll try to premiere it  at Gencon.  That would be pretty sweet.

So anyway - back to the pirates.  Historically, they rove around on these ships that have been gutted to maximize their space for cannons, made flush fore and aft, and rigged for speed.  Larger ships could have a hundred or more pirates hanging on to them, clutching various pointy weapons and shooty weapons, and some of the legendary prizes featured astronomical treasures - a few hundred thousand silver pounds.

Indulge me a second in some game discussion.  Let's say your hypothetical pirate crew (mostly 1st level men or zero level men) capture one of these rich prizes and earns 300,000sp - using the silver standard, where 1xp = 1sp.  if there are a hundred of them, they've each earned 3,000xp.  Cha-ching.  All those surviving zero-level guys become 1st level fighters, and the 1st level crewmen get to level 2.  Experienced pirate crews could be pretty tough, don't you think?  Famous buccaneers like Henry Morgan, who earned millions of silver pieces over his career, would be high level fighters indeed.  Sounds like a game setting.

I'm raising this because players, being what they are, might realize that the ghost-haunted ruins are a tad bit scary and dangerous, and wouldn't it be cool to mutiny and take over the ship and make ourselves pirates, and then couldn't we go attack shipping for "easy money"?  Piracy is like the ultimate expression of the murder hobo ethos.

The other thing that concerns me is starting the adventure.  How would you adjudicate the following type of situation: the player characters are the mercenary adventurers (ie, jungle explorers) hired by a patron to help find and explore the lost ruins.  There are many NPC's along on the venture in a supporting role, but as the players represent unhinged and desperate men (ie, adventurers) they are bearing all the risk of exploration and dungeon delving.  What would be an appropriate split of treasure between the hired adventurers and the rest of the expedition?

In the world of pirates, articles were written up with fairly even distribution of shares amongst the crew - but everyone had an active fighting role.  Is it reasonable for the patron to split 50-50 with the adventurers doing the exploration?  The adventurers and any NPC's that went on the dungeon excursions would get all the XP points, whereas the patron and folks that remained behind would get shares of money, but not experience.

I'm envisioning a scenario where a wealthy patron outfits a ship and crew, and hires adventurers to be the actual explorers that hex crawl the island and explore the ruins.  This lets you put a first level game out on an island without too much fuss.  Replacement characters can be recruited from the crew, but otherwise the NPC's are meant to stay behind.  It keeps the action firmly in the hands of the players.  But it does force you to consider what kind of agreement should exist between the patron and the desperate adventurers willing to hack through the undergrowth and plunder the lost ruins.

You also need to be prepared for when the players dump the captain overboard, take over the ship themselves, and sail for the shipping lanes, with violence on their minds.  Because pirates.

Gentlemen of Fortune - A Prologue to Xibalba

I've had a poll up for a few days regarding the megadungeon project for 2014 - thanks for all of the interest!  It's shaping up to be a close vote between the Harrow Home Manor and the Vaults of Xibalba ideas.  I've had some posts about Harrow Home before, so here's a small prologue introducing Xibalba - it's the kind of background information that might get worked into a player's handout or kickoff for a first session.

21st March 1710.
From the Journal of Sebastian Osbourne, Captain of the St George

I found the place as described in the account of the Spanish priest.  West 30 degrees across the Gulf of Honduras from Puerto Caballos, allowing the Caribbean current to guide the ship north towards Isla de Providencia.  Halfway between Providencia and Cayos Miskitos, the hidden island appeared out of the morning mists.  What strange powers the heathen gods exert over these waters, to hide an entire island from the world!

The money spent for the Spaniard's book, an account of the new world by Father Juan de Santiago, was worth every Spanish reale I paid for it.  The priest's sojourn with the coastal peoples revealed fanciful legends of 52 year cycles, meticulous stone calendars, and a hidden "city of the gods" that appeared on the sea at the end of each cycle.  The priest found the place in 1554… he predicted it would appear next in 1606, then 1658, and now 1710.  I have found the lost Isla Mysteriosa, the place where the buccaneer Sanglantes hid a fabled treasure neither L'Olonnais or Morgan were able to find - and no wonder!  The island disappears for decades at a time.

The St George rocks gently in the cove called "Bahia Segura" on the Spaniard's map.  Tomorrow we drop our first long boats.  I have scoured the dock side taverns and seaman's pubs of Nassau and Kingston to fill out a weathered crew of sea dogs and gentlemen of fortune, hungry for the chance to find the lost treasure of Sanglantes and plunder the forgotten city hidden on the island.  Unknown splendors await.  The adventure begins tomorrow.

There's a bit to unpack here.  I like the idea of placing Xibalba on a lost island that appears and disappears at intervals; it promises a potentially pristine location for the adventurers before the game begins - and yet, its regular appearances in the 16th and 17th centuries means that evidence of past expeditions, the ruins of a Spanish fort or mission, the wrecks of 17th century buccaneers - aren't out of the question, either.

A megadungeon campaign needs a nearby home base.  How about a floating home base - the St George, a privateering brig (or frigate) anchored just off the coast?  First level characters are crewmen of the St George, and the St George is where characters return for healing and recruiting additional help.  I'd expect higher level characters to eventually purchase or hire their own vessel at some indeterminate point in the future when they return to Kingston.

There's a lot of time for the poll to run its course, and I'm very comfortable if either Harrow Home Manor or Xibalba ends up being the choice (I'm assuming the Greek megadungeon is falling out of the race).  Harrow Home borrows heavily from Poe and Lovecraft and the gothic monsters of European folklore - vampires, werewolves, ghouls, the things that go bump in the night.  This little excerpt gives a teaser of Xibalba - a campaign that promises steaming jungles, crumbling ziggurats, pirates, cut throats, the weird beings of the Mesoamerican mythos, and maybe a bit of cursed Aztec or Mayan gold.

