Sea of Dead Men v1.2
Sea of Dead Men is a Blades hack about daring crews of pirates making their fortune in a dangerous and lawless ocean. I’ve revamped and streamlined some rules, and I’m starting to fill in the gaps setting-wise.
As always, comments/questions/feedback are appreciated.
Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LSdXPyO3Mg7dwtBFjawXM6LkMhMDLvMe
Changelog:
– Shiny colorful map
– New travel rules
– Hunting rules (for stalking trading routes looking for a target)
– Updated crew/character playbooks
– Streamlined cohort rules
– Lists of opportunities/plot hooks for the various crew types
Still to come:
– Remake Roll20 sheets
– Full descriptions for regions/factions
– More setting info
– Integration of SRD rules
– Writeups for character/crew types
– Layout revamp
– Art(?)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LSdXPyO3Mg7dwtBFjawXM6LkMhMDLvMe
Awesome stuff. I’m envious of how well you put together the character and crew playbooks, and that font choice is chef’s kiss
I like it. I’m a lover of the Age of Sail mystique.
Nice!
One question though. Are you dead set in removing claims from the game?
Alessandro Ussia
Yeah, I think I am. It just doesn’t fit the genre, in my eyes; it works really well for Blades’ variety of crime story, where you’ve got the claustrophobic everything’s-been-claimed atmosphere and you’re trying to hold territory and build up your gang, but I don’t think the mechanics as written work super well for a pirate story. The world is a lot bigger, there’s more open spaces, and there’s less intense competition for resources – plus, if you’re off sailing the ocean, it feels kinda odd to have a permanent claim tying you down to one place.
That said, I realize that the turf/claims mechanics do a bunch of good things for the system – they force players to dive into the faction system, and they’re a great generator of scores, not to mention they provide some fun mechanical benefits once you have them. There’s definitely a hole there that needs filling, and I’m starting to try to come up with things that can work in that niche, but I’m guessing whatever I end up with will be fairly divorced from the turf/claims mechanic.
And as a GM running the game, there’s nothing stopping you from putting claims back in; the ones you posted a while back (https://www.dropbox.com/s/armkg41e2tch7i4/sea_of_dead_men_turf_1-1_rev1.ai?dl=0, for posterity) are pretty solid and would slot in without any issues. It’s a genre consideration for me rather than a mechanical one, so if you think it fits the way you’d want to run it, go right ahead.
Joe Adkisson I was looking for a less prep-heavy system to DM a pirate themed game in and was so excited to find Sea of Dead Men. I’m actually DM’ing session 0 on Friday! Most of us have played BitD and one of them is our former DM, so I’m interested in how they’ll view the differences. Really looking forward to it, but I’m also unfamiliar with how to use custom sheets in Roll20. Can’t seem to get the code for that to work. Would you be able to explain?
Frank Verhage That’s awesome! I’d love to hear how it goes.
Here’s a rough list of steps to get the custom sheets set up for Roll20. (I apologize if I’m going over stuff you’ve already figured out, but I figure it’s easiest to do a step-by-step)
– First, you need to have a Pro account in Roll20 to enable custom sheets. It’s about ten bucks a month, if I remember correctly.
– Set up the game in roll20, then in the main menu for the game click Settings
> Game Settings.Scroll down to Character Sheet Template, and select ‘Custom’ from the drop-down menu. You should see four text-editing panes pop up – HTML Layout, CSS Styling, Translation, and Preview.
– Now head over to where the Sea of Dead Men sheets are stored. (I think the link should be in the document, but if not it’s https://bitbucket.org/adkissonj/sea-of-dead-men)
– You can ignore most of the files here – the ones you want are ‘blades.html’, ‘blades.css’ and ‘translation.json’. Click on the files to open them (or download the whole repository and open them on your computer, if that’s your cup of tea) and copy-paste their contents into the text panes in Roll20. blades.html goes to HTML Layout, blades.css goes to CSS Styling, translation.json goes to Translation. Ignore the Preview pane in Roll20, there’s enough javascript shenanigans going on behind the scenes that it probably won’t work properly.
– Once you’ve copied everything in, click Save Changes and you should be good to go.
The sheets are tweaked version of the standard Blades sheets, so if you’ve played Blades online they should be pretty familiar. Let me know if you run into any issues, or have any more questions.
