So I’ve been working on a pirate-themed hack for the past little while, tentatively entitled Sea of Dead Men, and figured I’d show off the progress I’ve made thus far. The aim is to make something that’s flexible enough to handle the whole range of the piracy genre – from high adventure swashbuckling (Captain Blood, Pirates of the Caribbean) to gritty realism (Black Sails, historical piracy).
I just finished a first draft of the character playbooks, and I thought I’d post them here and see what you all thought. I’d love feedback on the action list, abilities, etc, or any thoughts or suggestions as I start working on the crew/ship playbooks and the broader rules as a whole.
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz3G63iIAtq3cWF2WjhaV3FxUE0/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz3G63iIAtq3cWF2WjhaV3FxUE0/view?usp=sharing
This looks great.
Cool, I’m excited to take a look. Design is really nice.
That cool
I like the action verbs. If you were to play a gritty realism game, what would you do with Attune?
Will there be ship-to-ship combat rules?
Nice work!
I’m not planning on having super crunchy ship-to-ship rules; I figure it’s mostly going to be actions done by the crew (Navigating, Blasting with cannons, etc.) with effect based largely on the Quality of the two ships. But it’s going to take a lot of thought and testing to really nail down.
📌
Blast is a great choice of word for an Action. Can I ask what the difference between Scan and Reckon is?
Also curious as to why you moved Finesse to the Resolve attribute and why Pushing yourself only costs one stress rather than two.
This looks super cool though. Pirates are always fun.
Scan is basically the equivalent of Survey – see ships on the horizon, size up a crowd, etc, whereas Reckon is about doing calculations or logic – decoding a treasure map, for instance. I’m definitely a little unsure on Reckon, because it also bleeds into Navigate territory a little bit (planning a voyage, for instance).
And to answer Jason’s point about Attune in a realistic game…that’s not something I’d thought about, and I don’t have a great answer for it. My plan in general is to strive for historical accuracy and note where I differ, so that it’s easy to (for instance) just throw out the Occultist playbook and keep moving, but it’s definitely true that having one of the twelve actions be explicitly magical poses a bit of a problem with that.
(Edit because I didn’t see the second half of your post)
I didn’t change the stress cost for pushing yourself – the font I used just has weird numbers, so the 2 looks like an ‘a’. Transferring Finesse into Resolve was mostly motivated by space concerns (splitting up Prowl into Skulk and Vault meant that things had to be shuffled a bit), but I’m also kind of thinking of Resolve as representing some amount of interpersonal skill, and I felt like pickpocketing and dueling (where a big part of it is anticipating your opponent’s movements) fit in fairly well with things like Command and Charm.
The theme is quite potent in this hack. I couldn’t imagine someone making the special moves more piraty.
What does the personal memento and cracked diamond ring do? And why are they attached with the Commander and Occultist respectively?
Not Without a Fight looks like a really fun ability.
I’m assuming that Hex: the tomcat means that one of the Occultist’s friends is a talking cat, which fills my soul with an unnecessary amount of glee.
How tied will the group playbooks be to the ship? Will switching from one ship to another require switching group playbooks?
Attune could be changed to intuition and “feeling a storm is coming in my bones” kind of action for non magical games. Except it would need renaming and isn’t really an action. Maybe change attune to doing something that has mundane function but has a certain amount of mysticism around it. In magical games the magic function will be prominent while in a mundane one it has the other thing and the mysticism is just mysticism.
Maybe changing it to Curse? On the occult side of things they becoming curses, hexes and so forth while mundanely it allows for manipulating someone using negative emotions in contrast to charm. However that may overlap with Command.
It could be changed with Commune which would work like a cross between Attune and Consort in BitD but all having the weird people be friendly might not make sense.
You could replace it with Consort and instead of everyone getting the “being magical” action by default, the occultist moves give you permission to use your actions against the supernatural in ways not possible otherwise. Sensing arcane forces would be a Scan or a Reckon. Exerting force on the creatures of the depths would be a Command. From the Deep could be changed to be more like Ghost Voice and binding monsters to your will is done via finding out their true name, something everyone can try but Occultists are better equipped to do. Binding creatures to your will would be more analogous to rituals in BitD, where it requires long term projects and give powerful but dangerous results.
The personal memento is a locket, or an old diary, or something along those lines; though it isn’t baked into the playbook, I imagine the Commander as someone who used to be a legitimate noble or naval officer, so the memento represents a tie to that past life. And I like the idea that the Occultist carries a lot of odd trinkets that turn out to be more than what they seem (like the Pieces of Eight from Pirates of the Caribbean 3), of which the cracked diamond ring would be one. You’re right that they don’t have a really obvious use in a score, though – I could see a Commander using a memento as part of a bluff to infiltrate somewhere, or an Occultist using the ring to Charm somebody, but they aren’t as intuitively useful as, for instance, a fine pistol.
Yeah, Hex is probably my favorite of the contacts, just for the sheer novelty of it. He doesn’t even need to be a talking cat, though that’s a solid way of doing it (or possibly only the Occultist can understand him…) – even just a normal or exceptionally intelligent tomcat can make for a fantastic friend/enemy.
I can’t take credit for Not Without a Fight, though – I cribbed it directly from Adam Schwaninger’s Glow in the Dark hack. (It was way too cool of an ability not to use).
As far as the group playbooks being tied to the ship…they will to some extent, but only a little bit. The playbook names I have are things like Corsairs (religious pirates), Reavers (murdery pirates), Buccaneers (slightly less murdery pirates), etc, which aren’t tied to the specific ship. I’m planning on having the Lair and Quality upgrades from normal Blades correspond to upgrades to a single ship, though, which I’m referring to as the crew’s flagship – things like higher-Quality cannons, sails, or grapnels as well as rams, chain shot, boltholes, etc. I haven’t yet decided how those abilities would shift if the players switched to a new flagship – it’s a balance between fictional consistency (your new ship doesn’t have all that cool stuff, after all) and not punishing the players.
And that’s some good advice on Attune; I definitely like the idea of not having a single “do the magic thing” skill, and making Occultists diversify into the other ones, just with a slight magical edge. I like both Curse and Commune as ideas; as you noted, they both involve taking some situations away from under Command or Charm, which I need to think about. (I could actually see Curse being mundanely used like the Provoke skill is in FATE, to piss someone off or put them down, which is stuff that Command doesn’t cover quite as intuitively…definitely something to think about.)
Attune would work as-is for reading and engaging with complex dynamics, i.e. weather, crowds, even the dynamic of a crew on a ship. “To bring into harmony” doesn’t imply supernatural per se.
I like it! The world always needs more good pirate games.
This is a fantastic theme, and feels like it works soooo well with Blades. Kudos 😀