I'll have to figure out what to call the campaign.  Goblins of the Spanish Main?  The Mysterious Island?  The dungeons are the Vaults of Xibalba - so it'll probably just end up as The Xibalba Campaign by default.  We'll see which idea is the boss in another week or two.

Oh - Happy New Year everyone!

D&D Professional Skills

From time to time the DM might need to determine if a NPC professional succeeds at a difficult technical skill or craft - does the blacksmith make a suitable masterwork weapon on the first try, can the sage answer an obscure question, that kind of stuff.  As I collate notes for my future (Caribbean-based) saltbox setting, this extends to solving for skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery.

I've seen the simple 2d6 reaction chart from classic D&D turned into a skill resolution chart.  It assumes a modifier scale of -3 to +3 using ability scores.  (Historical note: Charisma was capped at +2 in the Moldvay rules, but this was changed for Mentzer and the Rules Cyclopedia).  For professional skills, I'm using the following descriptors to determine appropriate "ability modifiers":

Professional Experience:
Skilled:  +1
Expert:  +2
Master:  +3
Unskilled:  -2

Unskilled characters may not even get a roll in some cases.  The basic reaction chart goes like this:

Skill Resolution (roll 2d6):
2  serious failure
3-5 failure
6-8 partial success
9-11 success
12 great success

An example usage: if the players hire a skilled navigator instead of a master navigator for their ship, they'll pay less in salary or shares, but there's a higher chance of getting lost on the way to that hidden island.  As I develop the nautical rules, I'll work on specific guidelines when hired experts would make checks and how the dice results translate into specific outcomes.

For basic D&D, I like decoupling professional skills from the class and level system and treating them as background skills for NPCs; it keeps the major emphasis for class advancement on adventuring and developing adventurer capabilities.  Nonetheless, I can see the players asking if they can develop any degree of professional skill (especially these nautical skills) if they spend enough time on a boat.

This post from an older blog (Skills: The Middle Road) provided some recommendations for education around professional skills, so I'll use those values as a starting point and will see how it goes:

Learning a Profession:
Skilled - 1 month, 1000gp
Expert - 3 months, 3000gp
Master - 6 months, 10,000gp

If a player character commits to spending time in the rigging, learning how to furl and unfurl the sails, close-haul a ship, tie the right knots, swab the deck, and so on, they can be a skilled sailor after a month of effort and a bit of money on the side.  (For sailing, assume the money goes to gambling, carousing, repairs, clothes, basic gear, dues, and so on; ordinary folks pick up the same skills at a slower pace without all the money spent).

Alternatively, I can look at a hybrid game like ACKS, that bolts a new-school inspired feat and proficiency system onto the old school chassis.  Navigation and Seamanship are already represented as choices in ACKS, and Gunnery is easy to add.  ACKS also addresses when someone would be qualified as a "master" by stacking extra picks on a proficiency.  I'm not sure the high-fantasy tone of ACKS is what I'm going for, so the actual decision on rules flavor is for sometime down the road.

What's on Devil Island?

This is a follow up to yesterday's post about the Isla del Diablo, where rumors of a wrecked galleon promise a fortune on the sea floor.  What else do we know about it?  The island is a rugged place, with jungle covered slopes and a deep valley cut by freshwater stream; a church was built along the northwest hill sometime in the 16th century, in the lee of the central hills.  There are catacombs beneath the church where a buried secret lies, and there are remains of camps or a village in the jungle.

Does anyone live on the island?  Here are a handful of ideas for stocking it:

1. Homicidal Tribesmen:  Descendants of the insane lunatics marooned on the island in the past have formed a dystopian society like something out of Lord of the Flies; they follow a madman named "the Colonel".
2. Cannibal Cultists:  Corrupt mainland natives invaded the island some time ago when they were driven off by the Spanish; now they practice their inhuman ceremonies and cruel rites on Isla del Diablo.  Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
3. Unclean Spirits:  There's an unavoidable experience of being watched, followed, and stalked any time an explorer steps into the cool shade of the jungle.  Disembodied planar entities hunger for new vessels to posses and finally escape the island.  Is that dog head speaking to me, telling me to kill them… kill them all?
4. Alien Ghosts:  Those mentally deranged castaways were under the influence of alien intelligences stranded on Earth; the entities have used the years on the island to begin the construction of a space craft or beacon to return to the stars, but they've been stymied as their original hosts die from age or disease.  They'll feign friendship to lure visitors to their village, bringing new hosts into proximity of their brethren awaiting fresh bodies.
5. Ritual Murderers:  A few survivors of the Spanish shipwreck made it to the island, but the baleful influence of the dark Loas that inhabit the place has turned them into serial killers, each staking out a different territory.  One of them stays near the lowland swamps, and uses poisoned arrows and deadly snakes; another lays deadfall traps in the central hills; the jungle stalker slits throats in the night.  The signs and trappings of evil voodoo hang all around the island.
6. Abandoned:  Roll again, but the island is uninhabited now, and all that's left are the eerie remains of the previous group.
7. Buccaneer's Camp:  Rowdy French buccaneers are behind all the (false) rumors of Isla del Diablo, to divert attention from the secluded inlet on the western shore they use to careen their ship and launch attacks on the mainland.
8. Cimaroons:  Escaped Africans form their own societies all over the Caribbean when they slip the slaver's yoke, and Isla del Diablo is home to a free colony of escaped slaves.  They will fight to retain their hard earned liberty and slaughter any Europeans that learn of their presence.

Of course, I might just end up using all of these ideas, spread across different islands.

Isla del Diablo, From the Journal of de la Torre

The idea behind the Spanish Main campaign is to put the players in possession of a large number of leads, in the form of excerpts from the journal of a deceased monster hunter, the Spanish priest Luis Diaz De La Torre, a Solomon Kane figure in Catholic garb.  The Spanish Empire has exploited the Caribbean for 150 years before the start of the campaign, long enough for there to be ruined castles, lost colonies, and dark secrets littered across the turquoise sea.  De La Torre encountered both monsters and vast wealth during his decade in the Caribbean.  As I accrete material for the campaign here on blog, I'll also sprinkle in excerpts from De La Torre's journal.  It’s a pretty interesting approach to providing plot hooks for a sandbox game.

