Today we’ve a helpful guest post from designer and author somanyrobots. Robots have a 5e Patreon offering rules, advice and content that’s attracted over 100 subscribers.
Why are we getting tips on D&D on the ocean for free, given Robots has a Patreon? As it happens, this week somanyrobots launched his first Kickstarter. It’s Songs of the Spellbound Sea, and it has already met its funding goal.
Given that Songs of the Spellbound Sea offers rules for naval combat, ocean travel and supports that with new classes, subclasses and spells, I invited somanyrobots to share some tips on running adventures at sea.
Run seafaring campaigns like a breeze
By somanyrobots.
Most D&D campaigns wind up traveling at some point – and if your world’s big enough to have oceans, that probably means setting sail. Now, you could run a sea voyage as a simple flash forward – spend 5 minutes describing the salt breeze and a crotchety captain, then suddenly you’re unloading in the harbor and on to your next adventure. But if you want your ocean journeys to come alive, here are a few quick pointers to get the most out of a nautical adventure!
Don’t Sweat the Bookkeeping
Almost every longtime DM tries to run a travel game at some point, whether it’s the hexcrawl in Tomb of Annihilation, a long-distance road trip, or a big ocean voyage. And bookkeeping immediately comes up. You need to pay attention to food and water, or everyone will starve. Run out of gunpowder and you’re in trouble when pirates appear on the horizon. Let the crew’s morale sink too low and you’re liable to face a mutiny. And then there’s just time – tracking individual days of travel can be a slog. Trying to keep detailed count of all these elements is a pain — best case, you’ve got one player with major spreadsheet-brain who takes care of it for everybody, worst case, it’s a giant group headache that gets in the way of everybody’s fun. So you need to keep the tracking to a minimum.
But Don’t Ignore It Either
You don’t want to drop the bookkeeping entirely, though. Travel at sea needs to have some planning and some resource attrition involved, or it doesn’t feel like travel. The best way to do it is with a concept I call voyage legs – figure out in advance where the next interesting stop is going to be and how many days of sailing you need to get there. Maybe this is the ultimate destination, maybe it’s a stop at port, or maybe it’s the next random encounter, but it’s always one voyage leg, and you don’t really need to track more carefully than that. For truly epic ocean voyages, you might declare every week counts as a leg, but you’ll probably be having fun stops often enough that you don’t need that. Tracking individual days of food and water is overkill – if the ship’s stocked up enough for its next voyage leg, it’s in good shape.
Have Awesome Pit Stops
A big ocean voyage is the DM’s excuse to pull out some really wild adventures. It lends itself really naturally to one-shot adventures, disconnected stories, and monsters that you can fight because they’re cool, not because they’re important to your plot. Ship gets attacked by a sea monster? Do it. Visit a harpy island to rescue captured sailors? Rad. Ghost Pirates on an abandoned ship? Yes, please, and I’ll take seconds.
These don’t have to be one-offs – if there’s a pirate king who’s going to matter later in your campaign, it’s a great idea to tie him in. But a big travel sequence is the perfect excuse to pull out some adventures where it’s totally okay for the party to just have fun and move on.
On Random Encounters
You probably don’t want to leave your oceanic encounters up to a random encounter table. You can roll on a table to get ideas, but you’re going to want your journey properly paced, so you should hand-pick the encounters you want. Digging for treasure on a desert island is sweet, but not if the random table has you do it three times in a row. Don’t treat a travel segment as an excuse to rely on encounter tables instead of proper preparation — use it as an opportunity to get more inventive with your encounters and tell some self-contained stories with punch.
Give the PCs Jobs
You can have the PCs just be ordinary passengers aboardship, and if the voyage is truly only going to happen the one time, that’s probably fine. But if you’re already at sea, odds aren’t bad that you’ll have more voyages in the future, and if you’ve got a dedicated seafaring campaign, that ship’s going to become home base, floating stronghold, and primary travel tool all at once. Your voyage is going to be a lot more engaging if the players get invested in the ship and attached to it, and the best way to do that is to make them a part of the crew. Let PCs step into the roles of Captain, First Mate, or Quartermaster. You can use an established ruleset for these, or keep them to decision-making and role-play. But make sure they’ve got equal weight at the table – you don’t want the Captain to be the only one making any choices.
Don’t Let Naval Combat Slog
Most adventures at sea are going to wind up with ship-to-ship combat, because thundering cannons and boarding actions are awesome. But it’s also really easy for naval combats to drag on. It depends on what rules you use, but often ship combats are basically symmetrical – two ships with similar stats and similar abilities slugging it out until one crew surrenders. If they’re too tanky, this’ll take ages. If they’re not tanky enough, then initiative rolls will probably decide the fight. A few tips to help combat move quickly:
- Make it varied: Maybe it’s two ships and a sea monster in a 3-way fight. Maybe it’s two small ships ganging up on a big one. Maybe there’s an unstoppable man-of-war on the way, so the fight’s got to wrap up in 3 rounds or else.
- Don’t fight to the death. Fighting to the death in TTRPGs is often a little silly, but at sea it’s downright ridiculous. Losing a fight to the death means everyone aboard ship drowns, and all the cargo is lost. Nobody wants that. Have ships surrender if they reach half health, or if they’re clearly outmatched.
- Keep enemy turns breezy. If you’ve got fancy rules for officer actions and cool maneuvers, don’t let the NPCs use them. The goal is to let the spotlight shine on the players, so limit the snazzy stuff to the PCs. (This can also be a tool to break a symmetrical fight and give the PCs a significant advantage).
Pick the Right Rules
Any nautical adventure is going to need some proper rules to make it work – rules for ships and naval combat, for PCs to serve as officers, for weather and morale and hiring a crew. What you want is something that works for your players – the right level of depth, the right breadth of options, and exciting for the DM, because that’s who will need to rule on edge cases.
Wizards of the Coast published a stripped-down ruleset in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, which might be a place to start, if you own that book. But don’t be afraid to look farther afield – there’s a whole world of homebrew for D&D 5th Edition, with a whole pile of popular rulesets for this problem. Your author will humbly recommend his own Seafarer’s Manual (PDF link), a free supplement with rules for all these scenarios. It’s also being expanded as part of a paid book, Songs of the Spellbound Sea, currently live on Kickstarter and scheduled for release next summer.
Quick Links
- Kickstarter: Songs of the Spellbound Sea.
