After a lot of work, a little bit of playtesting, and way too much thought about what exactly the word “crew” entails when most of your game takes place on a ship, I’ve finished a rough draft of crew sheets for my pirate hack, Sea of Dead Men. Next up is faction and setting details, plus getting an official document together – I’ve got a lot of disorganized notes that need to get fleshed out and formatted.
Here’s the link (along with updated character playbooks): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz3G63iIAtq3RnpTejBuTEhMVmM/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz3G63iIAtq3RnpTejBuTEhMVmM/view?usp=sharing
Looks great
Did you merge Finesse with Sway? How expansive is the role of the “crew” cohort? What does the “expanded crew” upgrade do (ie- why is it cheaper than adding a type)?
I didn’t really merge Finesse and Sway – I combined Consort and Sway into Charm, and just moved Finesse from Prowess into Resolve.
The “crew” cohort is the crew of your ship; it starts with enough crew members to fully man the ship, and expanding it adds more ships, giving you the beginnings of a fleet as you advance Tier. The idea is that your fleet can grow larger as you get more influence and resources, like how the size of gangs is based on Tier in normal Blades. The “expand crew” upgrade is there so that you don’t need to turn your crew into a huge fleet; if you never take the upgrade, you just stay with a single ship.
It’s a little complicated, but it’s the best way I came up with that could handle both a big fleet and a single ship.
Really looking forward to this.
Blacks Sails!
Can growth in Tier be approximated by increasing Ship Size (and thus Crew) and once a certain size is reached either go to Ship-of-line OR a larger fleet?
Having Harm on the crew sheet is cool. Can a PC ship take fatal damage?
Is there anything like Claims?
The idea is that Tier provides a hard limit on how much you can expand your crew – even if you capture four ships and find enough pirates to sail them, if you’re a brand-new gang of pirates, you don’t have the respect or resources to command a multiple-ship fleet.
And yeah, fatal damage to a ship is totally a thing – in that case, once the PCs have finished the score and escaped whatever danger destroyed the ship, they’ll need to go about finding a new one. (Most likely some gather info during downtime, followed by a ship-stealing score, but that might depend on the particular game).
I decided to drop the Claims system – the piracy setting has less emphasis on scarcity and competition than there is in Doskvol, so the idea of always needing to take things from other criminals didn’t carry over super well, and I was having a really hard time brainstorming assets for the PCs to claim that weren’t already intimately tied with the ship.
Claims/Turf could be areas of the sea where they tend to roam, some areas provide more one type of victim.
Ship to Ship combat and Chases will be very interested rules…
I see. Well I find it not even a little complicated, just worded oddly. Like if Expand Crew adds a ship, i think you should call it that (Add Ship, or Expand Fleet). And since Add Cohort adds more to the main ship’s crew, you might consider having that be Expand Crew; since that is what the name suggests (expansion of current crew, not adding a new one to a new ship).
Yeah, I’ll definitely think about it. You’re certainly right that putting “Ship” or “Fleet” in the name of the upgrade would make it a lot clearer.
Are you planning ship-2-ship combat rules [and how all players have something to do]?
Where’s the double-upvote-button
Well shucks, turns out someone else other than me decided to make a Blades hack about pirates 🙂 . I however would love to help you with what notes I have. I don’t want to steal your thunder, I’m just really passionate about the idea and would love to work on the project with you. What say you?
Joe Adkisson – giving Sea of Dead Men a run today. I hope you are still working on this, because it looks like it will be a lot of fun.
Glad to hear it! Let me know how it goes.
Is there an updated/new version?
There will be soon – I’m working on getting a full rules doc written out, but it’s got a couple iterations to go before it’s ready to post here. I should have a finished draft to post within a month or two, hopefully sooner.
Dont worry about things being ready. People here (or I at least) love seeing work in progress, so please share as you work.