July, 1636, Off the Mosquito Coast
Today, I caught sight of the Isla del Diablo from starboard, but the superstitious captain would not lay to and launch a boat.  We continue on towards Campeche and then Vera Cruz for my "appointment" with Senor Gomez.  I've marked the place as 12° 12' north, 81° 40' west, nearly 100 miles off the Mosquito Coast.  It is an ominous place, with an ill and foreboding look.

I had heard rumors about Isla del Diablo even back in Madrid, from Cardinal Anaya.  Unable to quell an outbreak of demoniacs appearing in the highlands around Seville, the holy church endeavored to exile them with the annual flotas to New Spain.  This forsaken island was chosen to be a kind of prison - it was believed the demons would be trapped on the island, ringed as it were by hundreds of miles of trackless ocean.  I'm thankful the practice ended decades ago, and we now have humane treatments for folk afflicted with "evil spirits".  The cardinal's records indicated a church was built on the island back in the time of Phillip II, and I hoped to visit such a ruin, give it what blessing I could, and bear witness to the many deaths on the island during those less enlightened times.  It’s unlikely any could have survived the decades of deprivation and tropical disease.

Unfortunately, the captain informed me that all ships of the flota chart a wide berth around the place, and he is forbidden by his contract to pass nearer to the island - he only dared to come this close out of respect to my station.  The fear stems from an incident in 1627.  During that summer, a galleon foundered on the eastern shoals of the island while making the trip from Cartagena to La Habana.  A survivor claimed they were drawn by lights in the dark, appearing like the stern lanterns of the ship they followed, and the helmsman steered the galleon directly onto a reef.  150 men were lost, and tons of Venezuelan gold and emeralds must still lie among the wreckage in a few fathoms of water, for no salvage was mounted.   Landing parties were sent to explore the island for survivors, but it's unclear what they discovered; the captain told me that some of the explorers were driven mad on the island, and came to reside in the monastery at Vera Cruz.  Perhaps they're just sailor stories, for these men are a superstitious lot.  But fear of the place runs very deep, and it was even stricken from many charts.

For now, my investigation into the practices of Senor Gomez, and the cloud of suspicion that surrounds him, is of paramount importance, so I will have to delay any further inquiry into the mysteries of Isla del Diablo until such time as His Grace and the will of God allows.

Notes:
Wow, that little excerpt ended up as more words than I hoped.  Perhaps brutal editing can winnow it down to something more manageable for the players.  Let me know if you agree.  The meat of the rumor is meant to convey a lost island, possible inhabitants abandoned for decades, and a sunken ship full of wealth waiting for someone with a stiff backbone.  Are there actual demons there?  Maybe the exiles were just insane folks, mishandled by ignorance, and now feral and hostile.  Or perhaps there were actual possessed people, but the spirits are like the alien Yithians from Lovecraft, and not demons at all - inimical star creatures.  Or just maybe the Church was right, and the island is now a demon-haunted waste, while the larger world is just a bit safer.  (If so, stay away from the wild pigs, oink oink).  It's wide open.  Players with a ship are free to mount a salvage operation, hiring divers, and standing off the coast of the island while recovering sunken loot.

But the lure of clean water, firewood, game animals, and fresh fruit is probably too great to resist sending at least one landing party to look around, am I right?  It only takes a little opening to let the horror in.

Goblins of the Spanish Main - Project Outline

Famous "monster hunter" Father Luis Diaz De La Torre is dead, leaving behind his field journal and library describing the existence of secret cults, blasphemous books and artifacts, fantastic treasures, crazed wizards, and dire magic spread across the remote areas of the Caribbean and New Spain.  The players have the father's notes, a worthy ship, and a large sandbox to explore covering the mid-17th century Caribbean and the Spanish Main.

I've added a page to the blog where I'll post links as campaign material gets generated.  Whenever this campaign is ready for the players, the public posts will stop (other than game reports).

RULES-RELATED

• Professional skills
• Table of ship types
• Chases
• Maneuvers
• Ship combat
• Boarding actions
• Wind and Current
• Small Arms
• Dueling and Fighting Styles

SETTING

• Map of the Caribbean
• The Library of De La Torre (contents)
• Home Base - Port Royal
• Home Base - Tortuga
• Settlements and Colonies
• Ship Encounters
• Ship tags
• Random cargoes
• Island Encounters
• Rumors
• 17th c. Name Generator

Towards Simple Naval Combat

There are already RPG games that focus on swashbuckling campaigns.  They're lighter in tone, and feature the cinematic action, or perhaps a bit of politics and intrigue.  I'm coming at the pirate genre from the perspective of horror fantasy; ghost-haunted ruined Spanish castles on lonely promontories; dank swamps with zombie masters, jade idols, and mindless undead hulks; fallen jungle ruins with blasphemous temples and a fortune in gems.  The idea is to make a large wilderness hex crawl, a "saltbox" instead of a sandbox, with the sailing vessel as the primary conveyance.  The mode is D&D style play, exploration seeking  after treasure, but with the chance for a bit of opportunistic piracy on the high seas (both for and against the players), and some rowdy carousing back in Port Royal or Tortuga.

The challenge is to build simple, abstract, flavorful nautical rules that capture situations during the Age of Sail without requiring a lot of nautical interest to enjoy the style.  So far, the ship combat rules in Flashing Blades: High Seas (FBHS) strike a good tone of abstraction and flavor when compared to the fiddly bits in competing rules sets, but there are a few things to change and/or add, to adapt them to D&D style play.