Wow! That was a very quick reply with instructions that worked like a charm. Great step-by-step, really appreciate it. Thanks Joe.
I’ll make sure to let you know how it goes – session 0 this Friday with proper scores to follow. Do you have any tips for areas to avoid/focus on with regards to differences from Blades?
+Frank Verhage Glad to hear it worked for you!
My biggest piece of advice is to play up the faction aspect of the game as much as you can – since there are no claims, and since the setting is a little less claustrophobic than Duskwall, it can be easy to just go on generic piratey scores and let the faction drama slip by the wayside. When you come up with a score on the fly using the hunting rules, for instance, you might try and tie the target to a particular faction; or try and emphasize the changes in faction status from the crew’s actions.
As far as things to bring up in a session zero, I’d make sure your players are aware of the changes to stash and heat. Neither of those are immediately important for character creation, but it’s good to make everyone aware that those parts of the game will play out slightly differently.
Joe Adkisson Thanks Joe, I was wondering about the changes in balance from both of those things, so it’s great to hear what your experience is. We’ve got a few players who have only done a one-off and aren’t familiar with the ‘meta’ of BitD (sort to speak). Be interesting to get their take on that as well!
Joe Adkisson I’ve got a blades group I’m looking to run this with, so I’m really looking forward to it! I was curious which nations you’ve based yours on? Some of them are more obvious than others (British Empire, Venice), but I’m curious what your foundations were for those. Also, is Basari in the Windward Isles? Since that is the area that seems to be patrolled by Meghra? I was super excited to see descriptions of Flotsam and Pelican rock in the new update, and the travel rules seem really interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays!
Lianna Teeter Glad you like the game! I’d love to hear how it works for you in play, I’m always looking for feedback.
– You called the Valdesia/Britain and Sallice/Venice connections pretty well; Sallice has a bit of Spain/Portugal in it too, in that they have big treasure galleons and were the original discoverers of the Carrascan.
– Revelle was originally meant to be a sort of France/Spain hybrid, but over time the Spain parts kind of dropped out.
– Meghra is based pretty directly on the Barbary Corsairs.
– Segamba is a combination of various African countries.
– The Waturey and Ourogan tribes are based on the Taino and Caribs, respectively.
And yes, Basari is meant to be in the Windward isles; the idea is that it’s the main foothold the corsairs have in the Carrascan, and they make occasional raids into the other regions.
Joe Adkisson Oh interesting on the Spain/Portugal with Sallice – yeah I can see that. Hmm okay I was leaning towards France for Revelle and some African countries for Segamba so that makes sense. Neat on the others, I’ll have to look into those a bit more closely. Thanks for the answers!
Joe AdkissonLianna Teeter Very interesting reading that discussion on the connections to the real players in the Carribean/Carrascan Sea – we’ve had the same except for Meghra, which we’ve interpreted as Spanish (as the faction with the strongest religious aspect to them, they have an active inquisition they’ve just had a deadly encounter with). Revelle we’ve got down as basically French.
Yesterday we finished our seventh session of SoDM – the crew is learning more about how they’re bound to the demonic/ghastly ship that brought them back from the dead. Player/Crew roles are falling into place, with the different playbooks finding their way in ship combat. The only playbook which seems to struggle to find use is the Mariner; it’s difficult for the player to find a way to use their skills in active combat.
The crew also attracted heat from Meghra – I’m not sure how to add their faction to the sheet to keep track. Is there any danger in messing with the sheet in Roll20 settings?
So far we’ve had a good time with this hack! It’s a different game from Blades in many respects; where Blades is very confined and resources are sparse, driving conflict inherently between the stationary gangs, the Carrascan Sea is immense by comparison. The downside: some of the information gathering mechanics become a bit broken; if the players try to find a ship on the high seas from a port, for instance, they should get some useful info even with limited information – mechanically a random beggar would be of some use in this endeavour, which doesn’t make much sense. The solution might be simple – having them roll a simple hunt instead of doing information gathering at all might be a better way to handle chases and interceptions on the high seas.
It’s been a fun system so far and the setting/mechanics lend themselves very well to a different kind of atmosphere than Blades!
Any idea where this stuff is going to be hosted once google+ closes down?
Good question…the google drive links will still be valid, so if you save them somewhere you should be able to get access. Beyond that, I’ll probably wait and see where the community ends up, and make a post there.