I’ve been mulling about on making a light hack focused on Piracy. Right now it seems that most of the playbooks will work with little changes. But I’m still trying to brainstorm the following….
-How should I build the crew sheet?
-I think I need a couple of interesting special abilities – while most will remain intact, I’d like to swap a couple out for a more “pirate feel”. Particularly for the Spider/Captain.
-Do I need special rules for ship vs ship battles? Boarding actions? Ship destruction/repair?
Any ideas?
You mean piracy in the BitD setting, real-world piracy or a new setting?
For the time, it’s looking like early 18th century piracy, but with ghosts/supernatural etc.
Of course, electricity isn’t around – so I don’t know about all the ectoplasmic tools. But think Golden Age of piracy in the West Indies – wooden ships, sails, flintlock, and cannon.
I think that first of all, a game about shadows pulling of jobs on the dark streets of Doskvol uses different language and performs different actions than swashbuckling action on the high seas, so I’d look into changing the Actions. The whole Ship vs. Ship battles and Boarding Actions thing should come under that.
Second of all, regarding ship destruction, I think you have a couple of options, you could use the current Cohort “damage track” Blades has, that would be easy if your Ship is just a Cohort. But if, for example, your Ship was your Crew, I might look at more complex rules, perhaps giving it its own Stress track.
It’s hard to imagine the crew sheet: on one hand, pirates in the 18th century weren’t “specialized” as a crew of scoundrels in BitD, on the other, the ship is not always something so important in a pirate story.
Maybe the crew sheets should represent the historical “roles” of pirates (actual pirates, buccaneers, privateers, corsairs, etc.), cohorts to handle the actual “crew” on the ship(s) and a special category (vessel?) to handle the ships controlled by the PCs.
I would also refrain from using the captain as a playbook: the captain is just a position on the ship (and could always change during the course of the play).
I think this is an awesome idea and definitely want to play it. I’ve thought about it some in the past. In some sense, Smugglers are pretty close to a crew already, but of course, you probably want players to be able to choose to be pirates of various sorts (breakers, thieves, smugglers, etc.). As Dylan Durrant says, the ship(s) can be cohorts with quality, like they are for Smugglers with their smuggling routes and vehicle edges/flaws (especially with the Like Part of the Family ability).
Since you’ll likely want to play up geography and travel, just consider that the claims are likely various locations on land distributed throughout the seas. So “Turf” might be a safe harbor and supply source that welcomes pirates, and you in particular. Your Lair, then is just your flagship. It can be threatened the same way Duskwall crews’ lairs can be threatened in the fiction by factions with the means and the will.
You’ll want to reflavor the factions, of course, to bring in various historical naval powers and local authorities/gangs/religious organizations.
While Dylan Durrant is right that you may want to reflavor a couple of the action names more for sea, but you don’t have to. You can hunt ships or treasure, study charts, routes, and convoy behavior, survey from the crow’s nest, tinker with powder, sail repairs, ram enhancements, beautification, and counterfeit flags, use finesse to traverse the tops, pry into governors’ mansions or buried treasure, or out of the brig, prowl through the sea, spars/lines, and up opposing ships exteriors, skirmish with cutlass and shot, wreck with kegs or boarding axes, command your crews and extended fleet vessels, consort with allies, corrupt nobles, and fellow sea dogs, and sway Spain to grant you a letter of marque or sway locals that you’re a better landlord than a European monarch. Heck you could attune to the sea and the weather in either the mundane way that makes the difference between shipwrecks and legends, or in the mystical, superstitious way that nicely flavors the Disney pirates films.
I don’t think you’d need any special ship-to-ship or boarding subsystem. They both seem to me just like normal scores. You might infiltrate to board, or assault a ship with cannon, either way you often bring in cohorts (for crew) and consider differences in scale/potency/quality between ships/guns/crew or whatever is relevant to the action. Cohort types could probably be renamed, so you might have Sailors for normal maneuvering and sailing, a Gunner cohort for cannoneering, and Marines/Killers for boarding and land raiding. Of course, most ships would use crew advancements to make their sailors also gunners or killers, since when you’re boarding, you’re seldom also sailing. This way, experienced crews can gain quality, in order to best a larger but less elite force.
Characters could be specialists that could map to crew positions like captain. Maybe Black Sails could give further ideas?
If you use the TV series as an idea it opens up possibility for land based playbooks.
Some thoughts about crew types:
My first thought was to use the class of ship as crew type, but then the players can’t upgrade… maybe the ship class can instead serve as Tier level.
Crew types could be defined by motivation:
– Gain money
– Gain political power
– Fight for home country
– Take revenge
Or what about crews that put the supernatural into the center:
– Undead pirates
– Cursed pirates
– Pirates in league with a sea monster or the devil
– Pirates like Nemo and his Nautilus (and there we have electroplasma again)
Stras Acimovic is doing some ship stuff for Scum & Villainy, so that might be useful when he shares that stuff.
I’m also doing ship stuff for Razors (coming out next year — so a bit of a wait, I’m afraid). As Dylan said, a ship stress track is a good idea, and you’ll see that in Razors. Basically, the ship has a few short stress tracks for different ship advantages (handling, speed, etc.) and can be used as a stress-sink when you perform group actions with it.
Oh my, look at that. You got a little Razors preview out of me. Well done.
Scum and Villainy (aka S&V) should by all appearances be out before next year ^_~
For S&V we settled on doing ships as crew sheets (you’re literally the crew of a ship) – because smuggling vessels are different than bounty-hunting vessels, and the people on them are different (they’ll also have different job charts).
John did a great job with his examples for Blades actions, and I did something similar to showcase how ships work and should be used, I’ll see when I can throw together something to share.
Fun fact: there will be a Space Pirate ship (although the first one you’ll see is a smuggling vessel: the Void Jewel).
That’s my little preview ^_~