Skills
First thing to add is some basic skill resolution for professional skills - unskilled, skilled, expert, master - for specialized (non-adventuring) skills like sailing, navigation, and gunnery where resolution is going to matter.  Plenty of OSR types have adopted 2d6 skill systems modeled after the reaction roll chart.  Player characters can gain knowledge of professions over time, but the system is mainly for determining how hired experts contribute during a conflict.

Evasion
An important segment of a nautical encounter is when sails are spotted on the horizon, quickly followed by a decision to evade or give chase; the zoom level of FBHS is a little too tactical (yards instead of miles), skipping the whole dynamic of evading until night fall to escape the pursuer after dark, or using fog and foul weather, for the same.  Should be simple to extend the FBHS process a bit.

Maneuvers
When a ship has successfully overtaken another, there's the opportunity to maneuver.  FBHS has solid maneuvering rules, covering positioning for broadsides, chasers and stern guns, crossing the T, etc, and suggesting how to use ship handling and a bit of piloting skill; players don't need to know about the wind gage or leeward approaches, it's abstracted into fairly simple skill rolls once they decide on a broad strategy.

Combat
I'm a big fan of the humble d6 when you need to roll a ton of dice - too many years of Axis & Allies.  Batteries of cannons should be resolved with a handful of d6's.  Some of the rule sets involve calculating a ton of d20 modifiers and rolling dozens of times for a broadside on the d20 scale.  Meanwhile, FBHS has a single die roll for an entire battery, which isn't ideal to me either, so I'll adjust to include chucking handfuls of d6's and adding up hits.

Regardless, the strength of historical buccaneers was their crack shots with the musket, so there need to be adjustments to the combat approach to account for actual historical strategies like picking off helmsman, suppressing gun ports with withering fire, and otherwise clearing the deck with small arms while closing the gap to board.  The type of buccaneer ships in the game are typically lightly armed (unlike the 3-4 mast monsters used by pirates in the later age).

Reactions
There are a number of points at which a merchant ship's reactions (or morale checks) are critical; when spotted (to determine if they lay to, evade, or come about); when they’re overtaken - do they fight or roll over; when they're boarded, do they surrender, defend the decks, or set traps and retreat to closed quarters.  Reputation for the buccaneers and pirates will be a factor influencing morale checks.

Boarding
FBHS has fast, abstract rules for handling the boarding - although, like I mentioned above, the assumption seems to be two heavily armed ships slugging it out with broadsides, movie-style, and not fast rovers raking the decks with small arms and then quickly overwhelming with a boarding action.  It also omits grenades, a practical weapon, albeit one you usually don't see in the swashbuckling movies, either.  Otherwise, the FBHS rules feature a simple d6 system that would work well with the Axis & Allies style mass d6 rolls.

Ship Stats
It'll be important to define some standard ship "types" that make sense to me, by my understanding of the ships of the period; number and types of guns are important, structural hit points, handling ability (for maneuvering), typical crew sizes, and I'll even have to solve the cargo management problem (without having to micro-manage every single item loaded onto the ship).

I plan on yoinking some firearm rules from AD&D's A Mighty Fortress (although I assume the LOTFP gun book will be available long before this campaign is ready) and I'll be scanning Backswords & Bucklers again for ideas as well.  I also need to pick up Flashing Blades sometime, I really like the approach in the nautical supplement.

So that's a statement of purpose.  More to come.

Loading that Ship

I noticed a funny thing when comparing how different games have handled ship statistics.  For example, let's take a look at a well-known historical ship, the "galleon".  The galleon in LOTFP needs a crew of 150 and can carry 150 tons of cargo.  The d20 Skull & Bones book has the galleon at 400 *tons* of cargo (crew 200).  Flashing Blades: High Seas puts the galleon at only 24 tons of cargo, and offers more nuance differentiating minimal sailing crew from gunnery crews from max crew.  With all these variances, I don't think it's pedantic to question why 3 games defining the same ship would vary by a factor of 16(!) for a vital statistic that ought to be historically verifiable.

Only, it turns out it's not that simple to verify, at all.

For starters, a common ship like the galleon was made in a wide range of sizes over a 200 year period, from 100 ton hulls up to 600 tons and even larger.  In normal usage, the tonnage of a ship is a volumetric calculation related to hull displacement, and not the actual amount of weight loaded on the ship, dead weight tonnage, which makes it sit lower in the water.  There's a calculation for the volume of a ship (length x beam x depth)/100, which calculates the volumetric tons - also represented as tuns - estimating the number of tun-sized barrels that could fit in an area for determining admiralty and harbor fees.  Measuring the loaded weight and water line is something different,  and can only be done empirically (ie, actually measuring the water line as a ship is loaded).

Game designers haven't been particularly clear what they mean by "cargo" - the 150 and 400 ton "cargo" statistics could just be representing hull volume and not how much dead weight the ship could actually carry, whereas the 24 tons for the High Seas galleon probably represents the dead weight amount the rules are suggesting.  I'm just guessing at this point.  When you read historical accounts of pirates and buccaneers, 20 tons of precious treasure was a vast sum; Drake's famous capture of the Spanish galleon Cacafuego netted 24 tons of treasure, and it was carried on a 120 ton galleon.  Other examples to put into perspective:  Black Bart captured 240,000 pieces-of-eight from a heavily laden galleon, which represents just under 8 tons of silver; Ganj-i-sawai, the famous capture by Henry Every in the Red Sea, had closer to 10 tons of coins.

A funny way of considering the problem:  the ton of feathers weighs the same as a ton of coins… but who wants to worry about calculating the volume differences?

In addition to the conflation of terms, there's a paucity of written records - lack of detail on how certain ships were actually rigged and armed, for instance.  Further muddying the waters, many ship types use the same name for a radically different vessel - a pinnace sometimes refers to a towable, single-masted ship's boat used as a tender, but also referred to a 3-mast merchant ship in its own right.  Some of the games have missed that nuance as well.

Back to weight versus cargo, it'd be very easy to go completely down the rabbit hole, and start considering how many cannons are being carried, how large the crew and provisions, and worry about how much those things add to the overall burden.   Cannons are fairly heavy - 1,000 lbs or more per gun - and the games don't indicate whether they've taken armaments into account when presenting their ship values.  A compliment of cannon, shot, and powder could weigh 20 tons or more on even a small sized ship.

There's a strong argument to be made for using a totally abstract system for something like cargo, much the same way encumbrance rules are easier to manage as equipment slots instead of micro-managing pounds and ounces (or kilos, for anyone not mired in imperial).  The Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG went completely abstract with ship sizes and cargo.  Otherwise, you're always going to run into "that guy", who makes pedantic arguments about accuracy and what the game statistics represent.  Oh, wait a second… I'm the one being that guy.  :blush:

As gamers, I wonder how many of you prefer flavor and usability over deep historical accuracy?  I don't see my own players quibbling tons over the tons.  The closest gaming analogy is probably Traveller (again) because of its emphasis on trade and cargoes.  One of my old gamers accused my Traveller game of requiring accounting skills to prepare a ship's manifest; this was back in the 90's, and I missed the forest for the trees with more frequency back then.  I certainly don't want to recreate that experience of endless manifest management while running a nautical D&D game.

This is where I'm at, comparing maritime rules across games.  In a world where some of this information exists, in books, there's no reason not to strive for accuracy, but the system also needs to be simple, usable at the table, and not lose sight the game is about fantastic exploration over bookkeeping, even if there's the chance to engage in some high seas piracy and buccaneering along the way.  Resource management is fun, but only to a point.

BTW, the D&D Expert rules has a large sailing ship, representing the Medieval cog; Cook lists the ship as carrying 300,000 coins of treasure, which reduces to 30,000 lbs, or 15 tons of dead weight - and that's at Basic D&D's inflated 10 coins to the pound size.  The largest cogs seemed to be in the 100-120 ton volume range.

I've had a running conversation with Richard from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse; he's been able to bring some sanity to the discussion around calculating ship volumes, suggested crew sizes, potential armaments, and so forth - rules of thumb.  Here's perhaps the most cogent advice; when all else fails, use G+ to "Contact Other Plane" and summon a PHD!


*The image is from a National Geographic, (c) Roger Morris.

D&D Pirates and the Sandbox Engine

A number of posters have recommended Savage Worlds, and a Savage Worlds licensed setting, Pirates of the Spanish Main (POTSM), for the nautical weird fantasy campaign I've been discussing here lately.  After many such recommendations, I picked up the POTSM book last week - it does a really great job of laying out a Caribbean setting, using the ships and characters from the old POTSM miniatures game of ship combat.  I'm really enjoying it a lot (thanks for all the good suggestions, fellows!)

Old School D&D isn't the best game for a nautical setting, since its early editions omit the kind of skill systems and professions that would help adjudicating action on the high seas.  However, it's the ideal system for running a plotless sandbox game.  The key game conceits for the sandbox are Class Level = Power Level, and XP for Gold.

Class Level = Power Level means that much of the gratification for playing comes about when your character goes up in level, gaining survivability or the option to do new and cooler things.  In other words, regardless of which fiction you drape over the game world, no small part of why players enjoy playing the game is because their characters get to level up.

XP = Gold means that gaining money through adventuring is the best way to gain those levels.  These two factors(Levels and the need to acquire Treasure) create an underlying engine that drives the sandbox game forward without requiring any plot or emotional attachment to a story.  As long as sandbox preparation involves seeding the world with lucrative and interesting opportunities, the player's ambition and the game engine does the rest.  Players choose their own adventures to ensure they'll get money and make their characters cooler.

To keep the sandbox engine moving forward, many DMs also add things that drain party gold - taxes on player wealth like upkeep rules, carousing requirements, things like that.  Seems to me the old Sci Fi game Traveller always did a good job of making sure the players were eager for the next employment, because Traveller characters had an expensive starship to maintain.  Provisioning supplies for a sailing ship, sharing out wealth with the crew, and keeping it maintained ought to do the trick in the pirate sandbox.

These days, I'm (obviously) really enjoying the sandbox approach to running a campaign and focusing on tools and techniques to help in the running - the Black City has been a really successful experiment.  After trying a horror sandbox earlier this year using Trail of Cthulhu - which was more work than the payoff - I stepped back and came to appreciate that campaign structures are a matter of finding the right tool for the right job.  In other words, there are good reasons to use game systems that use plotted adventures.  But for a player-driven sandbox game, D&D has a powerful reward and incentive system that is unmatched in other games - as long as the players buy into playing rogues, treasure hunters, and scoundrels.  In other words, PIRATES.

Sea Dogs, Buccaneers, and Pirates

The idea behind combining D&D with piracy is pretty simple… pure old school D&D rewards bold plans that lead to lots of treasure - the paradigm of the game is XP for gold, by hook or by crook.  Furthermore, by placing adventures within reach of a ship, you introduce the resource planning and mobility from a sister game like Traveller - your dungeon crawlers become sea rovers.  It's a peanut butter and chocolate kind of marriage (if you like the Reese's cups, as I do).

I envision many of the adventures in such a campaign still featuring traditional D&D style delves once a given destination is reached - buried treasures in caves, ruined forts and monasteries abandoned by the Spanish, lost colonies, forbidden islands, ancient ruins of the Maya or Aztecs, and a healthy mix of mythological sites and artifacts. Plus, you know, acting like pirates once in a while and plundering.

The Caribbean changed a lot over the two centuries of Spanish colonization, and the kinds of raiders that pillaged those warm waters included French corsairs, Elizabethan sea dogs, Dutch freebooters, English buccaneers, French filibusters, and eventually pirates (after 1690 or so).

I'd rule out placing the setting in the 16th century, as most of the raiders were privateers working long distance out of European or English ports, and I think the region is much more interesting in the 17th or early 18th centuries when there are foreign colonies and local outposts competing with the Spanish.  Outlaw towns like Tortuga and Port Royal during the buccaneer period offer the kind of "adventuring home base" you need for gathering rumors, picking up crew, and setting out on the next jaunt.  For the pirates of the later period, there are new home bases like New Providence in the Bahamas, or mythical Libertaria in the Indian Ocean.

This is a bit of a history nerd question, but do readers have opinions on which period would work better for adventuring?  1690-1720 is considered the golden age of piracy; since most privateering was outlawed or strictly controlled by then, sea rovers during that time had no choice but to work outside any conventional law.  During the earlier periods, it was much more likely one governor or another could sponsor a ship, giving the raiders a façade of legality in one port or another.

There are other differences too - buccaneers tended to raid Spanish shipping and ports, hauling away the pieces of eight and gold doubloons of pirate lore, and they had their loose code as "Brethren of the Coast".  The Jolly Roger of pirate fame was an artifact of the later age, and the pirates of the golden age typically captured prosaic merchant goods instead of coin-filled chests of booty (although some of the treasure hauls of the Indian Ocean were massive).

I suppose a third approach is to go unhistorical and dump all the ingredients into the soup at the same time; for instance, in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the time is later (1720 or so) when the East India company and navy are cracking down on piracy; however, the movies use Port Royal as a base (30 years or so after it sank into the ocean, in the real world), and Tortuga is still a pirate haven in the films, 60 years or so after it diminished in significance.  There's a cogent argument to be made that once you add undead monkeys, ghost ships, pagan gods, and dark magic to any milieu, there's no use crying over a bit of mixed up history.

Seems like a good time for a poll, buckos.  Cast a weather eye over to yon right hand column, if you will, and please be leaving your mark on me latest inquiry.


The image is Howard Pyle's painting, The Buccaneer was a Picturesque Fellow

Voodoo in D&D

As I continue to take in all things of a piratical nature, I've been reading Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides, the novel that inspired the Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same name.  I've been meaning to read The Anubis Gates, so this was a convenient entry point to this author's work.  I'm enjoying the book a lot, more so than I did the movie, so I'll write a review/recommendation when done; today is just focusing on the thread of magic and sorcery in the novel.

In the story, it seems that nearly every pirate ship has a resident Bokor, a voodoo practitioner, and many of the rank and file know a few tricks themselves - at least, all the pirates moving in the same circles as Blackbeard have voodoo influences.  Magic is used to cure tropical diseases, heal wounds, bless ships, and protect in combat, among other things.  Hermeticists from Europe also find their arcane powers are increased in the Caribbean.  There's a conceit at work here; the New World in the 17th century is unformed, wild, and primal, and the significance of magic is stronger.  Magical effects described from the times of myth and legend are  possible again in the New World.  The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have a strong supernatural theme running through them, revolving around the influence of the 'heathen gods'.  This is great, great stuff if you're looking to run a historical fantasy game featuring a strong magic component, like D&D, but otherwise don't want to upset the historical apple cart.  The motif that the progress of time, civilization, and/or the Church drives the magic out of the world ripples across many literary genres and works.

The bit that fired my imagination is this idea that "every pirate ship has its resident Bokor…"  It sounds a lot like every adventuring party bringing along a thief, magic user, or cleric.  The Bokors in the story function most like healers and augurs, putting them in the same design space as the cleric in D&D.

I don't profess to know any more about Voodoo, Vodun, or Obeah than what one picks up watching movies and the occasional urban fantasy book; I also realize modern forms of the religions are heavily syncretistic.  It involves rituals and ceremonies invoking various powers of the spirit realm (the Loa), frequently equated to Christian angels, messengers, and saints in the modern view.

What would it take to make pirate-clerics in the Goblins of the Spanish Main campaign Bokor practitioners?  Very little, it would seem - renaming various clerical spells to fit the mood is a simple enough starter.  In On Stranger Tides, for instance, there is a spirit euphemistically referred to as Mate Care-For (the Loa Kalfu or Carrefour) that is frequently invoked to help heal injured pirates in the story.  The ubiquitous Cure Light Wounds could be referred to as "Touch of Kalfu" or even "Mate Care-For's Breath" and you 're ready to roll with it as is.  I can easily see players calling out, "Hey man, we need some voodoo up here - Hawkins just took a cutlass to the face."

There are perhaps a few signature elements of the popular conception of Voodoo that I'd want to address - zombification, voodoo dolls, and spiritual possession.

Animate Dead is typically a higher level (arcane) magic user spell, and calls to mind a necromancer calling forth hordes of skeletons from a desolate graveyard.  I'd probably make a lower level clerical version that allows the Bokor to create a single zombie.  Not sure yet if it would be the zombie powder version of The Serpent and the Rainbow or White Zombie - a living human transformed into an automaton - or an actual undead servant brought back from the dead.

All of the Bokor spells could be cast through a degree of Spiritual Possession, the level or type of spell dictating the degree to which the Loa needs to inhabit the Bokor's body during the spell casting.  For instance, augury or divination spells (when the cleric acts in the role of oracle or soothsayer) could require the caster to ecstatically channel the personality of the Loa.  Could be fun for the roleplaying opportunities.

I like the idea of making the Voodoo Doll a new type of magical construct that clerics can make, like scrolls (and about as difficult as a 1st level scroll - or perhaps the level of the doll = the level of the target).  In modern voodoo, the dolls are used more for sympathetic magical healing than sticking pins in their eyes.  Use of a doll would provide an interesting and flavorful twist to the typical clerical limitation of "laying on hands" by allowing a Bokor to cast different types of healing spells over a distance if an appropriate Voodoo Doll exists of the character.  Getting personal effects of an opponent to make an appropriate voodoo doll of that enemy offers some intriguing adventure ideas.

What about players wanting to play traditional European "clergy" in the Caribbean setting?  I expect that to be the norm, as long as we address the idea that fantasy Europe is lower magic than a typical D&D world as befits the weird fiction space.  It could be that actual miracle workers are rare, or clergy are uniformly low level and not capable of the vast wonders that adventuring clerics can achieve; perhaps magic-working clerics are members of secretive, mystical sects that perform clerical magic, and the mainstream clergy are mundane.  I prefer to keep the workings of the cosmology somewhat vague when developing weird fiction settings, since clear sides of good and evil and transparency about the cosmology undermines horror and mystery alike.



*The image is the M:TG Voodoo Doll card; my oldest kiddo just started playing Magic recently and now it's all he talks about.

Junkyard Necromancy

"What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate..."
 -Inception

I see it every day.  An excitable game master runs straight to the internet, carrying TNT and a plunger, to blow up their existing campaign because they absolutely *must* run that new game system or bring their players to a new setting.  You can't run a long term campaign without effective coping strategies for the gamer attention deficit disorder.  This is a serious problem, my friends, I know it well.  Ideas are a two-edged sword yielding creativity and madness.  How's that expression go, "I'm not just the president of the hair club for men, I'm also a client…"

My name is Beedo, and I have a problem with gamer attention deficit disorder.

My own coping strategy involves classic project risk management - Gamer ADD is the risk, and you either need to mitigate, accept it, avoid it, or transfer the problem.  I created a section on the blog called The Junkyard to park ideas that are exciting, but I don't want them to take up too much time and capsize the boat.  Getting them down in print is a coping strategy - I just tell myself I'll get back to them, someday.  Here's the Junkyard's mission statement:  This is the place where I put campaign ideas, notions, and high concepts that just haven't gotten built.  Yet.

Sometimes though, one section of the junkyard gets pretty full, and a towering mound of discarded ideas threatens to topple into the orderly little campaign next door and introduce some real collateral damage.  I had an epiphany this weekend that a half dozen or more ideas I've been circumnavigating are all about the same type of campaign - in fact, one campaign could include them all!

It's alive!

Arise, you dead ideas consigned to the junkyard, arise, and live again as a stitched together frankenstein campaign!

I've been sketching out a small horror sandbox adventure.  The initial launch of the campaign involves the players acting as marines on a small merchant vessel or privateer in the mid-17th century.  It could start in Jamestown, Bermuda, or somewhere in the Caribbean (Port Royal, or New Providence), but takes the group to the Carolina coast to investigate a derelict Spanish galleon adrift in colonial waters.  An abandoned, derelict ship is such a classic horror locale.  Before all is done, there are French pirates, hostile natives, and a reawakened heathen blood god of the Aztec world.  Assuming the players survive or flee, there's a good chance they'll have their own sloop and be free to start cruising around a Caribbean saltbox breaking things.  Yo ho, me hearties.

The back story of the galleon involves a Spanish witch hunter escorting a dangerous artifact back to Castile (and ultimately the Vatican).  As these things are wont to do, the wrong person messes with the artifact and madness, bloodshed, and death ensue, turning the ship into a floating abattoir.  I've often mused that a cool way to kick off a horror sandbox would be to inherit the library of a retired or recently vanished monster hunter like Solomon Kane.  The journals detailing his exploits and unfinished investigations allow a group to follow in his footsteps.  So why not put the guy's journal and library right on board the derelict ship?  The players can come out of this first adventure with a ship and a long list of journal entries describing eldritch horrors and lost treasures discovered by this Catholic witch hunter across the Spanish Main.  Time to raise the colors and set sail.

I mentioned that a number of my recurring campaign ideas have coalesced around this particular adventure, it's nice to realize the convergence.  Pirates, guns, ships, and weird horror.  Here are some of the many older posts littering the Lich House involving the theme of a 17th century sandbox for the Age of Sail:

• The Library of de la Torre
• Goblins of the Spanish Main
• Colonial Hex Crawl
• Mythos Expeditions as a D&D Campaign
• The Wide Area Sandbox

The discussion of Gamer ADD and risk management was here:  Winter is Coming, and so is Gamer ADD.  Now I just need a name for the new campaign (although Goblins of the Spanish Main is kind of catchy, even if there are no actual goblins…)

Goblins of the Spanish Main

Yesterday, I was suggesting some elements that are core to D&D that need to be addressed by the campaign setting.  The more of these elements that work in the setting "as is", the better is the fit between the setting idea and D&D; the closer it is to a core D&D experience.  Just to try it out, I thought I'd come up with a random half-baked idea and see how it tests as a D&D setting.

Yo Ho, me hearties!  Let's set sail for a fantastic version of the Gulf of Mexico and trawl the waters of the Spanish Main during the golden age of piracy - buried treasure, bottles of rum, and 15 men on a dead man's chest.  And monsters.

First up, dungeons and adventure sites.  How could you handle dungeons in a "saltbox"?  Exploring a wild stretch of sea, it's got to be sprinkled with islands.  Each island could be a simple hex crawl.  You could arrange the islands by distance, such that the furthest islands are more dangerous - a bit like dungeon levels.  Some of the islands themselves could have a few simple ruins on them, or basic sea caves.  You're not going to have anything quite like a traditional dungeon, though you could have ancient Atlantean ruins or something similar.

I don't see any problems using the following D&D tropes on the Spanish Main - classes, levels, alignment, high magic, and XP for gold.  One could even place demi-humans back in folkloric Europe and have the odd halfling, dwarf or elf in a crew.

It's not hard to imagine populating the mythic Caribbean with various monsters from the bestiaries, both sea monsters of nautical lore and monsters appropriate for the tropics.  A dinosaur-filled "lost world" like the Isle of Dread seems de rigueur.  What about two-legged opponents?  There'd be no end of foreign nationals, opposing pirates and buccaneers, or hostile natives that could be found on the islands - assuming you want to stay away from using traditional D&D-style humanoids.

If you cared about "domain level play", what would the end-game be like here?  Maybe mid-level to high-level characters buy their own ships instead of building castles.  I seem to recall Pirate Lords are like 11th level fighters in the Expert set, so you could adapt the end-game to a maritime milieu.

Actually, the biggest issue I see in adapting the tropes of the D&D campaign to such a setting is the fact that those NPC ships are commanded by high level characters!

The party is the unit of autonomy and exploration in the dungeon, and the idea behind the setting needs to support these small groups of picaresque adventurers setting out to scrabble for loot.  It's a bit hard to plan your own capers when you're on board a ship commanded by someone else.  This could be a fatal flaw.

Maybe the adventuring "unit" in such a campaign would be the longboat - just large enough for the players, their gear, and retainers, and once they get to shore they're on their own to plan and explore.  From that perspective, the ship becomes the local "town", the place the adventurers return to drink some rum, hear rumors, and plan their next expedition.  A tidy sum of loot is "taxed" back to the captain.

That's a potential solution - still doesn't provide a satisfactory solution for piloting the ship and crew from place to place, or how combat on the high seas would work when the players are a small group of pirates on a much larger ship.  I've got to think about it some more - the list was skewed towards mechanical elements and adherence to a core D&D experience, but there clearly needs to be some things on the list that address these non-mechanical concerns, like the importance of planning, autonomy, and small group play in the setting.  Playing the role of minions at the whim of a high level NPC is not a great recipe for D&D.


*Picture is NC Wyeth Treasure Island

A Survey of Travel Rules, Land and Sea

I had the chance to compare different editions of D&D and compare how they advised the DM to handle travel.  The system in the BX / Rules Cyclopedia / Labyrinth Lord chain seems like it will work just fine, and was clearer than the 1E DMG.  Encumbrance amounts yield overland movement rates of 6, 12, 18, or 24 miles per day, for unencumbered people; on a riding horse it becomes 48 miles per day.  If I can get a 24 mile per hex scale to work for area maps of Europe, hex counting becomes easy for distance travel; I'm just not sure how well it breaks down into subhexes.

A typical day of travel can be reduced to a series of rolls; a daily chance to become lost if not following roads; a daytime encounter chance (1 out of 6) and a nighttime encounter chance (1 out of 12).  Note:  the Cyclopedia recommends using a d12 for the nighttime roll instead of a d6; the assumption is a camped party is less likely to run into trouble.

Does an average of 1 encounter every 6 days through settled areas make sense?  Here's how I look at it; every day, the group is passing through cleared lands, farms, through cross roads and little hamlets, into woods, and so on.  Lots and lots of mundane encounters occur as the group passes farmers, peddlers, merchants, goodwives and other ordinary folk; that 1 out of 6 chance per day just represents the opportunity to have an interesting or violent encounter with a potentially hostile force.  It seems like it will work, I just need to put together appropriate tables for settled lands.

Nighttime encounters are a bit different; villages and towns should be common in the Europe of 1650 so most of the time a traveling group would be staying at inns.  I’ll use the 1 out of 12 chance when the group is camping outside, and the nighttime encounter would use the standard outdoor tables.  Inns and taverns present excellent role playing opportunities and involve a concentration of similar travelers, so I'll need to come up with some kind of carousing / complications table for staying at inns.  There's a balance between keeping long distance travel colorful but not bogging it down with too much minutiae, either.

I've been scanning A Mighty Fortress for ideas; it's an AD&D 2E supplement for the Elizabethan and early 17th century, and has lots of ideas worth borrowing (including an approach to firearms). That book suggests using monthly living expenses and requiring all period characters to gamble; it's an interesting idea, but maybe it no longer fits in the 17th century once Calvinism and the Puritans have had an effect on European culture?

Moving on to the sea, all the BX series of games have similar rules for ocean travel; each day also begins with a handful of rolls - figuring out the wind and weather conditions and the wind direction, the chance for a random encounter, and a chance to be lost.  It seems to me like both ocean and land travel could be handled by a spreadsheet like my calendar and weather sheet, so days or weeks of rolls could be generated in advance, speeding the presentation of the narrative at the table.

I don't know how much wind direction actually varies over the ocean; would wind in the real world reverse 180 degrees from one day to the next?  I understand the importance of the trade winds, Coriolis force, and how ocean currents and the westerly's affected travel to and from the New World; trips that took 2 months to reach New England could be done in a few weeks catching the westerly wind and the gulf stream back to northern Europe.  Absolutely random wind directions don't make a lot of sense when seasonal winds are known, so maybe wind direction should only be a deviation from the norm.

Charlatan over on Mule Abides has posted a bit on play testing his saltbox; one of the proposed  rules he's calling "Blood in the Water"; on the open ocean, having one ocean encounter creates another encounter check.  The other idea was to have a chance for something else to happen; I'm thinking this includes all sorts of nutsy stuff you'd expect to happen on a long journey - ship damage, torn sails, broken masts, risks of scurvy, chances of mutiny, fire, all sorts of hazards.  So a sailing hazard table is in order, or some other way to loosely handle wear and tear on the ship; bad weather would increase the chance of a hazard or the severity of the hazard roll.

More things that go on the do-list:

• Settled area encounter tables
• Nighttime carousing encounters
• Guidelines for monthly living expenses
• Updated wind and weather rules
• Ocean encounters
• Ship hazards table

I had a funny thought for area maps - I'm wondering if a European atlas would work?  I'm not a fan of using hex overlays on transparency, but it would save a ton of time trying to track down maps; some atlases even have relief.  Anyway, it would pretty much eliminate area maps from the do-list and get me working on all these random tables right away.  I'd just make an assumption that major towns and cities were occupied since the 17th century, and highways and major roads were roads and trails, respectively.  I'd just need to use a highlighter or something and redraw various borders.